“The coronavirus is about dying tomorrow. And with the climate crisis, we’re talking about my grandchildren dying.”
~ David Attenborough
“Some people say that now is not the time to be talking about the climate emergency because people are feeling anxious, afraid and overwhelmed, and that you and I should desist from dating until the COVID-19 crisis is over. I suspect that those saying this never took the climate and biodiversity emergencies seriously in the first place, and they don’t understand that just as the causes of our troubles are linked, our solutions must also be linked. So let’s build a better world together. Let’s get married. Can we discuss this on Zoom tomorrow morning?”
~ Guy Dauncey
→ The Practical Utopian – 7 April 2020:
When Climate Met COVID
“1. There’s a double-whammy coming: We’ve got to work together. 2. You warm my heart. 3. We share a dislike of market selfishness and greed.”
CLIPPINGS FROM THE NEWSSTREAM
“This crisis reveals how fragile our current way of life has become. Returning to business as usual is a fantasy. Policy makers and business leaders must recognize that climate change will be even more disruptive than the coronavirus.”
~ Professor Jem Bendell
“While the fight against the pandemic is largely about saving our old people, the fight against climate change is primarily about saving the lives of our children and grandchildren. To meet that challenge requires the spirit of national unity, of collective action for the community in defense of important values that prevail at the moment …”
~ Jørgen Steen Nielsen, Danish journalist, Information
“In the COVID-19 story, the problem that grows exponentially is the number of cases of infection. The ability to cope depends upon the number of healthcare workers, hospital beds, masks, and ventilators.
But, substitute another problem into the scaffolding of the story – say, the exponential increase in greenhouse gas emissions – and focus on other abilities to cope, like the ability to withstand sea level rise, stronger storms, floods, fires, droughts, and heatwaves, and you have another story with different specifics but a similar pattern.”
~ Elizabeth Sawin
“Whatever you might be thinking about the long-term impacts of the coronavirus epidemic, you’re probably not thinking big enough.”
“The Covid-19 disaster represents an opportunity for the human race—one in which each one of us has a meaningful part to play. We are all inside the crucible right now, and the choices we make over the weeks and months to come will, collectively, determine the shape and defining characteristics of the next era. However big we’re thinking about the future effects of this pandemic, we can think bigger. As has been said in other settings, but never more to the point: “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste”.”
~ Jeremy Lent, author
→ Patterns of Meaning – 2 April 2020:
Coronavirus Spells the End of the Neoliberal Era. What’s Next?
“Coronavirus is a political crucible, melting down and reshaping current norms. Will the new era be a “Fortress Earth” or a harbinger of a transformed society based on a new set of values?”
“The novelist on how coronavirus threatens India — and what the country, and the world, should do next”
A renewed appreciation of social solidarity
“If our society can act, finally, to manufacture a million ventilators and a billion protective masks, surely we can within a few years act on a far grander scale to erect, say, a million wind turbines, insulate and solarize a hundred million buildings, carve ribbons of bicycle paths throughout our cities and suburbs, and so on.
With the pandemic enforcing a brutal but necessary reset, the NIMBYism that has impeded this kind of progress practically everywhere might be swept into the dustbin for good.
Most hearteningly, the crisis is instilling a renewed appreciation of social solidarity. The more we are forced to quarantine and isolate, paradoxically, the more we become cognizant of the need for mutuality and social relations and social conscience.”
What does solidarity have to do with climate? Everything.
My well-being depends on your not being sick. My ability to be fed depends on your ability to grow and transport and distribute food. My life is now literally in your hands, as you make decisions whether to restrain your activity in the public sphere, keep your distance, self-quarantine.
If we so fully need each other, how can I abide your not having affordable health care? In this moment when the precarity of half or more of American households is laid bare, how can I abide a government that places the well-being of billionaires — whose wealth each week generates more money than many of us earn in a lifetime — above that of the 90 percent of Americans who make less than $100,000 a year?
Worldwide, the wealthiest 5 percent of households collectively burn more carbon than the entire bottom half.“
~ Charles Komanoff and Christopher Ketcham
→ The Intercept – 4 April 2020:
What the Coronavirus Pandemic Can Teach Us About the Climate Emergency
“Greta Thunberg couldn’t do it. Bill McKibben and 350.org couldn’t do it, and neither could the Paris climate accord. But Covid-19 is cutting human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as travel and other economic activity in much of the world slow or halt altogether.”
