“We have to get the message out that we need to change. Let’s have hope that we’re going to come out of this better people. We have to push our politicians in the right direction.”
It isn’t Day of the Triffids exactly but with humans in hiding, wildlife is reemerging in areas previously crowded by homo sapiens. Where late the sweet birds sang, they’re reappearing anew.
“It took just a few days of lockdown for baby rabbits to dare to cross once bustling roads in Christchurch, New Zealand,” Laura Millan Lombrana wrote for Bloomberg News mere days ago, “and less than a week for a puma to descend from the Andes Mountains into Santiago, one of South Americaʼs busiest capitals.”
Wild boar, a familiar sight to residents of Barcelona’s outer suburbs, have made their way deep into the heart of the Catalonian capital.
“It’s surprising and strange, yes, but also meaningful,” Lombrana added. “Research suggests that ecosystems can rebound (quickly) once human intervention subsides.”
That’s a familiar refrain to conservationists the world over, where even in war-torn regions of West Africa, for example, herds of wild elephants have been seen to recover more quickly than anticipated once they’re left alone for any length of time — provided there are enough wild wetlands for them to recover in.
And that, right there, is the crux of the matter, and the answer to the inevitable question, Where to from here?
Our wanton, collective destruction of nature was responsible in part for Covid-19 in the first place. Wet markets, places where living wild animals are sold for food — and the jumping-off point for a zoonotic virus that was bound to escape sooner or later — don’t just happen of their own accord. Ebola jumped into the human population in January, 1996, when villagers who had carried, skinned, chopped and/or eaten a dead chimpanzee in a patch of rainforest in northern Gabon later came down with a deadly hemorrhagic fever. In that instance, 21 of the 37 villagers reported to have been infected later died, and not in a pleasant way. Ebola’s astounding casualty rate, and the speed with which it spreads, leaves Covid-19 in the shade. Even at that, though, Ebola was not enough on its own to convince villagers in remote regions of West Africa, let alone the wider world outside, to change their ways. No matter how many sociologists insist Covid-19 will change our thinking, there are countless others — students of recent history, for one — who believe it’ll be back to business as usual, only even more so.
This is despite the emergence of a new discipline, “planetary health,” which focuses on the increasingly visible connections between human beings, other living beings, and Earth’s complex web of biospheres and ecosystems.
Former Guardian environment editor John Vidal noted in an op-ed piece last month that research suggests outbreaks of animal-borne and similar infectious diseases such as SARS, bird flu, Ebola, Marburg, MERS, swine flu, Lassa fever, the Nipah virus and now Covid-19 are growing with each passing day. Pathogens are crossing from animals to humans in growing number, and many of those pathogens are quick to spread to new places. The Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that three-in-four new, emerging diseases that infect humans originate in animals.
Climate scientists and conservationists alike — everyone from the World Health Organization and World Economic Forum to primatologist Jane Goodall and teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg — say our response to climate change and the coronavirus are linked. “We live in an age in which intersecting crises are being lifted to a global scale, with unseen levels of inequality, environmental degradation and climate destabilization, as well as new surges in populism, conflict, economic uncertainty, and mounting public health threats,” WHO climate change advisor Arthur Wyns wrote earlier this month on the World Economic Forum’s website. (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/climate-change-coronavirus-linked/) “All are crises that are slowly tipping the balance, questioning our business-as-usual economic model of the past decades, and requiring us to rethink our next steps.”
For now, signs of green recovery — no matter how temporary and fleeting they may prove to be — are there, for anyone willing enough to look.
Wyns again: “Crises like these offer an opportunity for a regained sense of shared humanity, in which people realize what matters most: the health and safety of their loved ones, and by extension the health and safety of their community, country and fellow global citizens. Both the climate crisis and unfolding pandemic threaten this one thing we all care about.
“When we eventually overcome the COVID-19 pandemic, we can hopefully hold on to that sense of shared humanity in order to rebuild our social and economic systems to make them better, more resilient, and compassionate.
“Ultimately, public health is a political choice. A choice we are now confronted with, and one we will have to make over and over again as we transition to a more resilient, zero-carbon, just and healthier future.”
Andr à tutto bene.
In truth, though, will everything be better the day after? We can only hope — and along with hope, our prospects for a greener Earth.
©Gerd Altmann-Pixabay