Dolphins and fish have returned to Italy's tourist hot spots during the shutdown. Photo / Getty Images
Dolphins and fish have returned to Italy's tourist hot spots during the shutdown. Photo / Getty Images
COMMENT
As humanity is experiencing a sci-fi-like reality for the next few weeks, Mother Nature is breathing a sigh of relief.
The world is on lockdown. Travel restrictions, grounded planes, restricted movement, self-distancing, working from home ... daily life as we know it has completely changed. Hysteria pervades society, butI have a feeling the fallout of Covid-19 is just what the planet needed.
But in my opinion, we haven't been listening to Mother Nature. When she told us the icebergs were melting, we did nothing. When she told us the planet was warming, we did nothing. When countries overheated, bush fires ravaged and animals died, we did nothing either.
We did nothing because it was too inconvenient to our daily lives; too challenging for our personal, national and global economies. I believe we've let the puppets in our capitals concoct policies that were too little, too late (and then get repealed by subsequent governments' administrations anyway).
In the aforementioned video, another sentence by "Mother Nature" is pertinent right now. "I have fed species greater than you, and I have starved species greater than you."
I believe we humans have been so naïve and cocky for so long. For the past 70 or so years, we've been acting like we're the only ones to have ever inhabited this Earth. As if nothing, or no one, came before us. A lot has walked this Earth before us. Civilisations have died out. Countries and cultures have come and gone. How epic and powerful were dinosaurs? Even they couldn't survive.
Now, for the next couple of weeks (at least), Mother Nature is getting a chance to heal. When factories in Wuhan had to close, Nasa aerial photos revealed dramatic and visible reductions in pollution. When Venice stopped all its tourism, the water in the canals turned from muddy brown to crystal clear.
For the immediate future, international air travel will all but cease. Motorways will have far fewer cars on them. More manufacturing facilities will close. We'll all realise how much we can do from home, and how tiny a carbon footprint we can feasibly create. And the effect on the environment will be immediate.
The old excuses – the economy, the cost, the corporate and governmental willingness – have not survived Covid-19. Everyone has agreed the world has to take a breather so we can get on top of this virus.
While the human health issue is being addressed, so too will the planet's health issue. Mother Nature, as we know her, is getting a break too.
This is the drastic and immediate response to the climate crisis we should have done a long time ago. It's terribly unfortunate that it's taken a viral pandemic for us to get here.
Don't take this as me flouting a crazy conspiracy theory – I don't believe nature is "punishing" us for our sins. This is simply by chance: a global health catastrophe has forced us to change our behaviour, and the result – if we can think longer-term beyond our own individual conveniences right now – is something the planet will thank us for.
We are being shown how to adapt to new circumstances. We are being given a new normal. Our governments are putting global health above economic health for once, so we'll have to find new ways of achieving economic health later.
What you need to know.
Whether or not our new and improved collective behaviour will stick around is up to us.
Will we learn from this? I hope so. As the weeks pass, and we see more visual and empirical evidence that the planet is healing while we're on hiatus from normal life, perhaps society will be changed for the better, forever.
Or maybe we'll just return to old ways. Possibly we won't listen to what Mother Nature needs. We'll revert to our smoke-clogging production and our unnecessary road and air travel. We will dirty our waters and our air again, we'll keep heating up our planet, we'll continue relying on our governments to take action that isn't in their best interests and thus doesn't happen.
This is my only real worry right now. The Covid-19 health crisis will resolve itself. The world is taking pragmatic steps. The crisis of the planet, on the other hand, is something we are being given one final chance to address.
Let us all respect Mother Nature now, at the 11th hour, before she decides we're no longer worthy of her.
