Why this Pandemic Is Different and Why Designers Should Care
Thomas Fisher, University of Minnesota
May 7, 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic is different from those that have come before. It represents not just a global plague, like the Black Death in medieval Europe or the “Spanish flu” in 1918, nor just an economic downturn, like the Great Depression or Great Recession. This pandemic is what ecologists call a panarchic “release,” which happens when one species becomes so dominant in an ecosystem that it overconsumes resources to the point where a triggering event — a disease, drought, or disruption of some sort — causes the ecosystem to collapse and reorganize itself in a healthier, more resilient and adaptable form.¹ This pandemic is humanity’s panarchic release.
Consider the unprecedented collapse of the global economy, which has happened in a matter of a few months. The Stockholm Resilience Centre has tracked the “great acceleration” of stresses that we have been placing on global environmental and socio-economic systems since World War II,² ranging from an exponential increase carbon accumulation in the atmosphere to an exponential eradication of species in what biologists call “the sixth extinction”³ to an exponential increase in human population, doubling in size in just 54 years.⁴ Ecologists find such exponential growth patterns in every ecosystem prior to its collapse and reorganization. Ours is no different.
You might think that humanity would be smart enough to have seen this disaster coming and would have done something to stop it, but we didn’t, in part because of the long-held belief, at least among Western cultures, in human exceptionalism. Thinking that we are different from and superior to other animals has blinded us to the fact that our very dominance as a species and our overconsumption of resources has made us vulnerable to a collapse. Which also makes the dominant narrative of things going back to “normal” after the pandemic particularly delusional. By not recognizing the nature of what is happening and by not altering the accelerations that helped create the conditions for this collapse, we will only set ourselves up for an even greater catastrophe in the future, when a more efficient killer, like Ebola, goes global, with a mortality rate as high as 90%.⁵
What can the design community do as we face such a reality? A great deal. When ecologies reorganize after their collapse, they often enable a broader and more equitable access to resources, a greater diversity of native and non-native species within the ecosystem, and an increased resilience against future disruptions. Many in the design community have called for equity, diversity, and resilience in our own built environment, and the time has come to put those values front and center in our work as we help people see the possibilities of a better life ahead.
A panarchic release is especially hard on the dominant species, as we have seen with the number of people who have become ill, unemployed, or out of businesses. But it also leads to a healthier and better-functioning ecosystem, as we have witnessed with the cleaner air, lower crime rates,⁶ and greater amount of family time most people now have. A Stanford University study showed that, using statistics up to March 8th, the number of lives saved in China because of reduced air pollution was about 20 times that of the number killed by COVID-19 there.⁷ Returning to the old normal is too deadly.
A panarchic release also reduces the dominant species’ excessive consumption of resources. The COVID-19 crisis has revealed the unequal access to resources that affects so many people, with people of color disproportionately affected by the coronavirus, in part because of the stress of poverty and in part because of the essential services many provide, which has increased their exposure to the virus. Closing such disparities as we reorganize our future is a matter not just of fairness and justice, but also of survival. Zoonotic disease emerges in the human population largely because of global poverty, which forces people to occupy wilderness areas and eat wildlife. Until we address the grinding poverty of too many people around the world, we will remain vulnerable to novel viruses capable of our eradication.
Here, too, designers have much to offer, from showing how we might improve people’s living conditions around the world to controlling the growth of global cities through better urban design and planning. While the economic collapse has negatively affected the traditional work of the design community as projects get cancelled, it has also opened up opportunities to help us imagine what a post-pandemic world might be like and how much healthier, more equitable, and more resilient it could be.
It will also demand asking fundamental questions. What do zoning districts mean as so many people now live, work, make, and study at home? How many vehicular streets do we need as so many have become accustomed to Zooming our faces around town rather that zooming our bodies around in our cars? And where will production and consumption occur as so many goods and services now get delivered to our doors? We may not have the answers, but they are the kinds of questions that we need to ask as part of a new type of design practice required in the post-pandemic world: a world that has never needed design more than it does now.
1. L. Gunderson, C.S. Holling. Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems (Washington D.C.: Island Press, 2002)
2. W. Steffen, W. Broadgate, L. Deutsch, O. Gaffney, C. Ludwig. “The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration” Anthropocene Review 2 (Stockholm: Stockholm Resilience Centre, 2015) p. 81–98
3. E. Kolbert. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Henry Holt, 2014)
4. M. Roser, H. Ritchie, E. Ortiz-Ospina. “World Population Growth,” Our World in Data. May 2019. https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth
5. World Health Organization, “Frequently Asked Questions on Ebola virus disease,” https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/ebola/frequently-asked-questions
6. Edith Lederer, “Crime Rates Plummet Around the World as the Coronavirus Keeps People Inside,” Time. April 11, 2020. https://time.com/5819507/crime-drop-coronavirus/
7. J. McMahon. “Study: Coronavirus Lockdown Likely Saved 77,000 Lives In China Just By Reducing Pollution. Forbes, March 16, 2020. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2020/03/16/coronavirus-lockdown-may-have-saved-77000-lives-in-china-just-from-pollution-reduction/#4dbc3eda34fe
