This year marks the 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day. Earth Day, it's worth remembering, was not started to celebrate the planet - it was started to protest what seemed like its imminent demise. Air and water pollution was far worse in the 1970's US than it is in the 2020's US, and there was no Endangered Species Act, no CITES, not much in the way of real legislation to protect wildlife. Earth Day was a call to arms, and in some ways, it was a successful one. Progress has been made on many fronts.
That's no excuse to sit on our collective laurels.
The current situation brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic has been a hard one, and we're still not out of the woods yet. Many of us, I'm sure, are very much looking forward to a return to normal. Still, I wonder if there are a few lessons that we can take away from this period that we may carry over to our post-coronavirus society.
For one thing, this whole "Work from Home" concept - obviously not a solution for many people, including police, firefighters, medical staff, and zookeepers. Still, a decent percentage of the population has been able to work from home. Might we carry that over, at least to a degree? Right now, one of the major forces threatening the environment is climate change, which is caused in part by emissions from vehicles. More people working from home (at least for a few days a week) means fewer vehicles on the road - less pollution, less fossil fuel usage, and better traffic for those of who do need to travel.
I'm hopeful that the pressure that this pandemic has placed on the wildlife trade will stay in place. If governments don't have the will to protect endangered species for the animals' sake, perhaps they will remember this (and SARS... and Ebola... and a host of other zoonotic diseases) as being cause enough to take a hard line against wildlife trafficking.
Along those lines, It would also be great if this would extend our appreciation for the outdoors. Maybe after two months of this (if we're lucky), everyone will be screened-out and be ready to explore the outdoors again. It would be nice to think that a society that's been cooped inside for so long will be ready to newly appreciate the natural world - and want to protect it.
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