Maybe The Coronavirus Will Accomplish What Activists Have Been Trying To Do For Years

Maybe it will actually wake us up to the reality of the changing biosphere to the point where something actually shifts in our consciousness and behavior.

I’m not here to fearmonger

I’ll leave that to the mainstream media, thank you very much. But it does seem that we should probably be paying attention to the ways our rapidly shifting climate is going to affect us all going forward.

Greta will be remembered as one of the first major global whistleblowers making the case for drastic action. Social media coverage of her mission has blown up my feeds since she got big on the world stage.

And it’s about damn time. Honestly.

Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people, to give them hope,” Thunberg said, “But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house is on fire because it is. -Greta Thunberg World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2019

A very brief history of environmentalism

Environmental politics have evolved from the conservation movement of the late 1800s to the regulatory victories of the 1960s, to the mainstream environmental movement of the 1980s, to the radical kind of environmental activism and environmental justice movements that are being largely spearheaded by the youth of the planet. For a more detailed account of the individual movements, read this piece on the history of environmentalism.

The well-connected, tech-savvy, and understandably panicked youth of the planet are not going to sit around on their duffs while the old-guard of the old story continues to rape the planet for ill-conceived profits.

Rapidly spreading viral diseases with a high percentage of serious complications are going to get people’s attention. It’s shameful that the collateral damage of millions of people who have been displaced by needless war, climate disasters, and the necrotic policies of dangerous regimes haven’t done the trick yet.

So maybe the coronavirus will bring things to a head. Especially seeing as how the economic impact of Covid-19 looks like it’s going to play out over the next months and years. Nothing like hitting the current system where it’s really going to hurt the most. In the wallet. Pathetically.

Forgive me, but it does seem that there are some similarities between the way the coronavirus looks to play out with the way the current U.S. President operates. I mean the method of drawing attention via an intemperate spewing of vicious nastiness in a completely transparent and unapologetic way.

This M.O. tends to rip the covers off the dysfunction inherent in the current paradigm, regardless of what is doing the spewing. And it incites change. For nature will seek its balance — either gently, or with great force.

3 major problems with our current worldview

I see three significant problem sets in the way we’re collectively and currently approaching the quandaries we’re facing:

1. We lack unity. We have a war mentality. Our culture is steeped and stuck in the idea of the hero’s journey — where a brave young hero must venture into the unknown, beat the baddies, and bring back the heroic solution to the rest of the people. The good guys winning and the bad guys losing is almost always the desired goal. Just look at all of our stories.
2. We are fear and blame focused in general. We look for solutions that come from “the other” making a change, rather than concentrating on what we ourselves can be responsible for in making the big shifts that need to happen. We have lost so much capacity for hope and love, to the point where hopefulness is cynically laughed at as being useless.
3. We still think that humans are special, to the point of being the owners or masters of the planet. We have not yet reorganized our understanding of self to recognize that humans are merely a continuum of the thing we call life. Our hubris to continue in this worldview is astounding in its stupidity.

We are now being challenged to make some large scale shifts in our mindset as well as in our habits. We’re currently living a life that simply isn’t going to work going forward into the future. We collectively need to start doing life differently.

Like, the whole thing.

Humans are a little like a young adult coming into therapy for the first time.

We are going to need to reimagine the steps it will take to change our relationship with the rest of this planetary organism that we are simply a part of. We are fooling ourselves with the old story that humans are the rulers of the planet, with eminent domain to use and discard our fellow organisms as we wish.

This old story is becoming obsolete, and obviously so.

The Gaia Theory posits that the organic and inorganic components of Planet Earth have evolved together as a single living, self-regulating system. It suggests that this living system has automatically controlled global temperature, atmospheric content, ocean salinity, and other factors, that maintains its own habitability. In a phrase, “life maintains conditions suitable for its own survival.”

It’s going to be up to us to figure out how to make the shift. But one thing I can tell you for sure that a War Against The Viruses is not going to work.

Is there a silver lining?

If the economy shuts down. If people are in fear of their lives. If we experience some kind of modern version of the bubonic plague, complete with Instagram stories that I can’t even begin to imagine — well, maybe we’ll finally get off our asses and start changing the way we live.

I’ll leave you with this hopeful book by one of my favorite authors Charles Eisenstein.

I told you I wasn’t here to fearmonger. I desperately want to have hope. I want my kids to grow up, and not die young in some crazy cataclysm. I just need some of y’all to be hopeful with me. And intelligently so.

But I am here to echo Ms. Thunberg’s warning. The house IS on fire. It’s about time we noticed. It’s time to start doing something about it.

If we open our eyes, and (I won’t apologize for being trite) open our hearts, maybe, just maybe we’ll begin to find the way. And if there are people here to remember our history in the future, maybe they will see that this global illness was one of the catalysts that we had to suffer to start making wholesale changes in the way we exist.

Otherwise, we’d better pull out the stops and just backfill our whole culture to leave as a mystery for future generations to ponder.

Here’s hoping we make a wiser choice.

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Kaia Tingley is a writer, artist, podcaster, digital strategy nerd, and sometimes hot-tempered supernova with a wild, free soul. You can find her on Instagram here or on LinkedIn here.