I wrote this in April 2020 while under lock down in Central Illinois.
I didn’t expect it to be a pandemic. I actively avoided reading Preston’s “The Hot Zone” in graduate school in the 1990s, thinking I had enough worries in my life contemplating climate change and a mass extinction. I did, however, expect something, sometime. Something, big. Something, transformative. But when? How?
It changes you, walking around for decades expecting something sesmic and not having it happen, or having events happen but them not being earth shattering enough. Too big to fail, too big to return, too big to ignore. You start to think it’s just you. Yes, the graphs and data suggest something quite alarming but business seems to be proceeding as usual. But you cannot shake the feeling that it will all catch up with us sooner or later… somehow. That we were living on borrowed time.
Hurricane Katrina. Hurricane Sandy. Droughts and fires in the Western US. The Amazon burning. Each time I would wonder. Big enough? School climate strike. Children in the streets. But climate change turns out to be a slow burn, ratcheting up of extreme events, large regional impacts but never everyone affected, all at once. Something that no one can turn away from. No one. Anywhere. Business as usual turned on its head? It took a tiny wrapped up piece of RNA to do that.
Virologists don’t even agree on whether to call SARS-COV-2 a living thing. The novel corona virus. The virus that causes the respiratory disease, Covid-19. The weird part is the part of me that feels prepared or that feels that indeed here it is the long-anticipated second shoe dropping from the sky and hitting us on our collective head. The sky is indeed falling, chicken little.
I can’t say I was prepared for any of the specifics; I did think the specifics would be environmental. Perhaps that’s the biases our disciplines create: worrying about one catastrophe not another. But I was oddly prepared for the magnitude of the shift. The degree to which everything we’ve been doing doesn’t work right. That part some part of me has known was coming. That same part of me is also whispering to me now “tell them we can’t go back, tell them, we need to build a new something. Tell them this was inevitable.”
Not the deaths. Oh God no. Of that magnitude. 707,000 globally. 160,000 in my home country alone as of August 2020 (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries). No; that could have been prevented with better leaders and better public policies. But a change this big. It had to happen. I’ve been telling my students for a decade that environmental sustainability is not a lifestyle choice. We don’t get to decide whether we change our systems to be sustainable. Either we do it with planning and foresight. Or it gets done for us. The hard way. Whether it’s pandemics or climate change, I will always choose planning and foresight.
Even when we plan it is always the most at risk, the underprivileged who pay the price. But at least planning can give them a seat at the table. I’ve seen how high the price is when we learn the hard way. So much was broken in what Mary Heglar calls the “Great Before” https://www.inverse.com/culture/58632-mary-annaise-heglar. How much of it will we fix as we move forward? I hope a lot. I hope we look at each piece of broken whatever and debate its value. If your house burns to the ground, you don’t have to rebuild it to be the same. You might not even build it in the same place. Droughts and fires being what they are where you live. You might think. What do we really want and how do we get it?
Things I know I want. The health of those I love, the brilliance of those who understand complex systems and can help us model different future scenarios, the comfort of a hug from a friend, the beauty of spring, birds, pets, black licorice. And lots and lots of bugs and wild plants.
What things make your list?
I also want the outdoors to be everyone’s. Not a white space as Dr. Carolyn Finney has deemed it in her groundbreaking book (https://www.carolynfinney.com/work). I want every kid who picks up a bug and squeals with delight, to be able to follow that curiosity to its logical conclusion.
Biology nerd for life and getting paid to be it. How do we crack open conservation and let the light in?
Amy McEuen 