~ Anuja Sawant | 22 March 2020
→ Washington Post – 15 April 2020:
Climate change affects everything — even the coronavirus
“Is the coronavirus pandemic connected to climate change? The more accurate answer is: of course. Climate change is frequently described as a threat multiplier, something that exacerbates existing problems and creates new ones. No aspect of life on this planet has been untouched by climate change — viruses included.”
→ Resilience – 13 April 2020:
This Is A Drill
“COVID-19 and climate breakdown are interconnected crises. They are the unintended consequences of a 500-year history of territorial expansion, conquest, resource extraction and industrial growth as a by-word for progress that has seen carbon pumped into the earth’s atmosphere at a rate that carbon sinks, compromised by industrial-scale deforestation, can’t contain.”
→ The Fifth Estate – 9 April 2020:
COVID-19’s extraordinary opportunities are on offer
“With the economy reeling from weeks, potentially months, of restrictions, a focus on creating jobs and rebuilding society will be critical as Australia begins planning for post-pandemic recovery. This presents an opportunity to combine job creation and economic stimulus efforts with action on climate change. Many climate solutions such as renewable energy, green buildings and sustainable transport are off-the-shelf, mature technologies ready to be deployed at scale.”
→ Sydney Morning Herald – 4 April 2020:
Coronavirus presents us with terrible climate risk – and opportunity
“For the climate this is the time of greatest risk but also of greatest opportunity. Should governments spend wisely they can decarbonise their economies even more quickly than they had expected to. The flipside is that if they don’t, it is a double negative.”
→ The Guardian – 1 April 2020:
Will the coronavirus kill the oil industry and help save the climate?
“Analysts say the coronavirus and a savage price war means the oil and gas sector will never be the same again.”
→ The Guardian – 31 March 2020:
‘We can’t go back to normal’ / How will coronavirus change the world?
“The long read: Times of upheaval are always times of radical change. Some believe the pandemic is a once-in-a-generation chance to remake society and build a better future. Others fear it may only make existing injustices worse.”
→ Fibershed – 31 March 2020:
Disease as a Driver For Change: Reflections Through the Lens of Ecology
“Natural systems provide us the road-map for making sense of these confusing and befuddling times; they support us in seeing what is important to do right now and what our next steps could look like. Sheltering in place and social distancing is distilled as a critical form of collective intelligence. Ecosystems are a model for economic restructuring, the future is beautiful and bright if we shape it into being: we invite you to join us in co-creating a resilient, regionalized material culture.”
→ The Conversation – 31 March 2020:
Coronavirus is a wake-up call: our war with the environment is leading to pandemics
“They might sound unrelated, but the COVID-19 crisis and the climate and biodiversity crises are deeply connected. Each arises from our seeming unwillingness to respect the interdependence between ourselves, other animal species and the natural world more generally.”
→ The Guardian – 28 March 2020:
Tackle climate crisis and poverty with zeal of Covid-19 fight, scientists urge
“Actions taken to suppress coronavirus reveal what measures are possible in an emergency, say experts.”
→ The Guardian – 25 March 2020:
Covid-19 is nature’s wake-up call to complacent civilisation
“A bubble has finally been burst – but will we now attend to the other threats facing humanity?”
→ Wired – 25 March 2020:
The Analogy Between Covid-19 and Climate Change Is Eerily Precise
“First deny the problem, then say the solution is too expensive? The playbook here is all too familiar.”
→ Presencing Institute / Medium – 17 March 2020:
Eight Emerging Lessons: From Coronavirus to Climate Action
“The Coronavirus Disruption is a Harbinger of Things to Come”
. . .
“Fully grasping our climate emergency is understanding that the train wreck is imminent. We know we can slow it down and make it less bad than it already is; but will we be able to?
Fully understanding the coronavirus (let me premise this by saying that no one does fully understand it) is knowing the train wreck is already here. Time has been compressed; we have no more time. We must go into triage mode to make it less bad than it will certainly be, if we do nothing or continue business as usual.
But before we can do this, take some time for you. Let yourself feel the weight and gravity of the situation and then remind yourself we can and will recover.”
~ Harriet Shugarman
There are a lot of links that can be made between coronavirus and climate change. In this article, Harriet Shugarman writes that the two are “eerily similar.” It’s very important to tell the truth about both while also remembering that people do not generally have the mental bandwidth to deal with more than one life-threatening crisis at a time:
→ Below2c – 28 March 2020:
Speaking The Truth About Coronavirus And Climate Change With Kids
→ Job One for Humanity – 26 March 2020:
How Pandemics Like Coronavirus (Covid19) Are Caused or Exacerbated by the Hidden Global Warming Emergency
. . .
