The forth installment of a blog series sharing art, articles, and abstract ideas that spark a contagious conversation.
These days every headline we see is about the latest coronavirus statistics, the government responses, and the newest hot spots. It seems random, arbitrary, and impossible to track the path of this thing. But what if our environmental conditions have left some populations more vulnerable to the virus than others? What if the destruction caused by COVID-19 is foreshadowing the destruction yet to come? In this blog, we’ll be discussing the common ground between this current pandemic and the climate crisis. Prepare for some eerie parallels.
WIRED contributor Gilad Eleman’s article titled, “The Analogy Between Covid-19 and Climate Change Is Eerily Precise” is the first post that comes up when you Google search the connection between climate change and COVID-19. He writes that the public response to our current pandemic is simply a time-lapsed version of the public’s response to climate change.
“We went through the stages of climate change denial in the matter of a week,” said Gordon Pennycook, a psychologist at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada, who studies how misinformation spreads. Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science who has studied the origins of climate disinformation, spelled out the pattern in an email: “First, one denies the problem, then one denies its severity, and then one says it is too difficult or expensive to fix, and/or that the proposed solution threatens our freedom.” Sound familiar?
Now we’re faced with the threat of another global catastrophe arising from the clash of nature and modern human activity. As with climate change, the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic are difficult to predict with confidence. As with climate change, the uncertainty interval encompasses utter cataclysm. As with climate change, any serious effort to mitigate or stave off this disaster will require major economic disruptions. And, as with climate change, such efforts to save the world must be put in place before any of the experts’ doomsday warnings could ever be proved true.
Gilead Eleman’s WIRED article concludes with this: “The climate change issue has been transformed into a badge of who people think they are,” said Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist and environmental studies professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “So if you’re a good card-carrying Republican in the Midwest, then you’d better be against that climate change stuff. And if you’re a West Coast liberal, or you live in Boulder, like me, of course you support fighting climate change.” When scientific questions become political issues, he added, people’s beliefs become statements of identity. “To some extent we see that with the coronavirus.”
The common ground between these two issues is more extensive than most assume. By the time people are ready to take radical change, it will be too late. The economic costs are too severe to endure. Identity politics are getting in the way of scientic facts.
Did I miss anything? Let me know in the comments of you see more common ground between COVID-19 and the climate crisis.
Written by Tatum Eames, Western Washington University Senior and Climate Justice Now Intern.