Generational Change: How Coronavirus will dictate (in)action on climate change
The terrorist attacks on 9/11 defined my generation. A point in time when the world literally came crashing down, bringing with it any presumptions of safety and security. The subsequent decades show the dramatic effects of that day on the American and global psyche, not to mention the impact, large or small, on billions of lives.
Almost twenty years later, COVID-19 and climate change will have an even larger impact on this generation. Yet, the collective memory will not focus on one morning but on a series of mornings. The same mornings. Not the insecurity of an instant but rather the insecurity over a collection of instances. Of hardship, sickness, boredom, anger, and fear spread out over weeks and months (and years?).
This may seem more obvious for fighting a pandemic, so how does climate change fit in? Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe I am hoping that it will. Yet, it does seem to fit as a collection of instances, not discrete points in time.
Barring a truly global natural disaster that is causally linked from anthropogenic carbon emissions, there will be no smoking tower (if you can excuse a turn of phrase). Instead, smog-filled skies will continue to loom, closing oppressively inward year by year.
Yet, out of a pandemic, there is hope. The call for collective collective action is omnipresent in the current crisis. Why not just collective action? Because true change requires not just groups to act but a group of these groups. Answering the call to action requires more than just the power of individual citizens, companies, or governments. It necessitates a response from a collection of societies.
This gives hope that transcendent action will define this generation. Action that will rise above nationality, class, or location. If there can be one bright spot on the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, it is this hope. A hope that the power exhibited now to overcome a common threat to humanity can drive us to tackle the next, much larger threat.
Just as one-off individual acts of handwashing or social distancing will not effectively blunt the impact of a virus, individual instances of veganism or composting will not counter the effects of climate change.
Meehan Crist, in a recent Sunday Review piece for the New York Times, hits this point home when examining the impact of coronavirus on climate change: “If anything, the short-term positive effects on the climate that we’re seeing today serve as a dramatic reminder that changing personal consumption habits will mean very little going forward if we also fail to decarbonize the global economy.”
Fighting climate change effectively requires systemic change. This is not new or revelatory. What is different now than looking at this problem say 50 years ago is the precedent that COVID-19 is setting for global systemic change. A pandemic pits humanity against a common enemy (despite all the flaws of that framing).
But the question remains once we successfully move past the coronavirus, which we will, can we continue along a path of collective action or will we only learn from the inaction?