“Is the COVID-19 crisis the wake-up call we’ve been waiting for? It’s an opportunity to reflect on the fragility of our way of life — our interconnectedness and interdependence — and how we are mutually reliant on each other. It brings out the best in us as individuals. I’m also seeing some encouraging signs from the corporate world as companies are stepping up to do their part in managing the coronavirus pandemic. But not the oil giants…”
~ Anders Wijkman, The Greed of the Oil Giants Is a Total Betrayal of the Future
. . .
Use what we have learned
Philip Sutton, one of the founders of the climate emergency declaration movement, writes:
“I think the current covid-19 emergency response provides a great deal useful experience for everyone of an emergency that is having massive implications for the management of the whole economy.
Each broad type of emergency has unique characteristics that mean that the emergency response needs to be tailored to those specific needs. But there will be some common aspects and general lessons. How to work out what is relevant in the climate situation? I think the answer is to become familiar with the economic management issues that arise in more than one emergency type.
I think it would be very useful for more climate emergency activists to become familiar with both the covid-19 economic emergency issues and those that applied in the two world wars and the special characteristics of the economic transformations need to restore a safe climate at emergency speed.
It might be useful to have an overall sequence for dealing with this learning process. My current feeling is that we could go through a five phase process:
- Phase 1:
Those of us who have some knowledge of the WW2/WW1 economic mobilisations urgently contribute ideas to our communities that might assist the effective response to the covid-19 emergency. The purpose of doing this is to help cut the death toll and social impact of the covid-19 emergency.
- Phase 2:
People interested in working out how to effectively mobilise the economy to restore a safe climate at emergency speed deepen their reading on the WW2 and WW1 economic mobilisation case studies. (This historical study will have much more saliency now as we simultaneously live through the covid-19 emergency.)
- Phase 3:
Behind the scenes, we study the corona virus response to see what we can learn that can improve the effectiveness of the climate response.
- Phase 4:
When the time is right, climate activists start to mobilise influence to try to shape the stimulus packages that are being put in place to stop the economy going into free fall and to eventually bring the economy back to health.
- Phase 5:
We use what we have learned from the virus emergency and our historical reading on the WW2 and WW1 economic mobilisations to help us with what needs to be done for the emergency speed restoration of a safe climate – bearing in mind that the climate-driven economic mobilisation will have its own unique characteristics.
What do you reckon?”
Building an environmental awareness and an activist community online
Introducing UNSW Environment Collective’s Post Corona Dream Discussion Blog
“We are in new and thought-provoking times. It is easy to get swamped by the bad news, however among the bad news there is potential for global systems change. As such, the UNSW Environment Collective is launching a blog to gather together these ideas and make sure the climate crisis doesn’t get forgotten in this public health emergency.
The blog will propose solutions to COVID-19 and the climate crisis. It will discuss systemic issues that both fuel the climate crisis and impede the response to COVID-19. It will explore how COVID-19 gives us insight into how we can make a more accessible world. Lastly, it will hopefully provide fun activities and talking points to keep you stimulated in this period of social isolation.”
→ Vision 1: Investment into publicly owned renewable energy
→ www.unswenvironmentcollective.wordpress.com
Building of a new world
Corona-induced rethinking and recalibration of our culture
“Today’s emerging pandemic could help catalyze an urgently needed tipping event in humanity’s collective moral values, priorities and sense of self and community. It could remind us of our common fate on a small, crowded planet with dwindling resources and fraying natural systems.”
~ Thomas Homer-Dixon
“For the first time in human history, we need to develop systems that protect, shelter, insure, safeguard, nourish, and tend to all of us. All of us. We really are in it together. In a way that we are still learning about. That is the strange and beautiful gift in the terrible curse of existence. It’s painful. It’s hell. Just being here. We love, age, grow, lose, grieve. But when we get through it, together, then there’s grace, intimacy, revelation, meaning, understanding, closeness.”
~ Umair Haque
‘The age of disconnection is over’
“Over this period numerous people decided to just get on with it, without waiting for government. In both bushfire response and the tremendous mutual aid response to Covid-19, millions of us are setting up local projects, or joining existing ones, that make life better, generate social cohesion, reduce our footprint, and cultivate an ethic of care – for ourselves, for each other, for the natural world we are part of.
