Let’s Not Go Back to Business as Usual After COVID-19
Let’s create a new normal, one that doesn’t value material possessions and wealth, over a community, personal relationships, and a bond with nature.
I live in Phuket, an island in Southern Thailand also called the Pearl of the Andaman, known for its raw beauty, sparkling waters, and raucous nightlife. You have probably heard of it and have maybe even visited.
The island received a lot of news coverage after the 2004 tsunami, which devastated the island and killed a lot of foreign tourists.
But, based on how overdeveloped Phuket has become in recent years, you would never have guessed how much damage was done. For better or worse, the island has rebuilt itself into a crowded tourist destination.
Although still beautiful, the Pearl has lost some of its luster, because of over development and pollution.
For the past few years, I have written a column called Sustainably Yours for the Phuket News, in which I try to solve local environmental problems.
Shortly after the pandemic broke out, I wrote an article titled “Reimagining Phuket,” in which I argue that this health crisis has given us an opportunity to reinvent the island into something better and that we shouldn’t just return to what was considered “normal.” I wrote, “..let’s not forget that normal meant constant construction, routine water shortages, and frequent electrical outages. Normal was the buzz of jet skis, the roar of motorbikes, and the thumping bass of club music. Normal was plastic-filled beaches and polluted klong waters seeping into the sea. Normal was congested highways, aggressive drivers, and a high death toll. So, let’s not go back to normal.”
As the world comes out of isolation and the virus goes from pandemic to endemic, I make the same plea to the rest of the world. Let’s not go back to “normal.” The reality is COVID-19 isn’t the heart of the problem, it is a symptom of an economic, social, and political system that has gone off the rails.
COVID-19
A single viral particle of COVID-19 is just 120 nanometers in diameter. By comparison, human hair is 80,000- 100,000 nanometers. This invisible, microscopic virus has broken our supply chains, brought our health care system to its knees, evaded the military, and made our governments impotent to stop it.
COVID-19 has been a worthy adversary, and it’s not a problem that we can bribe, capture, kill or negotiate our way out of. It has exposed the fragility of our modern world and highlighted our economic, social, political, and racial divides, and, in doing so, revealed our tribal natures.
We are at the top of the food chain, the smartest animals on the planet, with the ability to bend nature to our will. But all it took was a snippet of DNA 2000 base pairs long to bring the world economic system to a grinding halt.
It has infected hundreds of millions, killed several million, destroyed businesses, taken savings, and created a future of uncertainty, but everybody just wants things to go back to “normal,” but normal led to this.
What Normal Is
Normal is greed and apathy, creating an environmental crisis that led to this health crisis. Normal is multi-national corporations killing our planet to chasse quarterly profits, without considering the long-term consequences of what they were doing. Normal is 10% of the world, creating 50% of the carbon emissions and leaving the poorest people in the world to suffer. Normal is 1% of the world, taking 50% of the wealth and leaving 1 billion people to starve.
So, let’s not go back to normal because normal was the problem and it will eventually lead to our demise.
Societal Collapse by 2040
A 1972 MIT study that was recently reviewed by sustainability researcher Gaya Herrington predicted that, due to dwindling resources and a growing population, an economic and social collapse would likely come by 2040. Herington confirmed the findings of the study and that we are on the path toward collapse if we continue business as usual, saying that “pursuing continuous growth is not possible,” and sustainability is the answer.
More Pandemics
A recent study shows that as temperatures continue to increase, animals will flee the equator and move to higher altitudes or cooler climates. As they migrate, it will lead to increased contact between species that don’t normally mix. This will lead to the spread of cross-species viruses and as humans continue to encroach on habitats, the chances of a zoonotic transfer, just like the one that led to COVID-19, increases every year we continue to warm.
Another recent study published in Nature showed that even if all countries comply with their promises from the Paris Agreement, we only have a 50% chance of staying below 2C warming as it is. However, most countries are far from meeting these obligations. Another study showed that by 2026, we will start hitting the 1.5C tipping point.
1.5C vs 2C
The difference between 1.5C and 2.0 C may seem small, but the difference in consequences is magnitudes higher. For example, at 1.5C 8% of plant species will lose half their habitable area, it’s 2C 16%. At 1.5C 6% of insects will lose half their habitable area, at 2C it’s 18%. At 1.5C we will lose 70% of coral reefs at 2C degrees we lose 99%.
But why should you care about plants, insects, and coral reefs? In the fast-paced world we live in, what do they have to do with your life? You are just trying to put food on the table and take care of your family.
The reason plants, insects and coral reefs are relevant to your life is that they help to create biodiversity. Biodiversity creates resilience and stability in an ecosystem.
