Greta Thunberg was walking down the icy promenade in Davos like a modern-day Madonna, for the 75th climate strike. Her waif-like frame almost disappeared into the crowds that swarmed her. I was amongst a group of climate activists marching with her; but people pushed in from all directions and it was hard to walk.
A boom hovered above like a vulture; cameras loomed from roofs; a man hung from a tree for a better view of this young girl—lauded, vilified, sacrificed and martyred for voicing a very simple message: Listen to the science.
It was January 2020, and we were in the snowy foothills of Switzerland for the 50th annual gathering of the world’s power players at the World Economic Forum (WEF). Greta was very thin that week. She had cancelled numerous appearances because she had the flu, yet she still managed to speak once, scheduled the same day as a speech by Donald Trump – so the media could sketch them as intellectual boxing opponents. As if politics, science and our very survival were entertainment.
It’s an extraordinary time to be alive.
We may be the first species to document our own extinction. People make plays, songs and paintings about the climate crisis. Indeed, I’ve written a book - Who Cares Wins - about the different ways in which people are trying to halt the Sixth Mass Extinction: from youth activists like Greta, technologists like Elon Musk, entrepreneurs like Stella McCartney, to lawyers, politicians, indigenous communities, feminists and philosophers.
How have we got to this? What kind of madness is this, when teenagers are begging adults to simply listen to scientists? Yet we are too blinded by celebrity to even hear their message.
The year 2020 was unfolding with an ironic hidden twist that cold January day: a global pandemic soon forced us to our knees, cut down swathes of humans and economies, halted air travel, closed borders. It’s easy to reflect on the abnormality and wonder when normality will return.
But ‘normal’ got us into this mess. For many years, scientists warned of the accelerating risk of pandemics of this nature but were largely ignored: three quarters of emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic, because of humanity’s exploitative relationship with animals and nature. It’s our ‘normal’ that we use the same chemicals for fertilizers as we do for bombs: giving rise to the devastating explosion in Beirut earlier this month, the fifth such explosion in the last century.
It is ‘normal’ that we’ve experienced the 5 hottest years on record in the last 5 years. It is ‘normal’ that drives tens of millions of people from their homes each year because of climate change. It is ‘normal’ that quietly accepts that seven million people already die because of air pollution each year. It is ‘normal’ to ignore the scientific warnings that we risk losing a million species in coming years, that wildfires and hurricanes are increasing, or that we might soon face a water crisis.
A week after WEF ended I was back in the UK (by train), leaders had dispersed around the world, and the impact of 2020’s twist began to emerge. A microscopic parasite, existing in a grey zone between living and non-living, became a shock to the global psychology unlike anything experienced in modern times. Corona, COVID-19.
(Etymology of Corona: borrowed from Latin corōna "garland worn on the head as a mark of honor or emblem of majesty, halo around a celestial body, top part of an entablature”)
In collective enforced arrest in the rehab of our homes, exploring the prisons or palaces of our minds, huddled together (six feet apart if privileged for distance) in fear, confusion, love, and hope, many voices quickly proclaimed that this shock offered the wake-up call the world needed. The pattern interruption, the stillness: a chance to reflect on our habits.
Charles Eisenstein once wrote, “To interrupt a habit is to make it visible; it is to turn it from a compulsion to a choice.” What is our choice? When industries wake from their slumber, travel bans are lifted, when we can dance with strangers again, will we have made the shift in how we think, consume and live, to choose do things differently - carefully - to avert another crisis? Will the politicians who insist they are ‘listening to the scientists’ in response to the pandemic, continue to listen? Can we act instead of react?
Disasters have always brought with them pivots along our historical path. The charged beauty of this moment is that almost anything is possible, both Orwellian and utopian narratives. Naomi Klein has analyzed how the shock of disasters has been misused to instate authoritarian regimes. Conversely crises have often led to highly progressive change: many national health services today were a result of the 1918 flu epidemic; the First World War helped emancipate women; the Second World War led to the founding of the United Nations and modern welfare states.
Will our governments use the Corona crisis for bold, positive shifts? Radical ideas I discuss in my book, such as Universal Basic Income and the Green New Deal, now feel within reach. More has changed in months than we could imagine in years. Our ability for collective mobilization, kindness and transformation is revealed.
In every given moment we can choose to define a better ‘normal.’ Our planet is still beautiful, diverse and full of life’s abundance. There are still over a million species, upon which we depend, to save. It is humanity’s capacity to learn, invent, create and care that arguably demands our saving.
We could become the first species to prevent a mass extinction.
This article was published by US Vogue in August 2020 based on an extract from Lily’s book, Who Cares Wins.