If enough of us start doing this in our communities, and if enough submissions to the EPBC inquiry [the statutory review of the Australian Commonwealth’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act] call for reforms that are embedded in ecological thinking, we will be putting a whole lot of small chocks under the lever. Each of those chocks is tiny. But together they can tip the balance. All of a sudden, especially at a moment like this, change will come.”
~ Tim Hollo, executive director of the Green Institute
Covid-19 is showing us that when humanity is united in common cause, phenomenally rapid change is possible. None of the world’s problems are technically difficult to solve; they originate in human disagreement. In coherency, humanity’s creative powers are boundless. A few months ago, a proposal to halt commercial air travel would have seemed preposterous. Likewise for the radical changes we are making in our social behavior, economy, and the role of government in our lives. Covid demonstrates the power of our collective will when we agree on what is important. What else might we achieve, in coherency? What do we want to achieve, and what world shall we create? That is always the next question when anyone awakens to their power.
~ Charles Eisenstein, ‘The Coronation’
→ The Guardian – 28 March 2020:
With the climate crisis and coronavirus bearing down on us, the age of disconnection is over
“We can no longer pretend that we’re separate from each other and from the natural world”
→ The Correspondent – 1 April 2020:
We aren’t just stopping coronavirus. We’re building a new world
“We must pressure our leaders to take the long view in any coronavirus economic recovery package, even if this feels like a short-term emergency.”
“For me, one of the most dramatic effects of humanity’s COVID-19-induced slowdown has been nature’s rapid response; clean air over China, fish in the canals of Venice and the sighting of a raptor in my Vancouver backyard. In this disaster lies an opportunity to reflect and change direction in the hope that if we do, nature will be far more generous than we deserve.”
~ David Suzuki
→ CBC – 27 March 2020:
The COVID-19 pandemic may be an opportunity to transform the way we live
“The challenge is learning to see our place in the world differently so we can make changes in our behaviour.” By David Suzuki
Selfishness and greed decreases your chance of survival
“The world is going to look different in a few months. We’ll be better able to spot the helpers among the opportunists and cowards — crisis tends to make that distinction clear. And we’ll be forced to ask ourselves hard questions about our own generosity and empathy.
The most fundamental shift is that we’ve each had to negotiate balancing individualism (hoarding toilet paper) with the collective good (flattening the curve through social distancing, checking on neighbors). We’re recognizing, in real time, that we must change our lives and habits, to increase our chances of survival and that of others.”
“This ordeal can move us toward a profound understanding of how shared sacrifice can save humanity, other species, and our planet. Now at last, we might fight off our scrolling addictions, learn to value nature and relationships, praise the helpers of our society.”
~ Megan Mayhew Bergman
“Part of the human journey is — right now, at this very moment — about growing up. Becoming a mature species. One capable of acting a little bit more responsibly, with more grace, generosity, goodness, decency, courage, truth, beauty, when it comes not just to the planet, the future, democracy, civilization, but also each other and ourselves. See how the Italians sing to each other in this time of crisis?”
~ Umair Haque
Rediscovering the value of community and public good
“While panic buying captured the headlines, a quieter surge of self-organised kindness has welled up from all quarters. Fast-moving, adaptive, and suddenly everywhere: people are working out how we build community when we’re not even allowed to see or touch each other. Some of it is digital—like the thousandfold mutual aid groups that have come to life on social media, or the people curating trusted sources of information amidst the panicky blizzard. Some of it is analogue—like the trailer with some eskies in it just up our laneway, where neighbours are now leaving surplus fresh produce for each other to take and swap.”
“The way we get through this is by rediscovering the value of community, of the public good, and of collective wellbeing. We get through it by looking out for each other, and by getting organised. (…) In a crisis, things that seemed impossible suddenly become imaginable, and then they become achievable.”
~ Scott Ludlam
Fill the leadership void, develop as people
“Our supposed leaders have driven us to the edge of a public health and global economic abyss…and left us there. We can’t count on them to protect us. So, we must protect ourselves. We must do so by cooperating when leaders have failed to.
