Hard to talk of anything but the subject du jour at the moment, isn’t it?
Each morning after waking, rubbing the sleep from my eyes, a tense feeling mixed with helplessness comes over me in those seconds before I connect once more to the world.
What new horrors await me today?
Apart from in China and a few other Asian countries, this whole shitshow is going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.
The long run has never seemed so far away.
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I feel so sad for all those people around the world who—as we speak—are arriving at overloaded hospitals. Some of them with triage: we’ll try to save you, but not that guy over there. Italy looms in my head like a nightmare on steroids. America is about to live its most traumatic event since 9-11, with a president so incredibly incapable of rising to the challenge—let alone understanding the challenge—that I have literally no hope. I’m so sad for the (mostly) old people about to go through the flipside of the American dream, maybe not coming out the other side. I’m beyond sad for the valiant medical staff on the frontline in Italy, France, Spain, America, everywhere, doing their best, risking their lives. For what they are going through and will go through in the days and weeks that follow, I can only weep.
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More well-informed people than me seem to be worried that the whole financial system could topple. The rush to the “safety” of US dollars (ironically, the currency of the rich country coming dead last in its response) is causing all kinds of unintended bad shit to bubble up behind the scenes.
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If this whole sorry mess does “blow over”, I’m under no illusion that we’ll massively change our destructive relationship with the Earth. There will be lots of ramping up, job renewal, coal spewing, oil burning, share buying, financial trickery. And the insidious return of getting money that doesn’t actually exist to spin faster and faster once more, bringing with it that soothing illusion of prosperity we (in the “rich” world) know so well.
Then again, I can’t imagine that everything is going to be the same as before, either. Everyone with an environmental bone in their body will be calling out to bring back a better world, somehow. A world with less air pollution, cleaner water, forests without bulldozers, birds singing, insects humming.
It’d be nice, right?
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In any case, the Earth is already grinning like fuck.
In abandoned Venice, the water is not being churned up any more, and fish can be seen again (they were already there but living in the murk). It’s crystal clear!
Dolphins swim in semi-abandoned Italians ports.
Nitrogen dioxide levels drop off a Chinese cliff:
Air quality improves world-wide.
How many deaths will this prevent? More than coronavirus causes?
It’ll be fascinating to look back on this a year from now, if we get there!
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In other good-ish news, my copy of Wilding has arrived.
I’ll not be ordering another book online for the moment because somewhere out there, it means some poor sod in a warehouse has to go to work, put it in a package, send it off, and someone in the post office has to go to work—risking infection—to deliver it.
I want to be the least responsible as possible for putting people at risk for non-essential reasons at the moment.
Good luck to you all out there.
Bye for now.