The Upside of Broken: Remaking Differently #Fridays4Future #ClimateStrike

Common Dreams has a terrific article — I mean terrific — about the two major crises Earth faces now: COVID-19 (which, in case you didn’t know, is called COVID-19 because it was identified in 2019, not because it’s the 19th coronavirus) and global climate change.

The article, Humanity Must ‘Tackle Two Crises at Once,’ Says Greta Thunberg of Climate and COVID-19 on 50th Earth Day, includes three videos, including this visceral little gem:

My main take-away from the article was this:

As the coronavirus has spread across the globe, killing nearly 180,000 people, infecting more than 2.59 million, and devastating the world’s economy, climate and environmental activists have called for a global Green New Deal and just recovery that prioritizes a rapid transition to renewable energy and other efforts to reduce planet-heating emissions and pollution more broadly. Recent studies tying poor air quality to COVID-19 deaths have added weight to those demands.

COVID-19 has shattered lives, economies, world-views; it’s shown us who is essential and who is merely parasitic (tl;dr: We’ve had it upside-down); the shattering was so great because of the flaws in the system. Why remake the world in the same shape as before, lovingly recreating the flaws that make the last model so fragile?

Nobody sane would have wished for this. But it’s here. Let’s make the most of an opportunity that we can’t escape to forge a future we can live with.

I feel better already.

A WRITING PROMPT FROM ME TO YOU: A treasure is revealed when something is broken.

MA

About

I was born in Louisville, Kentucky, but now live in the woods in southern Indiana. Though I only write fiction, I love to read non-fiction. The more I learn about this world, the more fantastic I see it is.

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One thought on “The Upside of Broken: Remaking Differently #Fridays4Future #ClimateStrike

  1. Desserae Shepston

    April 25, 2020 at 1:11pm

    Great article, and I agree with your statement at the end: “Let’s make the most of an opportunity that we can’t escape to forge a future we can live with.” I keep saying that my hope for the crisis we face now is that it will teach us all something. I hope we learn the value of slowing down, of breathing fresh air, of community, of nature, of our creative selves, and of love. This crisis is here, as is the climate crisis, but in shifting our perspectives, we might just be able to take this opportunity to create a better world.

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