Everything is connected—the world is woven together by invisible threads of causation and carelessness, effects and unintended consequences.
People tend to collapse the world when they imagine it. An American envisioning India, for example, might have a pretty homogenous view of the country, but even someone living in New Delhi inhabits only a small segment of a full reality comprised of a layered social system, an economy, a fraught history, and the lives of millions of people. People get caught up in the immeasurability of community, religion, nationality, and race and how they overlap in so many unique ways, making it difficult to pick up the threads of a global problem in a local community, or conversely to trace local priorities across transnational boundaries.
The difficulty of scale is apparent now more than ever, and as a global problem, the pandemic works its way into every single community in the world. From our homes, we watch our favorite local bookstores and cafes go out of business, we watch our neighbors grow tomatoes for the first time in their front garden, we watch the local supermarket stock packages of disposable face masks by the entrance. These things feel more real than the news that the U.S. has reached 100,000, now 200,000, now 218,000 deaths. More real than the nearly 900,000 people currently infected in India, certainly.
The local/global scale perspective problem isn’t limited to the pandemic. It’s the defining feature of climate change, too. The world as a whole contributes to the worsening of the global environment but the impacts are felt locally in countless different ways. Wildfires and hurricanes are more prevalent than ever, causing life-changing catastrophes for thousands, if not millions, of people. The water level rises down in South Beach, near where I grew up, so that there is almost constant construction on the streets that trace the beaches and canals, always to raise them just a few more inches against the floods that don’t always need rain anymore to spill over.
There’s a quote that’s been floating around on social media: There’s no vaccine for climate change. People have been wearing face masks against the smoke from polluted air since before the pandemic, and should we be so fortunate as to find a cure for COVID-19, people will continue wearing their masks against air pollution after the virus has abated. This is the new normal, right? Except it’s not new, and it’s not something we should accept as normal. Now, nestled away at home in our own communities, we have time to think, to reevaluate how our lives and decisions support a global system that is killing not the Earth but its most prolific inhabitants, humans. Now is the time to tie together the knowledge of what’s happening and rebuild.
This sounds overwhelming, and challenging, and exhausting, because when something is too big and miraculous or terrible to comprehend or verbalize, people focus on the small, and so it is often the small things which count more so than the big. Focus on the small, then—what can you do in your life, yes, during the pandemic, yes, during the most political turbulent time in our lives, yes, despite the fatigue of emotionally dealing with these realities, to better the world?
Small things. Wear a washable, reusable face covering instead of one that will end up in a landfill or strangle wildlife. Buy local produce to reduce emissions from shipping, and if you safely can, eat at or order food directly from local restaurants, instead of ordering food through UberEats or other companies that take a percentage of profits from small businesses already struggling to pay rent.
I know it’s difficult to balance the world’s needs with your own. I typed out ideas for this article while under the heating lamps of a cafe in Paris, where I’m based this Autumn. Those warm, glowing contraptions that make the tables that spill out onto the sidewalk so inviting—the idea being to heat the literal outdoors—were going to be banned in the city starting this year due to their environmental impact, but because of the pandemic, the policy was postponed a year so that restaurants can keep people outside and reduce contact. Hence, my face is as warm as the steaming cup of coffee before me as I ponder questions of how to not kill the planet. We do what we can in an imperfect world.
That’s why it would be tempting to add, don’t order from corporations like Amazon, which doubled its profits during the pandemic, but Amazon in particular has actually been somewhat proactive in minimizing the harm it causes, creating 175,000 new jobs, distributing a $500 million bonus to its frontline workers and partners, and increasing its hourly wages. Whether this balances out the cost to the environment and to local businesses is for you to decide, but perhaps corporations are more aggressive about creating positive change than other powerful entities, like the government, because sometimes they have a financial incentive to do so.
It would seem that governments and corporations have the power to influence the course of the pandemic, as well as of climate change, on every level from the international to the local. Individuals have a more direct influence on the local level, but also have the power to vote both in political elections (like this November—make sure you’ve registered!) and with where they choose to spend money. The local and global, and indeed, the pandemic and climate change, are more interconnected than they seem.
How people value those around them impacts how they perceive and interact with the world. Each person must strive to value the small: every individual is capable of planting a tree, and also of being a virus super-spreader. In addition, each person must attempt to grapple with the big: the forces of history that seem to, but can never fully, overshadow the small, that led to the globalized system that made the spread of the virus and the level of industrialization that is fundamentally altering the environment possible. The world is both too big and too small for human comprehension, but action is still possible, and necessary.
Featured image from Hydroinformatics Institute
Written by Francesca Von Krauland, Columbia University Masters Student in Global Thought and Climate Justice Now Intern.
