What good is a crisis?
No crisis is ever good.
But can any good come of this one?
Recent Nasa data recorded since the start of the outbreak, shows that pollution in China is reducing at record levels.
There are signs everywhere that this crisis has the power to create positive interventions in global culture.
Aviation.
Predictions suggest that the airline industry will be irrevocably changed. Experts agree that we could be left with as few as 30 airlines, resulting in a radically reduced number of annual flights and rapidly diminishing the industry’s carbon cost to the planet.
Daily commuting.
One of the biggest contributors to daily emissions.
But as virtual working takes hold, it’s hard to see the pendulum ever swinging back to the legacy thinking of a five-day automated commute.
Social bonding.
Countless stories abound of people reaching out into their communities and offering help, as a ‘radical niceness’ sweeps the globe.
It seems the moment we’re threatened with social isolation, is the very time we seek to re-build valuable social bonds with those around us.
Health support.
In recent weeks, public support for a healthy and well supported national health system has skyrocketed.
Enlightened self-interest perhaps. But unarguable recognition that there is nothing more essential to a well-run, high functioning society.
One people, one planet.
And maybe just maybe, we’ll come to conclude, that nations were wrong to believe that they could ever thrive by turning their backs on a connected world. If this crisis proves anything, it shows that we are one people, living on one planet. America can’t be made great by shutting the door to the outside. China can’t progress as an island state. We’re in this together, whether we like it or not.
Everywhere we look, the crisis is necessitating interventions on a scale not seen before.
We’re witnessing fractures in the space-time continuum of 21st-century life.
Is now the time to embrace those interventions and change the way we live? For the long term, not just the crisis.
