While I – and I am sure most of you – can’t wait for the day when I can open a paper or magazine and not have to read about the swathe of destruction the coronavirus is wreaking on the world, it is true that the pandemic, and the global lockdown that ensued in an effort to contain it, have illustrated some things that I hope can only bode well for the future.
Firstly, it has thrown into sharp relief that people and nature are not separate entities. We are dependent on it for almost everything, from the air we breathe, to the food we eat; just as it is shaped by us in a myriad of ways. This influence goes both ways, and can be positive and negative. The fact that the virus jumped from animals to humans is not surprising – several such deadly diseases, including HIV, Ebola, and SARS, as perhaps the best known, are zoonotic in origin.
Human-animal disease transfer is not new, but the fact this one was able to tear through our societies at such a rate is new, and that is down to the fact that in our globally inter-connected world travel is faster and easier than ever before. What this has shown is that we as a species cannot set ourselves apart from nature. We are part of it, with an incredible influence on it, and will remain so despite growing technological advances seeming to remove us to a digital age.