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Our Brave New World

by KATHRYN BOUGHTON

Years ago, on the last night of a trip to France, a bug flew through an open window and hovered over my ear as I lay in bed. I slapped at the bug but only succeeded in driving it deep into my ear canal where it died a lingering and incredibly distracting death.

The next morning, my smart aleck son asked if I was going to declare the bug on the customs statement I had to file when I got home. Certainly not, I responded. I was going to smuggle in some wildlife right under the noses of U.S. government officials.

“There goes life as we know it,” he replied.

Well, that bug didn’t do it, but a still smaller micro-organism has succeeded in upending life in America—indeed, around the world. Like that earlier, literal, bug, we carry this one around in our bodies, multiplying it and depositing its spawn here, there and everywhere, passing it on to unsuspecting strangers or, more personally, to friends and family. So virulent is this virus that it will surely end life as we have known it.

No, I do not expect that COVID-19 will remain uncontained for long. But I do believe it is finally forcing us to face reality, to understand that nature is stronger than we are and that we have to act more wisely in the future. We can no longer ignore our impact on our planet or to walk around with the complacent attitude that humans are an evolutionary apex.

I rarely agree with President Trump but he is right that we are engaged in a war. It just happens to be a bigger war than he cares to acknowledge. The pandemic is a health problem that has become an economic catastrophe, but ultimately it is just a small piece of the disaster we will face if we do not become more thoughtful and proactive in the way we approach our environment.

As has always been the case, people are finding ways to battle this misfortune, to come together to carry forward the work of the nation and to care for each other—even if it has to be from a distance. Ironically, I think social distancing may force us to adopt, at least temporarily, measures that could benefit the global environment. Already, scientists are seeing improvements. Satellite imagery from the European Space Agency shows, in what one expert has termed “the largest scale (industrial emissions) experiment ever,” that levels of nitrogen dioxide over cities and industrial clusters in Asia and Europe are markedly lower. And in Venice, after a matter of weeks, the canals have gone from murky to clear.

Surely, these examples are only the tip of the iceberg of environmental improvements if people decide to work smarter. Barkhamsted, one of the towns I cover for a regional newspaper, demonstrated that this can effectively be done even in the rural Northwest Corner when it recently held a virtual meeting. The Selectmen convened a remote meeting that drew “together” three selectmen and two reporters with nary a one of us getting in a car to go to town hall. Not only did we prevent contagion, we reduced—albeit by a minuscule amount—pollution.

People like to get together, we are inherently social animals and there is fear that the enforced social isolation as we collectively oppose the spread of COVID-19 could exacerbate psychiatric problems such as depression. But the fear engendered by an enemy we can not see, cannot protect ourselves against, is real. I saw it recently in a supermarket where shoppers exhibited stress and fear—eschewing even the polite smiles and social greetings exchanged by strangers. The experience, a matter of buying a mere pound of butter, was strangely cold without the social lubricant.

But, here too, a silver lining might be evident. If families are isolated together, if parents are teaching and playing with their young children, won’t family bonds be strengthened? Instead of running hither and yon, taking our children to be coached, educated, counseled by others, might we not get to know them better ourselves? Instead of couples immersing themselves in work and extracurricular activities, might they not speak to their partners for more than the average 23 minutes a day? A quiet talk on a porch in the spring sunshine can be every bit as satisfying as going alone to a gym.

This pandemic is causing real hardship, real danger, real death—but it is not, as some have said, unlike anything ever seen before. Little problems like the Black Death in the Middle Ages killed 60 percent of all Europeans and reconfigured the economic and social structure of Europe (ironically, it too, came out of Asia and followed trade routes to Italy).

In Colonial America repeated scourges of yellow fever left residents traumatized and fleeing cities while carters rolled through the streets crying, “Bring out your dead.” My own great-great-grandmother’s 1870 diary records her fear as she watched scarlet fever moving toward her home through her coastal Maine community and her despair when her three children were laid low, one nearly dying.

She was used to a world that was not under her control: today, we think we have dominion over Heaven and Earth. It is not so, but we do have the power to act in concert to keep each other safe and to draw new wisdom and new resolve about how we take care of our world.

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