What should we learn from Covid?

Can we learn from Covid that we need to learn to live in with nature and to respect the animal kingdom? To eat more of a plant diet and preserve all wildlife habitats.

Humanity will be “finished” if we fail to drastically change our food systems in response to the coronavirus pandemic and the climate crisis, the prominent naturalist Jane Goodall has warned.

She blamed the emergence of Covid-19 on the over-exploitation of the natural world, which has seen forests cut down, species made extinct and natural habitats destroyed. The coronavirus is thought to have made the jump from animals to humans late last year, possibly originating in a meat market in Wuhan, China.

Intensive farming was also creating a reservoir of animal diseases that would spill over and hurt human society, said Goodall, one of the world’s foremost experts on chimpanzees and a longtime conservation campaigner, speaking alongside two European commissioners at an online event held by the campaigning group Compassion in World Farming, on Tuesday.

“We have brought this on ourselves because of our absolute disrespect for animals and the environment,” she said. “Our disrespect for wild animals and our disrespect for farmed animals has created this situation where disease can spill over to infect human beings.”

LEADERS GETTING THEIR PRIORITIES IN ORDER

LEADERS GETTING THEIR PRIORITIES IN ORDER

It does seem that nothing was done between December (start of the outbreak in Wuhan, China) and midnight on 16 March (start of lockdown) to plan, prepare and buy in products in case the virus arrived in the UK.

Similarly, when compared with the urgency and importance of responding to the climate crisis, virtually nothing was done from the foundation of the IPCC in 1988 to the present.  In 32 years, no response.  And still to this day.  Instead, the exact opposite was and is still being done:

1. with major carbon intensive infrastructure projects like High Status 2 train line for £106 billion of greenhouse gases to compete with internal UK plane flights - just stop them and use existing and unused intercity railway lines like the 120 Kms Black Country Railway that must be finished;
2. Work on the other 23 railway projects that need finishing, improving, modernising.
3. Midland Metro trams replacing buses and trains to make for more road and railway congestion and slower public transport journeys (more changes and more traffic lights);
4. Crossrail 2 for more travel and less working from home;
5. £15 billion to 2040 for West Midlands underground and overground tram projects.

All are concrete intensive, so carbon intensive, so very high greenhouse gas emissions.  Therefore, scrap them.  The Chancellor's economic package to help the economic lockdown/turndown/depression sufferers, is so colossal that that alone should cause them all to be scrapped immediately.

INSTEAD:

• The hundreds of billions would be better spent on basic income for all (the rich sharing their wealth with the less rich);
• fare free public transport for all (not intercity, however);
• working from home using broadband rolled out to remaining urban and all rural areas to discourage working in an office and to allow more shopping on line;
• fossil fuel rationing or carbon allowance for each individual in the UK.

What do you think, Bob?

Tim