Imagining the world after COVID-19
Without a major change, we’re headed for a crisis that will make this pandemic seem small by comparison
Over the past weeks, as we have collectively been grappling with the many challenges presented by the coronavirus pandemic, many opinions have emerged on what this pandemic has revealed to us about our society and our world, with thoughts about how this learning can help us envision and enact a different kind of future for ourselves. Themes have included a reset of our economy, large scale systemic changes to health, social and senior care, and seriously tackling the challenge of climate change. There is a growing consensus that it is time for radical change; that humanity needs to take a long, hard look at how we’ve been conducting ourselves and that we must find a better way of doing things. There is no “going back to normal.”
As a progressive and a committed environmentalist, I echo the pleas of other writers who urge us to see climate change and the mass extinction of species as a problem as great as, in fact more serious than, this pandemic. Like others, I also believe we need to invest more in our health-care system and senior care and consider, as Spain has done, the implementation of a universal basic income. We need to ask corporations, particularly those that avoid taxes through offshore tax havens, to pay their fair share and we need to fashion a society where economic benefit is better distributed and more widely enjoyed than it is now. In short, we need a more humane kind of society than the one we have, and we must learn to live in ways that allow our Earth to heal so that it can continue to sustain future generations.
Recently, I was sent a short video that carried a very powerful message. Alternating with footage showing empty streets in normally bustling cities like Paris, New York and London were inspiring scenes from the natural world, finishing with the reminder that we are guests on this planet, not masters of it.
We would do well to heed this message. But how do we move forward, how do we make the radical shift in thinking and doing that is needed? We can begin by changing our perspective from the current mechanistic, extractive and materialistic view of the world to one that is more organic, reciprocal and intuitive. I offer this diagram, borrowed from the Future Oxford Community Sustainability Plan, as a starting point.
This nested circle framework
recognizes that social and economic activity occur within ecological limits. In our current model, the economy drives everything else, and increasingly, we have let market forces drive the economy. Clearly, the social and environmental problems that plague us are not being solved by “the market.”
Recent events have shown us that markets are incapable of responding to a major cataclysm like this pandemic; instead it has required strong, effective leadership from governments. And we will never respond in time to what is undeniably an impending climate cataclysm without gamechanging government policy that envisions an economic model based on sustainability rather than unlimited growth. And while the massive shutdown of industry caused by COVID-19 will achieve about a five per cent (temporary) reduction in greenhouse gases in 2020, according to the Global Carbon Project, the latest UN Environment Programme’s Emissions Gap Report indicates that even if countries meet their existing climate pledges (a very optimistic stretch), emissions will continue to rise over the next decade. By 2030, the UNEP report estimates that emissions will be 27 per cent and 38 per cent higher than is needed to limit warming to 2 C and 1.5 C, respectively.
In other words, we are still going in the wrong direction, and without the right kind of direction — a massive shift to clean energy and a green economy — we will fail to avert the climate feedback loops and tipping points that will unleash an even more frightening pandemic than COVID. Make no mistake, the impact of climate cataclysm on our living conditions, our health, our food supply systems and our economy in the foreseeable future will dwarf what we are experiencing now. Looking at our circular diagram in a different light, we can perhaps view it as a new kind of lens through which to see the biosphere and our place in it, one which can finally give us, in 2020, the 20/20 vision and world view needed to imagine and create a sustainable future for ourselves and our fellow species for generations to come.
Jane Jenner lives in Burlington