Insects pollinate plants and trees which allows them to propagate. In turn, they provide nourishment for the insects. Since 75% of our crops depend on pollinators to grow, a loss of insects could mean a substantial loss in food production.
This would lead to famine as we struggle increasingly to feed ourselves while ecosystems collapse. So, feeding your family will suddenly become much more difficult.
Coral reefs are just as important. Although they occupy less than 1% of the ocean floor, they are home to 25% of all marine life. Without them, the ocean becomes a very different place. The ocean removes 25% of the CO2 we emit, provides us with about 50% of the oxygen we breathe, and has absorbed 90% of the excess heat from climate change. If the oceans die, we die.
Ecosystem Collapse
However, losing biodiversity isn’t the only problem we are facing. The problem with our food system today isn’t that we don’t produce enough food to feed everyone. It just doesn’t get distributed equitably and 1 billion people are malnourished and half of that food is still thrown away. However, in the near future, not producing enough nutritious food will become a problem. The climatic changes will lead to droughts and the increased heat means we will produce fewer, less nutritious crops.
When you are struggling to feed yourself and your family, your priorities will change. Getting a promotion to buy a bigger house, a nicer car, and more clothes to impress the neighbors will seem less important.
The detractors say that moving away from fossil fuels will destroy the economy. But, this is nonsense. Our economy is based on two very fundamental things. Having an ecosystem from which to extract raw materials to make goods and having an infrastructure to transport and purchase goods. Without either of these two things, there is no economy and there are no jobs on a dead planet.
As the heat increases, so do droughts and fires, which will lead to poorer air quality and loss of habitat. The frequency and strength of hurricanes will rise as the surface water temperature gets hotter, leading to hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure damage. These things alone could collapse the economy, but will certainly impede progress.
The Value of Nature
A study from the World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) Living Planet Report in 2018 said that the services that nature provides us with such as clean air and water, carbon sequestration, food, medicines, protection from floods, erosion, and more, are worth approximately $125 trillion per year.
However, according to the Food and Land Use Coalition, our food system alone causes $12 trillion of damage per year, from loss of nature and poor health outcomes.
According to a report by the World Economic Forum, if businesses prioritized repairing nature, we could generate $10.1 trillion in annual revenue that would create 395 million jobs by the end of 2030. This would mean addressing the three industries that are responsible for 80% of habitat destruction. These are food, infrastructure, and energy.
It would mean transforming, what Economic Hitman author John Perkins, calls a death economy into a living economy. One that uses regenerative agriculture and aquaculture, that revitalizes the land and ocean, rather than pesticides, fertilizers, and commercial fishing that kill it. It means integrating nature within the sustainable design of our cities and buildings, rather than leaving it as an after-thought. It means replacing destructive and unstable fossil fuels with stable renewable energy.
If We Stop Burning, the Planet Will Cool
For a long time, there has been the belief that if we stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow, the planet would continue to heat for another 50 years, because of the long half-life of CO2. However, this was based on old simplistic models. Newer, more complex models suggest that this isn’t true.
According to climate scientist Michael E. Mann, if humans “stop emitting carbon right now… the oceans start to take up carbon more rapidly.” The actual lag effect between halting CO2 emissions and halting temperature rise is not 25 to 30 years, but according to Mann, “more like three to five years.”
Big Banks Continue to Invest in Fossil Fuels
However, scientists say that to stay below 1.5 degrees we need to hit peak oil by 2025 and start declining from there. But you wouldn’t know it by the way Big Banks and Big Oil are behaving. Between 2016 and 2020, they invested $3.8 trillion in new oil exploration. Stop to fathom how big a number that is for a second. If you were to earn $1 per second, it would take you 12 days to earn $1 million, 31 years to earn $1 billion, and 31,000 years to earn $1 trillion!
So, let’s do anything but go back to normal. We wouldn’t be able to anyway, because that world no longer exists. The world I am talking about is the naïve one that thought the party would go on forever and we could keep chasing after exponential growth on a finite planet with no consequences. COVID-19 is a wake-up call.
Let’s Create a New Normal
Let’s create a new normal, one that doesn’t value material possessions and wealth, over a community, personal relationships, and a bond with nature.
Let’s learn from indigenous groups and act as stewards of the environment, maintaining biodiversity and living in balance with it, rather than satiating our rapacious need for more stuff to fill the emptiness of our lives.
Let’s lobby our governments and divest from Big Oil and Big Banks to change the system and let’s create a sustainable form of capitalism that revitalizes the planet, provides everyone with their basic needs, and creates a future worth living in.
