How will the Covid-19 pandemic make us a more sustainable society? By making us more aware of the larger biophysical issues like climate change and environmental decline and how completely unprepared we are to tackle them.
Our article linked here on the EuroNews site illustrates the changes we have to make to better adapt to our dynamic planet rather than attempting to force the planet to adapt to humanity.
A sustainable society promotes a broad economic base and embraces biophysical and well-being metrics to represent social and economic health in place of our current grow-forever GDP metric of the commercial marketplace.
Governments of all political stripes have shown they will respond strongly to the images of overflowing mortuaries and they need to apply this same focus to the crises of climate and resource depletion. Now that leaders everywhere have stepped away from market mechanisms to address a critical issue, hopefully we can apply what the pandemic has taught us to build more self-sufficient, stable and resilient nations which will allow the earth to regain its health.
The pandemic has been a rehearsal for larger problems only slightly further down the road. Clearly, population growth, greater density, higher consumption and more stress on the environment, the typical cure-alls for the commercial economy, have been cast aside in our war on the pandemic. We need to apply our newly broadened vision to effectively address the larger issues which constitute a much greater threat.
