Day #10 (3 April 2020)
When a Virus [temporarily] cleaned up the Earth !
I called up my mentor and professor, PVK, today morning, to discuss, you guessed it right, Covid19! These discussions, a regular nowadays, would itself fill quite some pages of my blog, though it deserves a much better deal!
He said “You know the last time I read my newspaper, sitting on the steps just outside my door, was in the late 1960’s. It’s been half a century. The reason why I have never been able to is the noise around!”. He added, “today, I could do that”. Noise, in the city, or anywhere for that matter, is mostly from the roads - the roar of the hundreds of engines and the diverse horns, all together; Gods – those loudspeakers from most of their abodes; and constructions - “development!”. The unlucky ones get to live nearer these places, and the ill-fated ones near massive noisy industries.
Now, it’s Silence! except for that occasional scooter or car, or a very rare truck, that runs on a special permit, for essential reasons! The abode of all the Gods have also totally switched off, and even closed doors, completely! SARS-CoV2, the novel corona virus, unleashed its Covid19 disease on almost all nations, triggering an unprecedented action from Governments and communities to lock down their towns, cities, country, industries, literally every economic activity, for weeks together.
The world is shut down! Noise is history, atleast for a short period!
While for the human species, it’s a nightmare, with such massive morbidity and deaths, and complete wrecking of the economic world; for the air, it’s a different story altogether. Pollution, all over the world has also come down dramatically.
For instance in Delhi, one of the worst of the polluted cities in the world, it was reported that on March 20, the PM2.5 value for air had an unhealthy 91 micro grams per cubic meter. In just one week that level fell to 26 micro grams per cubic meter. The Central Pollution Control Board also recorded a 71 percent decrease in nitrogen dioxide levels. Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata and Bangalore also recorded a drop in these air pollutants. (https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/31/asia/coronavirus-lockdown-impact-pollution-india-intl-hnk/index.html). There could not have been a better way of demonstrating that the pollution, the soot, the smog that we were suffering for years together, was nothing but human activity.
How does all this relate to the Covid19?
The same report details it. I quote “India has one of the highest rates of respiratory disease in the world, and the world's highest number of tuberculosis cases. Such widespread lung damage could potentially increase the risks associated with the corona virus.” In simple terms – We polluted our cities, we became a clinically vulnerable people, we kept getting all the warning, and yet, waited for that one Virus, a respiratory disease specialist, to come and do the kill. This is not an Indian story...it’s a global story.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that around 7 million people die every year from exposure to fine particles in polluted air. A recent study estimated that air pollution caused an extra 8.8 million premature deaths globally in 2015 alone, representing an average of a three-year shortening of life expectancy across the human population, and shortening lives on a scale greater than malaria, war and violence, HIV/AIDS, and smoking. (https://news.mongabay.com/2020/03/response-to-one-pandemic-covid-19-has-helped-ease-another-air-pollution/)
We either learn and vigorously adopt the necessary reforms, or wait for the worse to play out!
What needs to be done ? A few things for a start -
- No country, not even the badly affected ones should retract from meeting the Fossil-fuel free national commitments – ensure we are free of fossil fuels use in as many sectors as possible.
- Countries should commit to invest only in Cleaner future industries and development!
- We, as people, should keep the machines as shut down as possible, taking to walking, cycling, running, pooling, manual work, yes, all those things we always kept thinking, committing, declaring and effortlessly ignoring! The fossil fuel machines, including vehicles and even air travel, should be reserved for extreme essential uses only! This can be done by Govt itself leading the change.
- Shifting to non-polluting vehicles – electric, solar charged and so on.
- Revisiting industries with a zero-waste and de-growth policies that encourages people to adopt minimalism rather that consumerism and consumption. Across the chain, this will surely hit current economic paradigms, but will be good for the earth and hence life on earth.
- Slow down, slow down, slow down – that will help us realise that most of what we do in the name of development and growth were just false dreams, sick futures, and eventually collapse ! It will also help us realise some finer side of us, as people, families and community.
Eventually, it is about getting out of the treadmill, that we walked into, without as much of a choice, and couldn’t get out. Covid19 has just opened the door for us!
But the present situation comes with a huge risk. With such a massive collapse of the economic world, the natural course that the present system could do an over-compensation, as reports talk about. The Chinese are already expecting what could be “revenge pollution” which is that this kind of a very hyper-rebounding could not only wipe out whatever advantage we got in terms of a cleaner air, but could also dramatically deteriorate it as if in revenge.
The Climate change commitments, such as the development of country plans for 2050 that they are supposed to submit to the UN, stating actions on the Paris Agreement, could be delayed.
But change, in these times is a non-negotiable. And change cannot be brought about by the same characters that live and feed on this exploitative paradigm. Eventually one comes back to leaderships and that is where we get stuck! A classmate of mine, in one of the discussions in whatsapp, writes, “Next election would have been the perfect time for a dynamic visionary president to step in, shake things up in many areas including healthcare and education. While the pain is still fresh in the memory of the masses, willingness to go beyond ideologies and work together on practical solutions may be forced upon the elected reps. Unfortunately that is one prediction we can make with 100% accuracy- it is not happening ☹”
A lethal Virus ‘temporarily’ got us to clean up the Earth! Something that world leaders, conferences and summits could never do! It showed us that we need an infectious leader, one that aligns more with the earth; a bit less with us!
After word : Here is an excellent article from the BBC Future, which tells us clearly, where all this clean up could go, post-Covid! https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200326-covid-19-the-impact-of-coronavirus-on-the-environment
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