The Environmental Humanities, COVID-19, and Global Warming

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ABSTRACT. What good are the humanities? Do they ever help solve real world problems? For example,  even if a vaccine for COVID-19 is developed, we already know that so many will refuse to be vaccinated that we will not be able to achieve herd immunity. To save the United States and other democracies that cannot simply dictate vaccination for all, we must admit the mistakes made in responses to two closely related existential threats: COVID-19 and global warming. Next we need to direct our attempts at persuasion at the "emotional brain" which organizes information in the form of stories and is responsible for risk assessment and motivation. So, to adopt a little of the short story technique, let's imagine Jennifer, an MD/PHd student at Pitt. Following the example of Prof. Kathryn Hayhoe, who convinced a recalcitrant West Texas audience about global warming, Jennifer wants to persuade  Appalachians skeptical of CORVID-19. Jennifer knows she will need the interdisciplinary thinking and teamwork that enabled environmental humanities experts to express the scientists' knowledge in an "affective, or emotionally potent" way. Jennifer also knows she will need to combine emotional intelligence and narrative psychology in stories that embody the empathy needed to sway skeptical audiences. Eventually, by carefully reading the global warming story, Flight Behavior, she is able to understand the relationship between her target audience and visiting scientists like herself. Her sympathetic imagination now awakened by reading the novel,  she believes she identifies with the locals well enough to persuade them to follow COVID-19 guidelines. Hopefully, this thought experiment can

inspire a pilot study for humanities training to help public health representatives persuade skeptical audiences, training that could benefit global warming activists as well.

Keywords:  environmental humanities, global warming, COVID-19, narrative, persuasion

Dr. Fauci and others have grown increasingly concerned about the mixed messages about COVID-19 coming from politicians, pharmaceutical companies,  and what is worse, unregulated social media. In fact one social media organization will soon have persuaded enough people to refuse a COVID-19 vaccine that we will not achieve the “herd immunity” required for our survival.i

As early as the 1990’s Dr. Peter Hotez, dean and eminent professor at Baylor College of Medicine,  “witnessed the rise of  [a] powerful – and seemingly unstoppable” vaccine misinformation campaign,” now on the W.H.O.  list of the top ten global threats.[2] This” very aggressive and well-organized” movement” doesn’t just lobby politicians; it controls a gigantic media empire that includes over five hundred misinformation websites.”[3] On Facebook it presents “a multi-sided landscape of unprecedented intricacy that involves nearly 100 million individuals partitioned into highly dynamic, interconnected clusters across cities, countries, continents and languages.”[4] Armed militias carrying Confederate flags have joined its physical protests[5]  and an FBI affiliate already labels them a national security risk.[6]  Yet they have had the support of the President,[7] whom many of them idolize, as well that of evangelical Christians, holistic health advocates, libertarians, and many anti-government groups who oppose even testing for the virus.

Dr. Hotez calls for a ‘commensurate response” to them from our federal agencies and scientists.[8] Dr. Hotez himself devotes much of his valuable time to “debunking” their conspiracy stories and calls on Facebook “to weed out dangerous misinformation putting public health at risk.”[9] However, his voice and those of others like him are generally being ignored. Why?

There are many reasons, but the most important one may well be that “the age of the primacy of reason over feeling, which began with the scientific revolution, has come to an end. Contemporary notions of truth, scientific expertise, public administration, experimental evidence and progress” have all “run aground.”[10]  In human affairs the situation may be worse: the ship is breaking up and we are now “awash

in emotion.” [11] If this is the case, survivors must be able to swim in oceans of feeling to reach the shore.