We must fill the leadership and systemic voids that the crisis has exposed. This is a moment of decision for all of us. Will we hunker down, hoard, heap blame on the blameless, stay mesmerized by the media, spread fear, devolve in our isolation, and turn away from others? Or will we rise to the occasion, fill the leadership void, share solutions, develop as people, and find our purpose in helping each other?” (…)
“Countless thousands are rising to the occasion. A large and rapidly growing wave of prosocial behavior, resource sharing, and mutual aid is sweeping the globe. A growing number of people are defining this moment through their warmth, bravery, diligence, generosity, and creativity.”
~ Neal Gorenflo, executive director and co-founder of Shareable
“The US feels that it knows better, it always feels it knows better and it wants to tell the rest of the world what to do. But that’s been a costly error in this pandemic. Not being able to tool up with widespread and systematic testing, that was a massive mistake.”
~ Dr Gary Slutkin, American epidemiologist and former World Health Organisation official
Climate Shock
“Coronavirus is the first of the Great Shocks — just the first. It should be a warning. A wake-up call. A much needed alarm bell to rouse us from the slumber of a quiescent industrial-capitalist civilization in decline, utterly unprepared for this new century.
Because there are many, many more shocks to come. Bigger, harder, faster. Shock: a sudden, ruinous, catastrophic change. In economic terms, to supply or demand, to prices, to resources and their availability. In simpler terms, to life as we know it. One chapter of human history — the predatory age — is now coming to an end, one titanic shock at a time.
The next one on the way, of course, is Climate Shock. Like Coronavirus, it won’t be just one shock. Coronavirus, like any good shock, will echo and resonate, reverberate and ripple — it will subside, and then return, ebb and flow. The same is true of climate change. It will be felt in increasing levels of calamity. Do you even remember, at this grim juncture, that just a few weeks ago, Australia burned with megafires? And a few weeks before that, the Amazon did? Those are little warnings of what climate change is to bring.
By the end of this decade or so, the megafires and megafloods will begin to rage out of control. The world’s great cities will find themselves at the mercy of rising tides. The seasons will change. Stability as we know it, which has been based on climactic certainty, will fall apart with it. Today, the world is locked down at home because of a virus. What happens when the megafires ravage a whole continent — and this time, they don’t burn themselves out? What happens when half a continent is flooded — every summer, so the waters don’t ever really recede? Here we are, today, sitting comfortably at home, even in our anxiety. Tomorrow, many of us won’t have homes to return to. Or the jobs, work, lives, families that go with them.
Climate Shock intensifying is going to look like this. This year’s fires and floods are discontinuously — unimaginably, unthinkably, impossibly — worse than the last. They last longer and spread wider and burn hotter and flow faster. Think of it as a plane crash. Turbulence, and then…freefall.”
~ Umair Haque, The Age of Shock – (Why) Coronavirus Should be a Wake-Up Call About How Our Civilization Ends
More than at any time since 1941, we need leadership
“For the best part of 40 years a language that might have helped us through this catastrophic moment of our history was derided, then lost, and finally forgotten. Us, we, kindness, compassion, truth, community, sharing. It’s time we got these basic words back and with them the truths that underlie them: that we live together but we will, if we allow this virus to succeed, die alone. It’s time the prime minister spoke simply, directly, truthfully. Time to tell us what he doesn’t know and what he does. Time he stopped threatening us for our bad behaviour, time he told us what the plan was and where we are going. Because we are lost and today, more than ever, we need to know. We need leadership and for the foreseeable future we have only Scott Morrison to deliver it. But deliver it he must, and stop the evasion, the aggression, the bumbling. Tell us the truth, tell us the plan and keep us informed. That would be a start.
Remind us not of the few Australians who err but of the many millions of Australians who over the coming weeks will put their lives on the line for us all. The million-plus doctors, nurses and orderlies, the hundreds of thousands in food retail, to name only some, some of whom, we know already, will most certainly die.
The prime minister needs to invite people to help one another, not punish them for being human. He needs to show humility in the face of the crisis, not anger. He needs to understand that it is us and only us who can save ourselves, and that we are not boats to be turned back, but people to be invited in.”
“Honesty and truth, inclusion and respect – how much these would do to help ease the fear and growing despair gripping so many Australians. But none of these things seem to have ever been in Morrison’s nature. The fault is far from his alone: he rose to the top in a system that rewarded the most conspiratorial, where those most brazen with public acts of threat and punishment would be rewarded and celebrated, where the language was always about evasion of truth and avoidance of responsibility.
And at his press conference on Tuesday night he looked a drowning man, panicked, unsure, angry – an ordinary man who finds himself in the most extraordinary circumstances for which his whole history has been unable to prepare him.”
