It’s Time to Reimagine How We Live on Earth
We changed everything in a matter of days. We slowed down and began practicing the strange art of social distancing. Now, we can only measure the fruits of our (non-)labor over swaths of time. Small indications in the data show us we may be flattening the curve of the COVID19 infection rate in the United States. As the days turn into weeks, we are confronted with a new question: what life awaits us on the other side of this crisis?
A few long weeks ago, we would have thought all of this was unthinkable. Life as an adult in North America was business as usual. You remember it well: the humdrum of stress, the random deadlines, the punctuations of joy and triumph amidst the endless churn of work. The running around, the buying of near-useless items, the paying off of things, the razor-edge budgeting that sometimes makes ends meet, and often does not.
Maybe we will never return to that “normal” way of living.
A diligent response to dealing with the coronavirus meant upheaving everything, and our new normal is just taking root. In the US, we’re doing it by self-organizing within our regional systems, one county at a time. The leadership at the top of our system has been slow to respond in a systematic fashion. Our current president is not only an incompetent fool but also a relentless liar. His daily briefings are an absurd, painful exercise in spin and propaganda.
But there is a silver lining gleaming above us. It beckons us tentatively, between our fits of gloom and grief. If we are capable of re-orienting everything in our lives so quickly, then who knows what we can accomplish next? If anything, this crisis has shown us that we are capable of massive change. We have responded to this current moment with adaptation and resilience.
This situation gives me hope not only for slowing the spread of the coronavirus, but also for slowing down climate change. Already, we are seeing that our drastic measures of self-containment are decreasing carbon emissions around the world, but how long will that last? We are capable of imagining a better world where people don’t have to choose between the economy, environmental protection and public health.
Maybe we need to realize that what we considered “our normal way of life” is actually killing us. What does that mean, exactly? For starters, our lust for expansion and domination of resources has led us to unprecedented deforestation and ranching around the globe. We’ve encroached on the last wild spaces of the Earth, thus releasing many unknown viruses and bacteria that can be found there. Research shows that destroying nature unleashes infectious diseases. And the clincher: globalization provides the perfect vector for spreading those viruses at an astonishing pace.
In our quest to become global citizens, the very system that we built to connect ourselves may lead to our own unraveling. There is nowhere to hide. But one thing we can do is go within ourselves, re-examine our society, the world and our place in it. It’s time to dig deep, and realize that our rat race has led to this mess.
As we slow down and take a step back from our frenetic economic activities, many inequalities come into stark relief. Some of us have the luxury of stopping and sheltering in place in relative safety, and knowing we’ll get through this eventually, even though it’s nerve-wracking as hell. Others do not have that luxury, have no place to shelter adequately, and are at great risk of being infected, and not being able to buy their food or cover their bills. The system we have built is precarious and unethical.
We face another ugly truth: the healthcare system in the US is a disaster. This is the land where regular people are penalized for not being able to cover exorbitant medical bills, and are asked to pay insane monthly insurance premiums just to not go bankrupt when a health crisis strikes. Now, with a pandemic on our hands, the absurdity of this system is even more clear: the people who become severely ill might go broke just trying to save themselves.
As we navigate our way slowly through our new Age of Captivity, we have time to talk amongst ourselves and confront these stark truths. This unexpected shift in our lifestyle could be the moment where we radically increase our odds of surviving as a society, and also as species on this planet.
How do we do it? It depends on all of us to rethink how we invest our time and energy. Instead of being embroiled in partisan politics and celebrity culture, it’s a good time to re-imagine how we interact with wild spaces, other species, and even learn more about the ecology of disease. It’s a good time to remember how our ancestors survived before us, how they learned about their environments and the stories they told to transmit their knowledge.
We will get through this. Our dreams propel us forward, one sleep at a time.
Thank you to my colleague Karen Park. Our conversations inspired this piece.