One of many ways to learn how to navigate in such waters would be one or more ‘humanities” courses. Let’s say the speaker took a course that included the first famous philosopher to apply reason to nature and thus the first great scientist, Aristotle. One his  basic principles, one that has been tested for 2500 years, is that a speaker must master pathos (audience emotions) and ethos (his own emotions and character) as well as logos (logical argumentation). Though he was primarily a proto-scientist, he discussed pathos in three of his books: Rhetoric, Poetics, and Nicomachean Ethics. Social scientists following up on his insights have proved that individuals do not always act rationally or even in their own self-interest[12]  and, more remarkably, that their emotional "response" to the speaker often precedes the speech and predicts whether or not they will be convinced by the speaker's rational arguments[13]

Though there has been a revival of interest in emotions for over twenty years now, when George Marshall was researching his 2015 book on the opponents of climate change prevention, he reported, "The view held by every specialist I spoke to is that we have still not found a way to effectively engage our emotional brains in climate change."[14] Even now, when increasing population and other forces driving climate change have spawned a very dangerous global pandemic, we have yet to fully activate the emotional system of the brain responsible for risk assessment and motivation.[15] “To do so,

 first of all, we must be able to recognize and respond appropriately to our own feelings as well as those of our audience. 

 Secondly, we must know how emotions relate to each other, distinguishing between secondary feelings like anger and primary emotions such as fear.

Third, at times we need to organize our information into formats that seem to tell a story, as Dr. Hotez did in his book about his daughter Rachel. 

Stories, even brief anecdotes, are how the "emotional brain" organizes the information it uses for risk assessment and for motivation.[16] Stories about common hopes and fears  can also contribute to an atmosphere of mutual respect and positive regard. It may be that only then does the speaker have a real opportunity to get any agreement from a skeptical audience on how to stop COVID-19.

 Conspiracy stories moving with warp speed through vast internet networks are persuading the many Americans who question science, vaccines and  climate change. These stories stoke their irrational fears and become far more influential than scientific proof, as they "take on a life of their own, following their own rules, evolving and gaining authority as they pass between people."[17]

 The most popular political story plot  is that of perpetrators causing effects that reveal their motivations The most common version is that governments ( perpetrators ) justify current COVID-19 restrictions ( effect ) in order to extend their control over our lives ( motive ). An opposite version would be that wealthy businessmen ( perpetrators ) fund COVID-19 denial ( effect ) to keep their businesses churning out profits ( motive ). This kind of polarizing plot almost always works well, no matter how far from reality it is. [18]

       Our challenge is to tell stories with different plots such as “treat others as we wish others to treat us, “[19] but a story’s

success depends not only on our emotional intelligence buy on how well the story is told. Unfortunately, opponents of the radical changes needed to respond to global warming and pandemics are often are better at storytelling. Take, for example, the Climate Change exhibit at the London Science museum. Shell Oil was able to substitute its narrative for the original because it was "very much better-written and better-funded than any climate change education program".[20]

While experts in environmental humanities may never match corporate resources, they can  expose the implicit negative narratives that  shape public opinion and then use the principles of emotive storytelling and narrative psychology they learn from famous writers to tell better stories.

So, to practice what we preach, let's adopt a little of the short story technique. Let's imagine an MD/Ph.D  student named "Jennifer" at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. After two years of medical school she is now completing a PhD in science communication with the help of faculty from the Graduate School of Public Health and the Faculty of the Arts and Sciences. As her "final exam," and preparation for her PhD thesis, she has decided to do for COVID-19 what Dr. Hayhoe did for climate science at Texas Tech: reach out to the surrounding communities.[21]

So Jennifer finds herself trying to persuade angry people in Appalachia, who voted for the anti-science candidate in the last presidential election, to trust what scientists are now saying about a virtually invisible virus.

            Jennifer knew that her first task was to get to know her audience. So she turned to survey results. She saw the impact of the disinformation campaigns attacking science

and our healthcare system. In fact she found herself facing Vladimir Putin, who used thousands of social media accounts to persuade Americans that COVID-19  is "not a serious threat."[22] To her dismay she discovered that China, Iran, and some Americans are now following Putin's lead.[23]

She took as one example early April, 2020. As the COVID-19 death toll passed twenty thousand, many Americans continued to deny or minimize its seriousness.

