Medicine7

“Before this virus, humanity was already threatened with asphyxiation. If there must be war, it cannot be so much against a particular virus, but against everything that […] in the long reign of capitalism has forced whole populations of the world […] to a heavy, gasping breath and a life of oppression.
Overcoming this limitation would mean going beyond the purely biological aspect of breathing […] as the [erfassen] thing we have in common […]. By that I mean the universal right to breathe.”

The University of Chicago Press Journal (Achille Mbembe), 13.04.2020:"The Universal Right To Breathe."

Joseph-Achille Mbembe (born 1957) is a Cameroonian historian and political scientist. He is a professor at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, South Africa.

In his article, Mbembe draws attention to the general destruction of the foundations of all life on our planet. "In Africa in particular, but also in many places in the global South, energy-intensive mining, the expansion of agriculture, predatory land sales and the destruction of forests will continue unabated. The power supply and cooling of computer chips and supercomputers depend on it. [...] If COVID-19 is indeed the spectacular expression of the planetary impasse in which humanity finds itself today, then it is about nothing less than rebuilding a habitable Earth to give us all the breath of life. We need to reclaim the lungs of our world in order to break new ground. Humans and the biosphere are one. Humanity has no future on its own."

2020