Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Pandemics change business-as-usual overnight. Governments mobilise huge resources to tackle the problem and compensate for its impacts. At the same time, people depend on the civil and public domains for advice, protection, health services and the whole infrastructure of response.
This is a lot clearer in a collective crisis like this one than if it were happening to one person but the essential issues are the same. There is the need for a new “package” of life routines and elements that is sustainable before mental and emotional turmoil will stabilise.
Large-scale and dramatic rearrangements of our current system worldwide and in the United States are likely to come in the wake of the season of death that is upon us—and in the wake of the economic carnage that results from the breakdown of a system so vulnerable that a tiny virus could topple it at its base.
An ecosocial modest proposal by cartoonist Miguel Brieva from the coronavirus pandemic. How about if we take advantage of such a complex and extraordinary situation to draw some valuable conclusions?
Facts about the COVID-19 pandemic and what you can do. Sources for more information.
For the next few weeks, many of us here in Ireland – and possibly where you are — will feel like we are in a permanent state of house arrest, working from home and looking after children kept home from school. Most of us are, rightly, staying away from crowds of people and making food at home, so most of us need to stock up on the basics durable foods that will keep over time – beans, lentils, rice, flour, salt, sugar and other staples.
We need to be thinking of ways to keep civic connections alive for the next while. The pandemic will not last indefinitely: the virus itself may be here for good, but one way or another it and humanity will negotiate some sort of biological accommodation… Our urgent task is to keep our communities healthy and resilient in the interim.
Oblivious to the risks, we have now built a globalized society that from the point of view of a coronavirus is a near perfect vehicle for the virus’ propagation. But that is only one part of the story. For when all the tightly coupled logistical and financial nodes of the global system start transmitting signals of distress and breakdown, this really threatens panic and ruin.
Fourteen years ago, as shortages in key commodities appeared and prices soared, I asked whether just-in-time was nearly out of time. If the corona virus spreads worldwide, we may all be asking that question soon.
I’ve talked more than once in these essays about the challenge of discussing the fall of civilizations when the current example is picking up speed right outside the window.
Just after Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, called the ebola outbreak "completely out of control," the government of Sierra Leone ordered its citizens to stay indoors for three days.
Americans are now receiving unsubtle messages from the universe that perhaps we have reached our limits, and it is time to stop trying to grow the economy.