61% of American adults (at least a hundred million people) still did not believe that the virus was “very easily” spread.[24]

 Only a third of white evangelicals even admitted that "the virus poses a major threat to the health of the U.S. public."[25]

 More amazing was that on April 9th, with New York City on the verge of mass burials,[26] 58 percent of the Americans who depend on conservative media for news believed COVID-19 "is less, or no more, deadly than the common flu,”[27] the same message being pushed on social media by Russia, China, and Iran.

  Still more disconcerting, she discovered that 14% of the respondents had no faith in scientists at all, and thus presumably could never be persuaded.[28]

Most Democrats, on the other hand, already believed that scientists are generally better at making decisions about scientific policy.

That left 30 to 40% of Republicans who might be persuaded to change their opinion.[29]

How could she reach them?

Learning that for more than ten years climate change speakers had been using surveys like these also for audience analysis, she studied their conclusions,[30] but knew she needed something more, something more than numbers, statistics, and social science. She vaguely remembered as an undergrad having to fulfill something called a "humanities" requirement.

 She couldn’t remember what “humanities” means, [31] but still had her notes from that class on someone named John Henry Newman: "science, working by itself, reaches truth in the abstract, and probability in the concrete; but what we aim at is truth in the concrete" which “exerts a force and makes an impression on the mind which nothing abstract can rival.".[32] Jennifer was not quite sure what he was getting at, but was encouraged to read further: "This is not merely the customary method of the humanities; it is the most common logic of all: our most natural mode of reasoning is, not from propositions to propositions, but from things to things, from concrete to concrete, from wholes to wholes.... This is the mode in which we ordinarily reason, dealing with things directly, and as they stand, one by one, in the concrete." [33

Unfortunately, most of the time when she read the word “concrete” she thought of “cement.” The words “specific” or “detailed” worked better for her, especially when she recalled what was so often written on her compositions for Freshman English:

vague BS; be specific! Replace with details, examples, analogies, metaphors.

It was even worse if she used an abstraction for an emotion like “love.” She could still hear the instructor quoting her favorite author:

“abstractions have no autonomous existence, and thus must be embodied in a context as detailed, vivid, and ‘real’” as possible [34]

She knew that meant she had to

 use original language (not clichés) to recreate the sensations of touch, sight, hearing, taste, and smell associated with the emotion in sufficient detail that the reader’s imagination can ‘feel’ it as directly as language permits.

 Realizing what emotion she herself needed to feel, she decided to ask the professor of her humanities class how literature could teach empathy for one's audience.

Her instructor started off on a tangent about why the "sympathetic imagination”[35]  was a better term than "empathy," but Jennifer's frustration prompted the reminder that experts in the environmental humanities have helped scientists, government officials, and businessmen communicate with the public [36] by setting up interdisciplinary teams to make  new knowledge “affective,’ that is, "emotionally potent.".[37] Jennifer thought this was more like it, but ....

the professor was off again, enchanted by the sound of her own voice, moving on to Rizzolati 's demonstration of how “mirror neurons allow us to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual reasoning but through direct simulation. By feeling, not by thinking.” [38] She was rolling now, citing Keysers’ brain experiments on how those neurons are "moved by a novel," and his remarkable demonstration of how well a few marks on a page, if they supplied sufficient evocative detail,  can make "our actual emotions come

together with those of others and those we read about and imagine.”[39]

“There it is again, it’s all in the details,” she thought! Getting tired of listening to the professor’s abstractions, wanting to he "moved by a novel," Jennifer interrupted her to ask for a great novel about the people of Appalachia.Jennifer was told to read closely Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver, who lives on a farm there. Her professor knew that this famous climate change novel would give Jennifer many insights into, and empathy for, her target audience of white evangelicals who depend on conservative television for news, value in-group loyalty, respect for authority, and -- what the surveys missed -- deep knowledge of the Bible.

