It began with tales of an exotic land where innumerable persons eat meats frowned upon by Western mores. Though more people live in Wuhan than London, there was little doubt which city had a greater claim to fame.
So, when rumours arrived of a brutal disease ravaging the entrails of the lesser known city, its scale was felt like so many minor ‘stories’ in the 24-hour news cycle: - It was happening to Them, as SARS and MERS and so many other respiratory syndromes, to the other worlds of developing countries, and we would likely get away with doing little. It had served Us so well in the past.
Next in the story was Italy. All of a sudden the scale, the metrics, were of a slightly different tenor. We had been on holiday to Italy, or at least liked Italian food, and it was getting a little too familiar for comfort. The news cycle was feeding our brains with numbers that sounded worryingly large. The house of rumour feeds anxiety and depression about what might come next. We like to think of ourselves as rational, not herds; but behaviour was adapting irrationally – the stockpiling, the fitful use of cloth masks, the slow hollowing out of public venues. Should we be worried?
Other countries were acting fast. Why weren’t we? Were we somehow safe? Was the divine providence of our great, now secular nation proclaiming us set apart from other peoples?
The picture was moving so fast – the scale of i in this surge of feeling, urging human beings, somewhat bewildered by the contradiction between our habitual modes of being and the steady crescendo of death knocking. (Behind the knock, the knack of the media for feeding our fear, by framing it in a familiar, consumable form.)
When a friend explained it was doubling every three or four days, and if everyone was blasé about it, our elders and our weak would be consumed like nothing I had experienced before, finally it sort of clicked and the net of lockdown no longer seemed so full of dread.
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What shocks me still is how stupid I showed myself to be. I pride myself on my intellect, my skill at interpreting data and language; I berate Johnson and his crew for failing to read the numbers, to comprehend the scale that was to befall the country (there’s little doubt the fool in chief has made a fool of our country https://on.ft.com/2SwGZre and https://bit.ly/3b6dq66). But I didn’t take it seriously until far too late, and when I sift through the data in my head, i see i was not alone – the ego was not made to compute the indifference of the universe to its suffering and joys. Many in my social sphere also discounted the bad news as peripheral to the direction of their lives, until it was too blindingly obvious to ignore.
It bodes ill for our collective future.
Since my teenage years, I have been sympathetic to the environmental movement. In a city as bedazzling as London, vibrant with multisensorial entertainment on every night of the week, the environment is a nice thing for an educated liberal westerner to patronize, but remote from my everyday concerns. If everyone else is travelling to exotic lands, expanding their horizons while they have the chance, why shouldn’t I?
The scale of the environmental catastrophe is every bit as daunting as the scale of the economic and health catastrophe we are currently experiencing. The islands nation of Kiribati will disappear within 30 years. The elephants who once roamed most of sub-Saharan Africa 70 years ago have been either poached or herded into national parks for our pleasure and entertainment (https://bit.ly/2L0KotX); and these our earth’s most giant mammals are just the tip of an environmental iceberg – as at least with their enormous scale they are visible, the last of the pachyderms (which included mammoths and mastodons amongst others only 10,000 years ago - we may have been instrumental in wiping out the other pachyderms too). Over 50% of the world’s coral reefs have died in the last 30 years, and chances are that by the time I die, they will be all gone.
Yet it all seems very peripheral to the direction of my life. And when I contemplate whether by acting or not acting, I might make a difference – I don’t believe it; I just don’t learn fast enough.
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Some of my friends talk about the ‘Great Turning’, the visionary moment when human societies realise their energies are spent in killing their planet, and alter their nature-annihilating and carbon-fixated ways. Lockdown shows it is possible.
I say this is nonsense. The sad truth is that most behaviour will return much to the way it has before. Home working will go up, reducing driving to work; but some will swap public for private transport (fear of germs). Social contract theory runs deep in the Anglo-Saxon model of the state, and large segments of society have not signed up for an anti-capitalist eco-utopia; just look at the gilets jaunes, or the SUV-driving Midwesterner; no matter how much we may admire the evidence-based prosecution by Extinction Rebellion. The cost to the consumer, used to the dizzying gifts of technology, is too much, power says.
The oil-and-gas industry, the tourism industry and the construction industry (to name but a few) operate on a scale few of us can imagine – and they are on the back foot. They are desperately in need of a return to the status quo. Governments depend on them for tax revenue, and employing the voters, so will support them.
Turning back to China, one of the best indicators of a return of economic activity was the rise of congestion in cities and the firing up of coal power plants. If we could only persuade this country that produces 28% of all carbon emissions to switch coal to gas and renewables, that would lower emissions substantially. Changes in consumer behaviour can reduce extinctions – Seven Continents, One Planet by David Attenborough was good on how palm oil is destroying Sumatran orangutans – so avoid palm oil if you can. And instead of investing in Shell, we can invest in projects like these - https://www.goldstandard.org .
It is the melancholy music of humanity that in times like these we can observe the peaceful, half-polluted skies and imagine a better world; then sigh turn our backs on it and resume the blind path we were on before. If there is one thing I want you to take away from this blog, it is that you will forget (if not this crisis, the next). So if you believe in change, schedule reminders that through small acts, we can steer a slightly better course.
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