The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic as a test bench of ecological and economic global crisis: 7 theses on how to problematise the human condition in the age of the Anthropocene

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic represents the first epidemic at the time of the ecological crisis, of what is called the Anthropocene: the statement may seem obvious, but what we want to emphasize is that it is not simply a simultaneity of moments, but rather a significant and intimately connected set of events that should be analyzed with different critical tools than those used for the analysis of other pandemic crises that have crossed the history of humanity. It is clear that, in general, pandemics are not to be understood as exclusively natural dynamics (beyond the ambiguity of the term nature that will be one of the subjects of these analysis), both in their origins and in their effects, and they can only be understood within historical and social frameworks that see the ecological dimension and economic dimension intersect deeply (the discourse and the norm of the oikos, as the place of dwelling for human and non-human living beings). The starting point and first element is that this pandemic crisis, precisely because it is connected to the Anthropocene (which is generically defined as the era in which the human becomes a geological and climate-changing power), could manifest a threshold in our relationship to the oikos and could in some ways anticipate – as a test bench – the announced crisis of metabolism human/nature: the idea from which we start is that this pandemic is an observatory on what could happen.