This target audience contrasted sharply with the group of scientists who come to study the Monarch butterflies stranded in Appalachia in the novel. They knew better than Jennifer the difficulties of science communication. One of them remarks to the heroine,

“’scientists had a devil of a time convincing people that birds flew south in winter. The Europeans used to believe they burrowed into muddy riverbanks to hibernate. They would see the swallows gathering along the rivers in autumn, and then disappearing. Africa was an abstraction to these people. The notion of birds flying there, for unknown reasons, they found laughable’. ‘Well’, she said. ‘I guess seeing is believing’. ‘Refusing to look at the evidence, this is also popular’.”[40]

Jennifer knows that she too will have trouble overcoming the inertia of her audience, and she too will be seen as an affluent outsider with a radically different worldview than that of the people of Appalachia.

Yet, after reading the novel for a while, she nodded assent when she read that for scientists “reality is not optional,” and yet also understood when one of the locals responded to a scientific fact with “I’m not saying I don’t believe you, I’m saying I can’t”.[41]

            While there was not much Jennifer could do about that kind of denial, she could follow up on an insight about the differences between “us” and “them” provided by a middle-class do-gooder who tells Kingsolver's central character about sustainability.

He suggests that she" bring  your own Tupperware to a restaurant for leftovers, as often as possible.”

 She replies: “I’ve not eaten at a restaurant in over two years.”

He suggests, “Try to reduce the intake of red meat in your diet.” She replies: “Are you crazy? I’m trying to increase our intake of red meat.”

“Why is that?” “Because mac and cheese only gets you so far.....","

He suggests she buy used items from "Craigslist.” (COVID-19 version: he suggests she use ZOOM to attend church.) She asks “What is that?” He says: “On the Internet.” She replies “I don’t have a computer.”

Finally he suggests that she “Fly less.” She just stares at this man who has no clue what her life is

like.[42]

             Jennifer's second breakthrough came through reading about their channel surfing." Fox News would morph into

a late-night comedian making jokes about Christians and southerners . . .

 people living in double-wides who listened to country music. ...

The very word 'Tennessee' made those audiences burst into laughter,...

They would never come see what Tennessee was like, any more than she would get a degree in science and figure out the climate things" (or COVID-19) "the way scientists did."[43]

            Her third discovery, perhaps the most important, was generated by a four-sentence exchange.

A woman comes to visit her daughter-in-law in a storm:  “It’s not much of a fit day out, is it?" she says, and adds," 'Reach down your hand from on high, and deliver me from the mighty waters." Her daughter-in-law replies "I was just thinking the same." The mother-in-law just adds," Those Psalms about the wreck of the world."[44]

The two women know the Bible so well that both of them thought of the same verse at the same time, with that one verse, molreover, invoking for them the whole song. The Psalm has a simple plot: [1] a request for respect for the forces of nature and the divine power that can easily crush our arrogant pride; [2]  a promise of deliverance for those who do so.

While most of Jennifer's colleagues considered residents of Appalachia functional illiterates, Jennifer began to realize that these people have read closely the most influential book in Western culture, a text that prepared them for death and for the end of the world.

 They often cited stories from the books of Genesis and Job,  but their focus on Psalms reveals their deep faith in the power of prayer, a database rarely accessed by the elite.

Now that Jennifer was getting to know them, she wanted them to know that the lead scientist in the novel, was not an elitist. She wished she could share with them his deep grief for the Monarchs. Yet it was not possible because it's all in the details. There was not enough time. A string of abstractions summarizing it would not do in speech, any more than it would in writing.

