Pandemic Survival Is a Group Project

ALMOST FROM THE first day of the COVID-19 crisis, the question in the back of many minds has been: How soon will this be over? When can we get back to normal?

For irresponsible people, the answer has been: Now. Schooled by a lifetime in a consumer society, deprivation of any kind seems impossible, hence the pictures of people demanding, sometimes at gunpoint, that the barber shop or sports bar be opened back up.

For more responsible souls, the answer has been: Once we have enough tests. Or once we have good treatments for the coronavirus. Or once we have a vaccine.

But the real answer, in some sense, may be never.

Because, of course, this pandemic is just one crisis buried within a much larger one: the reaction of the natural world to the demands placed on it by a species making unprecedented demands.

We’ve fooled ourselves into thinking stability is the norm—those of us who grew up in the relatively placid years and in relatively placid places in the latter part of the 20th century can perhaps be forgiven our expectation that placidity would mark our whole lives. But those particular lives in those particular places have generated so much change that stability is no longer a possibility. In particular, our prosperity burned so much fossil fuel that we decisively shifted the chemistry of the atmosphere, setting ourselves up for a century—probably many centuries—of chronic instability punctuated by acute crisis. Even increasing the temperature a single degree Celsius has been enough to fundamentally shake the planet: more and bigger storms, fires, droughts. And we’re on track to raise the temperature three times that much—which would mean far more than three times the damage, since the consequences are increasing exponentially, not linearly. That’s what “tipping point” means.

Job one, of course, is to limit that rise: If we do everything right, we may be able to stop just shy of 2 degrees, which will be a great human accomplishment, but a far worse world than the present.

So job two is to develop the mindset that helps us deal. I think we will find ourselves less fixated on growth, and more on security, safety, resilience. Growth is largely an individual process, all of us pursuing our own self-interest. But these other goals can only be accomplished by communities—local, national, global—that focus less on competition and more on cooperation. Unless you’re willing to indulge in prepper hoarding fantasies (and no Christian rightly can—we’re the people who’ve been told to love our neighbors), then survival is a group project. And when the threats are planetary in scale, that group by necessity is large.

But the starting place is to surrender our hope that we will simply return to some old normal. We’ve got to move forward, with a new kind of nimbleness. Together.