Venting to the editor

John Sherbino | May 20, 2020

Even a cursory review of COVID 19’s worldwide distribution suggests two things that fly in the face of our popular social and political view that ‘more is better’.

Infection thrives in crowded environments. Large cities, meatpacking plants and retirement/nursing homes have demonstrated that, even while acknowledging that other environments are not COVID free.

However, it is accurate to say that ‘physical distancing’ is significantly easier in less crowded living and working areas. Worldwide, metropolitan environments have grown and in addition, they have drawn outsiders in with the promise of work and the encouragement of public and private transportation. The flags of gross domestic product and employee productivity fly high around the world.

Economists, Marketing academics and business continue to stress the need for a growing population to lift both productivity and consumption.

In Canada, given the nature of our land, we are concentrated industrially along thin bands of resources within which the population is growing and crowding. Although urban sprawl is publicly derided, it is financially encouraged as metro living costs drive yet greater high-rise density as human and material resources continue to be centralized.

In recent years political boundaries and cash allocation have been adjusted to facilitate population centralization leaving rural communities without the necessary resources to flourish. Yet, even in the countryside, people are being encouraged through tightening legislation to form larger communities where goods and services can be concentrated.

A look at the history of COVID 19’s spread ( and this is not the first or likely to be the last event of this kind) confirms the disadvantages of centralization and population growth within a limited space. In this instance unfortunately, big cities are definitely ‘where it’s at’ and small communities are by design on the way out.

All of this is so globally ingrained it is seldom questioned or when it is, the idea of fundamental change and those who present it are derided as eccentric, fools, or worse - as anti-capitalists or, heaven help us....as socialists.

You don’t have to have a fully worked-out solution to know you have a dangerous problem that needs immediate focus. Recent events in industrialized farming and meat production and the for profit storage of seniors scream at us to pay attention.

Jamming ourselves together in order to make a living or even to live isn’t going all that well.

John Sherbino