Sometimes it’s really hard to make sense of what exactly the truth is. That’s just a reality that comes with so much information being available. Your everyday Joe Schmo debates in the comments section are one thing, but the world’s top epidemiologists, for example, disagreed on the fate of COVID-19 in a recent New York Times article. One said the globalized world would be back to its former self in due time: you will be able to hug your mother, fly to Ireland, or go see AC/DC at Madison Square Garden. Another said that the world would never be back to how it was. Frankly, I’m not sure that things ever should be back to how they were. (To be fair, an extremely small number of the epidemiologists in the article said life would never return to normal.)
But one simple message from almost all the experts throughout all of this has been: we need to slow down.
After all, we survived just fine for thousands of years without globalization. To move back to a smaller world would require a complete restructuring of the global economy, but considering it’s been shut down for months, now is the time to make that change in the hopes of having a more sustainable future.
We’re walking on a revolving rock that’s been floating in space for billions of years, and yet, in just over 100, we discovered substances that made us cancer cells to the planet and technologies that rendered in-person interaction pointless, and we have destroyed our world at unforeseen pace. Some people argue that overpopulation is not the issue, but rather it’s the scale of our consumption, and how far that scale reaches. I’ve made even more of an effort recently to support local economies, not global economies. In time, the money and effort will go to where the demand is, so don’t think we can’t make a difference with the daily, seemingly small, decisions we make.
Perhaps travelling around the world in less than a day isn’t what the world is here for. Perhaps the world isn’t built for single-use plastics, for animal cruelty and animal agriculture to be synonymous, and to be destroyed at our convenience. By now, these are things most of us intuitively know, but the COVID-19 crisis is an opportunity for us all to start living our lives on the quieter side, somewhere between lockdown and where were before.
More than global policy, economics, or consumer psychology, the power lies with us and in the decisions we make.