            Nevertheless, feeling she was on the same wavelength as some of the people in her audience, if she couldn’t get them to read the novel, or hear more about it, she could call upon their memories of a book they had already read. Not being much of a Bible reader herself, she scanned the internet, where she found a white evangelical website that featured an article titled "Disease Pandemics Are Coming."[45]

 

Realizing that it would enable her to counteract the many conspiracy theories denying the animal origin of COVID-19, she decided to bring copies to her presentation. The article invoked the four horsemen of the Apocalypse who come "“to kill with sword [warfare], with hunger [famine], with death [pestilence and disease], and "by the beasts of the earth. ”

At the time the article was written (2005) HIV/AIDS and global flu epidemics were the primary examples of disease, but a prediction from a coordinator of the World Health Organization is cited: "we have never been as close to pandemic as we are now," as if he knew COVID-19 was on the way.[46]

In any case, the threat of what became COVID-19 is spelled out: the fourth horseman will come to "savage

hundreds of millions of people" when he unleashes "a deadly arsenal of devastating diseases that are already germinating . . . in the animal kingdom, by the beasts of the earth (Revelation 6:8)."

The story ends on a positive note, however, by citing Psalm 91: "you shall not be afraid … of the pestilence ….A thousand may fall at your side, And ten thousand at your right hand; But it shall not come near you"if you humbly accept a higher power.

            When she passed out copies of this article, Jennifer hoped that some members of the audience would see that science and religion need not be in conflict, and would want to hear more about the animal origin of human diseases, thus giving her a chance to counter at least one prevalent conspiracy theory: that COVID-19 had been deliberately created by humans as a weapon..

 She decided she would list the years of previous pandemics and the causes:

541 (fleas on cats, dogs,  and rats);  1346 (fleas on marmots and gerbils); 1889 (poultry); 1918, 1968, and 2009 (pigs); 2005 (primates).

Then she would add that for thousands of years we have forced animals to serve us and we received in return

the common cold virus (horse); tuberculosis (cattle); MERS (camel);

chickenpox, shingles, and avian flu (chicken); measles, smallpox, and influenza (pig).

 She would then focus on bats (the COVID-19 virus reservoir) and pangolins (apparently the amplifier species).

The pangolin, a harmless anteater

She would love to tell a story about the lowly pangolin. Perhaps call her Pippa. She is a very shy, peaceful, defenseless anteater, supposedly protected by law but now the last of her kind, for they are on the verge of extinction. In

fact they are the most heavily trafficked wild animals in the world. Pippa's only hope is to hide in the thick jungle. But the cruel two-legged creatures come and chop it down to make more room for a growing city nearby. More two-leggeds come and easily spot her pathetically trying to hide near a fallen log. She is picked up and hauled across an ocean and shoved in a set of "wet market" wire cages stacked on top of each other.

She is faint and sick, has had nothing to eat or drink. Urine and excrement fall on her from the cages above. She is not aware of it but it a virus is falling also, into her. Suddenly she is dragged from her cage and chopped up alive for one of the two-leggeds. If she was a revengeful type, which she was not, her last thought would have been on the poetic justice of the virus now about make the jump on to the two-legged as they ate her and kill hundreds of thousands of them.

Jennifer knew that at this point her audience might miss the point because they would still be wondering who would want to eat a dead scaly anteater? She would explain that in

Southeast Asia pangolin products were sold on the internet as medicine for wounds, skin diseases, and rheumatism, despite modern and ancient medical advice to the contrary. However, the price eventually jumped from seven dollars to about three hundred dollars per pound.

Somebody was "making a killing," as they say.

            The answer to the mystery helps explain why we are suffering from pandemics and fearing apocalyptic global warming:

Eating pangolin has become a status symbol, a sign of our pride in our own superiority to other humans as well as to all other animals.

Below you see the feast prepared by the person who who bought Pippa. First course is a whole baby pangolin, boiled in a sauce:

The next courses were photographed by newspaper reporters exposed a Chinese official trying "to impress high-level guests with a pangolin meat stir-fry."[47]  Jennifer made copies to pass out to the audience:

 Of course, such conspicuous consumption was not unknown in the West: French kings once served humming bird tongues. Now, however, eating almost-extinct animals is a

fashion statement  that leads directly to the death of hundreds of thousands around the world.

