Ten Corona Lessons (For Now, and a Better Future)
Eliran Bar-El This ‘natural disaster’ is not natural—if anything, it’s social However tempting and consoling it may be, to think of this pandemic as a natural occurrence entirely out of our control, this is a gross and dangerous mistake; in fact, this calamity is not only natural. Recent months have proven how much and how deep the natural world is intertwined with the social. The mere variance in death toll, different as it is between the nations, indicates that what we do, or not do, matters. It is not just that ‘nature’ invaded upon us from the outside. Rather, ‘nature’ is also within us, and we interact with it, changing it, creating and destroying it. China’s place-in-the-social-space, being the world’s factory, must be considered as part of the multiple causes that created this epidemic; and the globalisation through which the west consumes what the east produces made this into a pandemic. Therefore, to keep ignoring our interaction with nature, and its change a...