~ Richard Flanagan
“As the global pandemic deepens, it’s not just the virus itself that threatens human life. The corruption, cronyism, and incompetence of those in power is adding fuel to the fire.”
~ Betsy Reed, Editor-in-Chief of The Intercept, USA
Returning to “normal” means continuing to careen toward climate catastrophe
“Like my cancer — like COVID-19 — the longer we ignore this, the worse it gets.
If we listen to experts, we can see disaster looming. We know that the sooner we act, the smaller our losses. Yet the lure of wanting things to return to normal after the pandemic is strong. We must remember that “normal” means continuing to careen toward climate catastrophe. If such normality is reestablished, it will not last.
Calling something “unsustainable” doesn’t mean it will make polar bears cry or Greta Thunberg scowl; it means it cannot — and so will not — be sustained. Life will not just go on as before.
We either radically alter our priorities, putting the needs of the many before the desires of the few — with the disruption to our dominant stories and systems this requires — or we will increasingly find ourselves plunging into the even more radical consequences of altering the basic parameters of planetary life, rendering Earth unrecognisable and increasingly uninhabitable.”
~ Dr Byron Smith
“We who are adults need to be exactly that: adults. Not spread panic or rumours. No one is alone in this crisis, but each person has a heavy responsibility.“
~ Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven – in a televised address to the nation
“I urge all Australians to keep calm, keep informed and keep connected.“
~ Professor Paul Kelly, Australian Government Deputy Chief Medical Officer
We hear statements such as these said about the corona crisis. Let’s save them and remember them, because the issues are exactly the same when we talk about the climate crisis.
Related articles and resources
→ Financial Times – 4 April 2020:
Arundhati Roy: ‘The pandemic is a portal’
“The novelist on how coronavirus threatens India — and what the country, and the world, should do next”
→ ABC News – 3 April 2020:
What cancer, coronavirus and climate change have in common
“Like my cancer — like COVID-19 — the longer we ignore climate change, the worse it gets.” By Byron Smith
→ Resilience – 2 April 2020:
Covid-19 sucks but it could teach us how to avoid the worst consequences of climate change
“Four things we can learn from the response to COVID-19 that are critical for climate change resilience.”
→ Bloomberg – 28 March 2020:
Professor Sees Climate Mayhem Lurking Behind Covid-19 Outbreak
“Virus ‘feels like dress rehearsal’ for global warming, says professor Jem Bendell, author of the controversial report, ‘Deep Adaptation’.”
→ Shareable – 26 March 2020:
The coronavirus pandemic calls us to share more than ever, here are 10 ways to get started
“World leaders have failed to protect us from the coronavirus. They had a chance to contain it. But through delay, misinformation, denial, and unpreparedness, they have unleashed it on the world.”
→ The Telegraph – 22 March 2020:
David Attenborough: why at 93 I’m only ‘mildly worried’ about coronavirus
“The broadcaster on how reports of his death have been greatly exaggerated and the need to keep a sense of proportion over Covid-19”
→ Forge | Medium – 21 March 2020:
We’ll Be Different On the Other Side
“How is Coronavirus changing our generation?”
→ Medium – 20 March 2020:
The Upsides of a Global Pandemic
“Five Ways Coronavirus is Finally Forcing Us to Make the (Radical) Socioeconomic Transformations We Should Have Made Long Ago” By Umair Haque
→ Shareable – 18 March 2020:
Coronavirus catalyzes growing wave of grassroots action despite social distancing
“There is a groundswell of grassroots action in towns and cities across the U.S. and world. Although often hidden beneath the surface, these grassroots responses are growing rapidly in scope and scale. They are often formed spontaneously by individuals and groups who recognize the immediate needs of those around them and choose to act.”
→ Peter Gardner – 18 March 2020:
The Coronavirus and Climate Change Emergencies
“The advice from various experts on tackling the coronavirus has been “go early and go hard”. With the climate emergency the first option has been lost so we must double down on the second. The global response to the coronavirus shows, and continues to show, that this can be done.”
→ Globe and Mail – 5 March 2020:
Coronavirus will change the world. It might also lead to a better future
“This global health crisis is revealing critical vulnerabilities in humanity’s planet-spanning economic, social and technological systems. This larger picture is mostly painted in dark hues, but there are also some surprising silver linings around the coronavirus clouds swirling on our horizon.”