The fallacy of “back to normal” thinking
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| Joel Pett, The Virginian-Pilot |
The failure of higher
education in the United States was made clear by the COVID-19 virus pandemic.
From the president down, too many elected officials with college degrees have been ignorant of or defiant toward the lessons of the biological and social sciences.
From the president down, too many elected officials with college degrees have been ignorant of or defiant toward the lessons of the biological and social sciences.
Ill-advised reassurances
in the initial stages of the pandemic ignored or denied the significance of
exponential growth. Leaders exploited the human tendency to accept uncritically
information that one is motivated to believe.
Indeed, as the dimensions
of the problem became clearer, the Trump Administration increasingly abandoned
efforts to provide the public with the information and guidance that
epidemiologists were offering.
Tens of thousands of
Americans are dying because of the failure to act early and inform accurately,
and this burden is falling disproportionately on minorities and the poor.
Even more depressing has
been the failure of millions of people to see through the Trump
Administration's too-early promotion of "re-opening" the country and
returning to "normal."
The relaxing of social
distancing and use of masks is an attempt to bolster the stock market in the
short run rather than protect the long-term health of both our citizenry and
our economy.
From the Ozarks to
southern California beaches to the Trump Tulsa rally, crowds of people have
clustered together, apparently unaware of, or unconcerned about, the threat
their behavior poses to them and to their friends, relatives, and neighbors.
This situation has been
greatly exacerbated by the justifiable and important but vulnerable large
crowds protesting against police brutality and structural racism, symptoms of
the inequity that President Trump has encouraged rather than disapproved.
Neither the mass media
nor our schools have promoted an understanding that what they want to return to
was in no sense "normal."
It was extremely abnormal—roughly
one-thousandth of human history based on a one-time energy bonanza from fossil
fuels and the enslaving of millions of people.
In that tiny 300-year
stretch of its roughly 300,000-year history, Homo sapiens expanded
some 15-fold in numbers, fouled the atmosphere, disrupted the climate, wiped
out most other large animals and huge tracts of primeval forests, used most of
the easily accessible non-renewable mineral resources, destroyed or depleted
much of the planet's rich agricultural soils and underground freshwater stores,
and spread novel hormone-mimicking chemicals everywhere.
Along with farming, our
species also invented slavery, racism and often inequitable borders, and
developed and used weapons that killed five times more people in a single war
than had existed on the planet when agriculture was invented.
Myths of continual
growth
Never before the 20th
century in the vastness of human history had it been necessary for the leaders
of major nations, separated by those borders, to cooperate to deal with global
existential threats and achieve some global governance. Without that,
"normality" now means facing a catastrophic collapse of global
civilization.
In that brief stretch of
our history as a species, industrial humanity managed to give a small minority
of people a life of longevity and comfort. In that historic blink of an eye,
our ancestors completed a process that began with the invention of agriculture
and ended the multi-millennia-long normal human history as a "small group
animal" living in relatively egalitarian assemblages of 100 or so people.
Agriculture allowed
enormous population growth and made cities possible. Settling down to practice
agriculture created hierarchies of inequality, demanded back-breaking toil by
those low in that hierarchy, and built armies to protect the property and
interests of the top of the hierarchy.
The higher population density of cities created the preconditions for pandemics, and the more recent developments of global travel, wildlife trades, and ubiquitous habitat destruction have made more pandemics inevitable.
In this long view, was
2019 normal? Not even remotely.
Would a complete return
to 2019 lifestyles offer a long, secure future? Almost certainly not, as human
life-support systems crumble and corporate gangs and autocrats increasingly
control large nations and pay no attention to the human common good.
Perpetual growth is the
disease we must cure
Yet today most educated
people remain clueless about this crucial cultural-evolutionary situation and
are bombarded with myths about perpetual growth.
They have been
"educated" to believe that such growth is the only cure for their
troubles, when that, even more than COVID-19 and future epidemics, is the
disease we must cure.
Even so, as the pandemic
has upended lives, some observers have speculated about a "new
normal." The changes in social and economic behavior instituted for
controlling the spread of disease, such as working from home, eschewing airline
travel, and banning large-scale public gatherings, have already yielded
significant environmental improvements.
Reductions in greenhouse
gas emissions and unhealthy air pollution could be made permanent to everyone's
benefit.
By greatly accelerating
changes already being explored by businesses and other organizations, the
pandemic made the advantages of those changes so obvious that many
organizations will likely adopt them permanently.
Even though the pandemic
crisis created a major disruption of the economy— especially in the food and
manufacturing sectors—that will require serious adjustments, our efforts at
adaptation have illuminated possible paths to a more sustainable future.
Learning our limits
The prolonged
demonstrations against institutionalized racism and economic inequity also
offer some important lessons, which seem to have finally been realized by
governing entities from Congress to municipal police departments. Small
victories of this sort motivate continuing efforts and analysis of barriers to
further reform.
With the opening that
social disruption can provide, the global society might also be able to restore
and expand essential controls on the scale of the human enterprise and the
technologies humanity employs to support itself.
Some form of medium-term
sustainability might prove possible, which could be built upon to design a
long-term plan for environmental security and general public health. Success
could start in small steps, such as instituting a carbon tax or requiring
courses in "existential threats to civilization" in high schools and
colleges.
But to reach a
long-lasting "new abnormal," we will have to move fast. Scientists
and decision-makers will need to estimate what civilization should aim for as a
new equitable regime, constrained in population size, consumption patterns, and
choices of technologies by the biophysical limits of Earth, which have been so
blithely ignored until now.
Beyond better educating
our youth about those limits, we could institute a system of adaptive
management that would continuously update the status of the human enterprise
and encourage behavioral change as needed.
But that would require
leadership and a 21st century education, both of which seem to be
pie-in-the-sky impractical as we write this. But nothing could be more lethally
impractical than a return to the old normal.
Anne and Paul Ehrlich,
emeriti at Stanford University, are co-authors of THE POPULATION EXPLOSION, THE
DOMINANT ANIMAL, and many other books and scientific papers. Their views do not necessarily
represent those of Environmental Health News, The Daily Climate or publisher,
Environmental Health Sciences.
You can reach Anne
at aehrlich@stanford.edu and
Paul at pre@stanford.edu.