What has COVID-19 Pandemic taught Us about Environment and Global Inequalities (1)

As the Pandemic COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc and take hold in the world with over 5,7million infected worldwide and nearly 360,000 fatalities as of Wednesday, May 27th, 2020, panic, chaos, and uncertainty have consumed people’s lives and governments alike in what seemingly looked like a global catastrophe.

      Preventive measures, quarantine, and sanitary isolation, emergency states, lockdowns, curfews you name it, are but different coinages which simply mean that the earth is finally demanding a break.  Everyone seems to agree that once this is all over a new world order will emerge and new mapping will take place of our economy, politics, and value system, and of course a new reordering of our priorities.

     As the virus continues to spread exponentially claiming many lives across the world, in such times of existential crisis the question is not solely about the quest for survival but such crises become indeed transcendental as they turn into eye-openers to more pressing and deep questions and lessons generally related to our ontology.

COVID-19, Maybe Nature's Cry

The viral story of how the novel coronavirus pandemic started in China at the beginning of the year is quite potent. Many reports claim that the origin of the virus is believed to be a wild animal market in Wuhan which sold both dead and alive animals. Although the exact animal source has not been thoroughly identified, many believe that the original hosts are bats. Regardless of the plausibility and credibility of this claim, the fact that the virus can jump from animals to humans should cause a Eureka moment to reflect on what we are doing wrong and what we are missing out when it comes to environment and eco-system.

    Starting from the industrial revolution and moving to the age of technology, the earth has been cruelly subjected to ruthless exploitation of its resources leading to many deadly environmental issues like global warming, toxic chemicals, acid rains, climate change, droughts to name but a few. The bitter truth is that no matter how many official meetings, conferences, and forums have been held around the world to draw attention to the environment and how the mounting industrialization is undoubtedly jeopardizing the lives of all species on the planet, it seems that the recommendations and decisions arrived at were merely empty promises and narratives. They have never actually gone beyond the walls of the conference halls. Hence, what has happened is that nature itself has been sending us messages so that we could listen to its cries and turn the fancy word of sustainable development into a lived reality.

 Thus, this novel Coronavirus pandemic is but nature’s cry to reconsider and redefine our relationship with nature. To use postcolonial terminology, one can say that nature is striking back. Whether we like or not, amid this Coronavirus outbreak, recent statistics and satellites orbiting Earth have shown a massive drop in air pollution and warming gases concomitant with the ramping down of global economic activity. With thousands of factories closed down and millions of cars parked in garages, people in Beijing and California, where pollution was overriding, are now unexpectedly enjoying blue skies and clear fresh water.

   What we also know now is that amid this global calamity all countries are firmly mobilizing and enacting all it takes, even at the expense of their economy, to find a vaccine and end the spread of the contagion. This is quite understandable insofar as our immediate existence is at stake, but what we are not realizing is that air pollution kills just as many people as the virus and even more. The World Health Organization estimates that 4.6 million people die each year from causes directly associated with air pollution.

The first lesson is therefore that we have to stop taking nature and our eco-system for granted. We have to redefine and revisit our relationship with the environment because our very survival depends on how well we live and let live and how well we co-exist with all the species that make up our eco-system.  

 Time to question and destabilize Social inequalities

 It seems that Coronavirus has widely opened our eyes to certain realities we have deliberately decided to overlook for so long. COVID-19 established itself as a  just and democratic Virus making no destination whatsoever between the poor and the rich, the white and the black, believers and non-believers, fellow citizens, and those in power and between developed countries and poor ones. This explains why all countries are strictly mobilizing to curb this virus, yet no one has cared before about the hunger virus simply because it doesn't affect advanced countries and those in power.  The FAO has estimated that 9.1 million people die every year due to starvation and hunger-related diseases including children, with over 3.1 million dead children, which means that one child dies from hunger every 10 seconds. This shockingly horrifying number is far higher than the Coivid-19 fatalities. Perhaps it is high time we stop our global hypocrisy and selfishness and mobilize together to put a to end poverty and hunger all around the world.

The utmost step would be to question social equality, especially in third world countries. One way to address this issue is the redistribution of resources. The fact that only a small minority takes hold of global resources and fortunes undermines the whole concept of social justice and equality. Safeguarding a dignified life beyond poverty and injustice should be a top priority.  Once human greed ceases to exist then our chances of survival in the face of worldwide calamities would be higher. Coronavirus pandemic has painfully uncovered our vulnerability and health and social inequalities and thus we have to care about each other and think about disadvantaged people. In Chaos' theory there is what is called the Butterfly effect, which simply proposes that a small insignificant event can lead to significant bigger repercussions, someone ate bats in china and the whole world is in an emergency state now. This uncovers how we are all connected and how the imaginary boundaries we have created do not entail that we have to act rationally with calamities that threaten humanity as a whole.