Jennifer knew that this image provide conclusions for her story that would resonate with her audience:"

(Proverbs 16:18).

[48]

"Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher .... that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; ...they have all one

breath;so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast:for

all is vanity.all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again"(Ecclesiastes 1:1,19-20) .

Now it was time to increase the emotional level in the audience:

Invoking the four horsemen of the apocalypse once again, she imagined her rhetorical flourish:

 "As more and more pandemics strike, as climate change tightens its grip, civilization, as we know, it will vanish. The elite in the urban towers will last only a few days. You, the people of Appalachia, who know how to live off the land, will survive much longer.

However, even if you can get us back on the road to civilization, all the scientific knowledge we have accumulated will have vanished like "the wind"--  the original meaning of the word "vanity."

           Jennifer knows that she must end with more hope than this. So she decided to briefly summarize the basic story plot

of most post-apocalyptic novels:  isolated individuals do not survive, only those who form .groups based both on love for one's neighbor and the need to defend themselves against those around them who still live in fear.Finally, she will remind her white evangelical audience:.

For this to work she knows that she must be the answer that she seeks. She recalls Kingsolver's memory of an Appalachian pastor who models the ethos of the successful speaker: he "moved people, persuading them with his demeanor, so loving and forthright. Whatever he said , you wanted it to be right."[49]

Then, she would pass out copies of an article titled "Coronavirus: A Biblical, Historical Perspective," from a different white evangelical website. She would conclude by reading aloud one paragraph mand then ask for questions:

“Already in the Old Testament we find very strict quarantine regulations for those suffering infectious

disease (see Leviticus 13).

So, when Christians follow government and medical advice to, say, drastically reduce all social contacts, this is not an expression of unbelief (as though God

did not have the power to protect or heal us).

Rather, it is a demand of wisdom and, especially, of neighbourly love. The equation is simple and sobering:

The flatter the rate of viral infection progresses the smaller the number of vulnerable people who will die.

Wherever we can contribute to that outcome, we should!”[50]

After the question and answer session, the audience would be surveyed and the results used to improve the speaker's performance and science communication generally.

Hopefully, using something like this as a pilot study will lead to more testing and eventually to the institution of programs

in interdisciplinary public health communication in many institutions that can significantly increase compliance with pandemic and global warming prevention requirements.*

  *(If we don’t get social media regulated, however, we will have to take on our opponents on their own battlefield. Their “online narratives tend to be nurtured in in-built community spaces that are a specific feature of platforms such as Facebook (for example, fan pages)”[51]

REFERENCES

[1] Neil F Johnson, et al,” The online competition between pro- and anti-vaccination views,” Nature May 13, 2020 Accessed May 21, 2020. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2281-1#ref-CR5

[2] Sara Berg, “Restoring Trust In Vaccines,” interview with Peter Hotez  Moving Medicine American Medical Association Fall, 2019 (13-18), p.15. with the result that if a parent tries to download info about vaccines “it is almost impossible because they are inundated with misinformation

[3]Berg, 16.

[4] Neil F Johnson, et al.

[5] Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, “Antivaccination Activists Are Growing Force at Virus Protests,” New York Times May 4, 2020 Accessed May 25, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/02/us/anti-vaxxers-coronavirus-protests.html

[6] Jason Wilson, “FBI-connected researchers suggested biggest threat in controlling outbreak was from ‘those who categorically reject vaccination’,” The Guardian April 27,2020  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/27/us-warning-pandemic-anti-vaxxers Accessed May 23, 2020.

[7] “Donald Trump offered support on Twitter for the discredited link between autism and vaccination. As president-elect, he met with leaders of the anti-vaccination movement, although as measles cases surged, he endorsed vaccination.” Rebecca Robbins, “Meeting with Trump emboldens anti-vaccine activists, who see an ally in the Oval Office” Stat Nov. 30, 2016 https://www.statnews.com/2016/11/30/donald-trump-vaccines-policy/  See also repeated praise of Trump and attacks on his opponents throughout the antivaxxer media empire.

