Could Covid19 Help Our Human Species to Survive

While attending to the Covid19 Epidemic, let’s not forget about longer term threats to survival of our human species.

Since the early 1970s, a period of more than 40 years, I have numbered myself among those writing about issues impacting the long-term survival of our human species on planet Earth. These issues can be grouped under the imperfect and bland, but social and politically acceptable, label of “sustainability.”  Climate change, and its consequences, in various manifestations, seems the most visible and threatening dynamic.

But what occupies our attention in daily television news broadcasts, newspaper lead- stories, podcasts, Twitter feeds and the like? Our daily fare comprises information about economic growth, crime, employment/unemployment, stock market indicators, and sports events along with the pronouncements, foibles, idiosyncrasies, and indiscretions of our political leaders.  In the daily completion for attention and, of course, our discretionary spending, issues relating to human-species survival have occupied the position of an inconspicuous, widely ignored, “also-ran.”

For several years, I have seeking answers to the question, “what would it take to mobilize social, political and popular-consciousness around a set of concerns, viewed as a potential threats to human survival?”  The Covid19 epidemic is providing answers.  It has demonstrated the capacities and shortcomings of political-economic institutions and of our political and economic leaders. It is a sort of global litmus test, offering members of our human species opportunities for serious reflecting and learning. In time, it seems that a vaccine will be developed, the epidemic will run its course and a degree of normalcy will be restored.

Whether our human species, and especially those whom we choose as leaders, will take advantage of lessons that the covid19 epidemic offers is yet to be determined. Could Covid19 be helpful in sensitizing us to the issues of human survival that climate change and its consequences will pose?  This is an important question because, for the consequences of climate change, there will be no vaccine.

It seems to me, the Covid19 epidemic offers, for our species and especially our leaders, what good teachers call a set of “aha moments?” Will our human species draw from them the lessons that are to be learned and put them to use?   That is the most fundamental question that the covid19 epidemic poses.