“We have long exceeded our limits; it is time to try something new.”
I saw a harbour seal at the lighthouse just the other morning, near where I live. There were hardly any other people around, no container ships, no tankers, no cruise ships lining up to dump thousands of tourists on the local pier. A city of 2 million people was eerily quiet, and the seal splashed around happily, oblivious to any talk of pandemics and economic lockdowns.
One planet, one world, our world. The greening of Planet Earth — one of the unintended, if entirely predictable, side-effects of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic — continues unabated, even as the crisis itself shows no sign of abating. Satellite imaging from NASA and the European Space Agency continues to show pollution on the wane across industrial cities in central China and northern Italy, the areas most affected by the pandemic. And while it will take a lot more than this for the polar ice sheets to recover, early signs are, if not definitive exactly, at least encouraging.
Teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg has self-isolated herself for the past two weeks, living in a borrowed apartment at an undisclosed location with her dad Svante, who’s also showing symptoms, but she’s doing fine, she told her followers early Tuesday on Instagram. Viruses take no prisoners, and they make no exceptions.
The Fridays For Future school protests have migrated online, and though they may not be so visible on the nightly news, the climate kids now have a wider reach — the worldwide web — and they have a captive audience, as more countries impose a total lockdown.
If nothing else, the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that human societies are capable of changing behaviour virtually overnight, even as it threatens millions of lives. Donella Meadows, lead author of the 1972 Club of Rome report The Limits to Growth and its follow-up 20 years later, Beyond the Limits, warned at the time that humanity’s future would be defined not by a single crisis but by many separate-yet-related crises, owing to the innate connectivity of the global village.
It isn’t just that today’s pandemics can be spread around the world in little more than 24 hours, owing to airline travel, but rather the wider view of an ever-growing human population depleting the Earth’s resources faster than they can be restored, coupled with our collective failure to live a sustainable lifestyle. It isn’t just burning through natural resources at an unsustainable rate but the constantly growing amounts of plastics, toxins and industrial waste into the Earth’s atmosphere, into the planet’s ground water and into the world’s oceans. Everything is connected. Climate change, biodiversity loss and economic collapse do not recognize national borders — and viruses do not recognize physical borders.
COVID-19 is being likened to a wake-up call to stop exceeding the planet’s limits, if only because scientists can show how deforestation, habitat destruction and extinction events make pandemics more likely.
Deforestation, to cite just one example, drives wild animals closer to human populations, increasing the likelihood that zoonotic viruses
like SARS-CoV-2 will make the cross-species leap from animals to humans. (The prominent science writer David Quammen wrote an entire book about this, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, in 2012.)
Renewable energy — both the idea and the practice — has received a sudden shot in the arm, even as the fossil fuel futures markets have crashed.
As those satellite images show, fewer people chewing up fewer natural resources — including fossil fuels — has already had a noticeable effect on the air we breathe and the way we live.
Some good can still come from COVID-19. China has vowed to impose a temporary ban on the wildlife animal trade, though only time — and transparency — will tell if he ban is more than just temporary.
This is an issue because COVID-19, as with SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) before it in 2003, has effectively been traced to China’s so-called “wet markets” – open-air markets where animals are bought live and then slaughtered on the spot for customers. As Project Syndicate’s Peter Singer and Paola Cavalieri reported earlier this month, virtually everyone affected by the virus since December has some link to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale wet market in Wuhan, a city of some 11 million people in China’s Hubei province.
“In tropical and subtropical areas of the planet, wet markets sell live mammals, poultry, fish, and reptiles, crammed together and sharing their breath, their blood, and their excrement,” they noted. “In China’s wet markets, many different animals are sold and killed to be eaten: wolf cubs, snakes, turtles, guinea pigs, rats, otters, badgers, and civets.”
Similar markets exist in many Asian countries, including Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines
“Scientists tell us that keeping different animals in close, prolonged proximity with one another and with people creates an unhealthy environment that is the probable source of the mutation that enabled COVID-19 to infect humans,” Singer and Cavalieri added — though, in truth, we probably didn’t need scientists to tell us that.
Some truths tend to be self-evident, especially when, as NPR’s Jason Beaubien reported, “Live fish in open tubs splash water all over the floor; the countertops of the stalls are red with blood as fish are gutted and filleted right in front of the customers' eyes; live turtles and crustaceans climb over each other in boxes and melting ice adds to the slush on the floor. There’s lots of water, blood, fish scales, and chicken guts.”
Given all that, it’s harder to believe a deadly virus wouldn’t get loose than it is to believe that one did exactly that.
There is room for hope, though, as Jane Goodall keeps reminding us. Throughout human history, tragedies have often led to important changes.
The evidence is there in front of our very eyes — in the form of satellite images — if only we choose to see it.