[8] Berg, 18.

[9] Isaac Stanley-Becker ,  “Trump’s promise of ‘Warp Speed’ fuels anti-vaccine movement in fertile corners of the Web,” May 20 Washington Pos.t Accessed May 25, 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/trumps-promise-of-warp-speed-fuels-anti-vaccine-movement-in-fertile-corners-of-the-web/2020/05/20/c2b3d408-9ab2-11ea-89fd-28fb313d1886_story.html

[10] William Davies, Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason (Norton 2018).  Cited by  Isaac Chotiner, “A Political Economist on the End of the Age of Objectivity,” The New Yorker, February 14, 2019. Accessed May 25, 2020. https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/a-political-economist-on-the-end-of-the-age-of-objectivity,

[11] Melissa Estes Blair , “ Why our politics are awash in emotion,” Washington Post  Oct. 10, 2018 Accessed May 25, 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/10/10/why-our-politics-are-awash-emotion/

[12] Richard Perloff. The Dynamics of Persuasion: Communication and Attitudes in the 21st century.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003.

[13] Edwin Black,  Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method. New York: Macmillan, 1965, pp. 138-147.

[14] George Marshall, Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change. 2015. New York: Bloomsbury. Kindle Edition. 50.

[15] [  Marshall, 49

[16]Marshall , 48,

[17] Marshall, 88

[18] Marshall, 38.

[19] This, of course, is one of the most universal plots. Sometimes it is phrased in the “empathic” form, “What you wish upon others, you wish upon yourself.” These phrases, and the negative, “Do not treat others in ways that you would not like to be treated.”  In the East we hear variations of them as early as Confucius; in the West as early as the Code of Hammurabi, Tobit 4:15, and  Leviticus 19:34 (“Love the stranger as thyself for you were once a stranger") and eventually in secular writers such as Plato, Aristotle, Isocrates, and Seneca. Hence we are not surprised that the Golden Rule is the centerpiece of the 1993 "Declaration Toward a Global Ethic" “signed by 143 respected leaders from all of the world's major faiths, including”  Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, Sikhism, Taoism, and Zoroastrianism. https://parliamentofreligions.org/pwr_resources/_includes/FCKcontent/File/TowardsAGlobalEthic.pdf

[20] Marshall, 105

[21] Dana Nuccitelli,.” Katharine Hayhoe is successfully convincing doubtful evangelicals about climate change, “The Guardian. August 28, 2017.

[22] William J. Broad,, "Putin’s Long War Against American Science" April 13, 2020. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/science/putin-russia-disinformation-health-coronavirus.html  .(Accessed April.19)

[23] Julian Barnes, et al. "As Virus Spreads, China and Russia See Openings for Disinformation" New York Times, April 22, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/us/politics/china-russia-coronavirus-disinformation.html .(Accessed April.22)

[24] Jon Cohen,  "Perceptions of Coronavirus," SurveyMonkey. March 9, 2020. Accessed April. 6, 2020. https://www.surveymonkey.com/curiosity/axios-coronavirus-perception/ .

[25] Poppy Noor,  "A Third of Americans Believe Covid-19 Laboratory Conspiracy Theory,"  The Guardian,  April 13, 2020. Accessed April. 14, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/13/coronavirus-conspiracy-theory-laboratory-report

[26]Alan Feuer and Liam Stack, "New York City Considers Temporary Graves for Virus Victims" New York Times..April 6, 2020  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/nyregion/mass-graves-nyc-parks-coronavirus.html (Accessed April.20)

[27] Gregory Smith, "Most White Evangelicals Satisfied with Trump’s Initial Response to the COVID-19 Outbreak,"  “Fact Tank,” Pew Research. March 19, 2020. Accessed April.19 https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/03/19/most-white-evangelicals-satisfied-with-trumps-initial-response-to-the-covid-19-outbreak/

[28] Pew Research, "Trust and Mistrust in Americans' Views of Scientific Experts." August 2, 2019. Accessed April12, 2020.  https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2019/08/02/trust-and-mistrust-in-americans-views-of-scientific-experts/

[29] Ibid.

