Coronavirus & our planet
The Illusion of our Separateness
Haroon Rashid is right when he said, ‘We fell asleep in one world, and woke up in another’. None of us could ever have imagined a pandemic as our world has been experiencing. Inger Andersen (UN’s Environment Executive Director) believes that ‘Nature is sending us a message with the coronavirus pandemic’, that ‘humanity was placing too many pressures on the natural world with damaging consequences’
While humans have retreated temporarily, it seems like nature is filling the vacuum. After a week of ‘lockdown’ friends in South Africa sent us videos of penguins walking around the streets of Simons Town. In Italy Venice’s canals are clearer than they have been in 60 years while there are ducks in the fountains of Rome. In the US Coyotes have have been spotted on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and deer are grazing a few miles from the White House. Wales are reporting that peacocks have strutted through Bangor and goats are roaming free on the streets of Llandundo. I will not mention the cows in India because really, they have always been free. (Of course there are also the reports of dinosaurs in Times Square but we’ll file that with injecting disinfectant and the conspiracy theories).
More factual is the effect on our air. As our roads and airports became quiet and factories closed, dirty gray pollution belts shrunk over cities everywhere. Every country that locked down experienced a considerable fall in carbon and nitrogen dioxide. Friends in India sent me beautiful photos of blue skies over Delhi and apparently the Himalayas were visible from northern India for the first time in 30 years. In the north east of the US, air pollution is down 30% and according to Marshall Burke, (professor at Stanford), the reduction in air pollution in China likely saved the lives of 77 000 people over 2 months this year.
Experts believe that the destruction of natural habitats help to create the perfect conditions for viruses like Covid-19 to emerge and that the outbreak could be part of the climate change crisis. We’re of course not solving climate change by having a global pandemic but perhaps this crisis may lead to a deeper understanding of the ties that bind us on a global scale.
While nature seems to be more free and breathing a little easier during this time, humans all over the globe are losing just that. Over 3 million of us are or has been sick and millions more are feeling the pain of social isolation and the economic hardships this pandemic caused. But we do know that this will end. It may feel as if we're in prison right now, but the sentence is a short one. Hopes that humanity could emerge from this into a healthier, cleaner world will depend not on the short-term impact of the virus, but on what we learned from this and the long-term political decisions made about what will follow.
May we not forget this experience but remember how the butterfly effect of one person in Wuhan getting sick changed our world. Perhaps our actions can do the same.
What do you think the long term effect may be? Please let me know in the comments below.
“We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.”
Earth day doodles I did while home schooling my children.