[30] The Nature Conservancy, for example, demonstrated how to adapt to the unique communication habits, needs, and values of audiences. The Nature Conservancy, "Climate Change Stories"

https://www.nature.org/en-us/what-we-do/our-priorities/tackle-climate-change/climate-change-stories/canwe-talk-climate. (Accessed  April 17). Social Psychology journals also showed that for white evangelicals and those who depend on conservative media for news, she should appeal to such values as in-group loyalty, authority, respect, and free-market solutions. J. Graham, J. Haidt, and B. A. Nosek, “Liberals Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 96(2009): 1029-46.In climate change appeals, focus on free market solution "produced striking and dramatic effects: reducing or entirely erasing ideological differences nearly 40%." C. Wolsko, H. Ariceaga, and J. Seiden, “Red,White, and Blue Enough to Be Green: Effects of Moral Framing on Climate Change Attitudes and Conservation Behaviors,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 65 (2016): 7-19.

[31] "Humanities" courses include history, literature, languages, art, music, religious studies and philosophy (but not Anglo-American philosophy which had adopted the strict rationalism of the sciences). In the Oxford English Dictionary. We learn that an early spelling of “human” was "humane," meaning "marked by sympathy with and consideration for the needs and distresses of ... human beings and the lower animals." Two citations of this meaning assert that the basis for "human" nature is "love" OED info XXXXX

[32] John Henry. Newman, A Grammar of Assent. University of Notre Dame Press, 1979. 223, 49.”Concrete ‘facts’’and ‘things’ not only help us hold on to reality, they limit and test the validity of abstractions: without a firm hold on things, we shall waste ourselves in vague speculations," 47.

[33] Newman, 260-1, cf. 243.

[34] J M Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello New York: Penguin, 2003, p.9.

[35] " the ability of a person to imaginatively transcend the barriers between her and another person and, by actually entering into the other person 's feelings, so to speak, to secure a momentary but complete identification with her."  Bate demonstrated that “the sympathetic imagination  in literature and morality are so psychologically dependent on each other that they augment each other’s growth and delicacy, and the decline in one necessarily precipitates decline in the other.” Walter Jackson Bate, “The Sympathetic Imagination in Eighteenth-Century English Criticism.” ELH [Journal of English Literary History] 12, no. 2 (1945): 144-164.

[36]R. S. Emmett, & D. E. Nye,  The Environmental Humanities : A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017), 5,7,8.

[37] Emmett & Nye, 8.

[38] Jeremy Rifkin, The Empathic Civilization. Penguin, 2009, p. 83.

[39] Christian Keysers, The Empathic Brain (Social Brain Press, 2011)  Kindle, 2017, p. 108.

[40] Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior 2012. Harper. Kindle Edition. 390

[41] Kingsolver, 391.

[42] Kingsolver, 454.

[43] Kingsolver, 55.

[44] Kingsolver, 175.

[45] Fred Dattolo, " Disease Pandemics Are Coming." Trumpet Print Edition. March-April 2005. Accessed 4/8/2020.  https://www.thetrumpet.com/1350-disease-pandemics-are-coming.

[46] Dattolo.

[47] Wu Yan, " Pangolin Man" South China  News July 15, 2015 http://news.sina.com.cn/c/nd/2017-02-07/doc-ifyafcyw0540684.shtml.

[48] All biblical citations are from the King James Bible.

[49] Kingsolver, 356

[50] Christian Hofreiter "Coronavirus: A Biblical Perspective" RZIM no date  https://www.rzim.org/read/rzim-global/coronavirus-a-biblical-historical-perspective" (Accessed 4/18).

[51]Neil  Johnson et al.

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