In the little town on eastern Long Island where I grew up, there was a house on the corner of Old Neck Road and Main Street. (Years later, that intersection would become a Waldbaum’s Shopping Center, but the time I’m remembering here was long before that sorrow.) The house, set back from the road, had clearly been abandoned for many years. The wood was weathered to a dark gray, the roof was caving in, and plants of all kinds were growing into and around what was left of the structure.
There were a couple of old No Trespassing signs on the parcel, also weathered and falling over, but no fence or moat or anything, so of course, kids from all over the neighborhood trespassed.
It was kind of a wonderland, and an amazing place to play house or school, since there was a sort of structure. This was long before children were protected from derelict buildings and sundry adventures/dangers, so we traipsed all around and inside the rotting home.
What I noted about it then, and what I remember about it now, was how clearly the earth was swallowing up and reclaiming what had been a house. Red oaks had sprouted and were growing in what may have been the living room. Dutchman’s pipe and honeysuckle vined around the vertical beams that had supported the roof over the porch. Everywhere, poison ivy, wild huckleberry, and low-bush blueberry grew.
I don’t know how old the house was or how long it had been forsaken, but the image of that green transformation has always stayed with me.
Honestly, if we leave things alone, it doesn’t seem to take that long for Nature to step in and recoup.
I’m finding that the Corona Pause Button has pretty quickly recalibrated a number of things in my own life; and I’m intrigued by changes I’m learning about in other parts of the world due to the decrease in “normal” levels of fossil fuel-based activity.
I still go to work at the mental health rehabilitation center, and I drive to the trailhead most mornings with my dog. My work commute takes about 12 minutes to travel just under eight miles; the trail is not quite three miles away. (I no longer do neighborhood walks with Ivory because a vicious dog attack a couple of years ago put the kibosh on neighborhood walks for us.)
And that’s all the driving I do now. Before Sheltering In Place, I was making two or three trips of 20-30 miles every week to drive my youngest son to various activities and groups. If I had an appointment with the dentist or the dermatologist or my oncologist, I’d drive about 35 miles. (And yes, I could find a dentist closer to home, but having had the same dentist for 27 years, I’m not going to switch it up now. Unless he retires and makes me.)
So after two weeks of not making any of these longer trips, I drove to a grocery store that was a little less than 13 miles away, about a 20-minute drive, to get various supplies, including a certain kind of very low-sugar chocolate chips (I know: Spoiled). There were other cars and trucks on the road, but nothing you would call traffic.
But the drive felt so LONG! Too long. So it took me about two weeks to reset to a much saner driving distance tolerance.
Meanwhile, air quality all over the Bay Area is vastly improved with huge reductions in particulate matter. The air over China, where I don’t think they’d recognize an emission control if they tripped over one, is significantly cleaner. This is clearly an incredible boon to anyone with respiratory illness. I wonder what it feels like to the birds?
Venice’s canals resembled sewers when I visited in the 1980s. I knew I was supposed to love the place, but I couldn’t get over the unpleasant smells; the tons of trash everywhere, including in the water; and the wall-to-wall tourists. Just giving the whole frenetic tourist project a rest during lockdown has meant that the filthy water has cleared and people can see schools of little fish again. I wonder what it feels like for the fish to be able to see us again?
Climate change has seemed such an intractable problem, something that would take decades, lifetimes to unravel. But we’re seeing carbon emissions drop a lot thanks to Sheltering In Place. We’re adapting, we’re making changes and the earth is responding—quickly--with healing. As with that house from my childhood on the corner of Old Neck Road and Main Street, given a chance, Nature reclaims and renews.
What would happen if we didn’t ramp up all manufacture again to pre-coronavirus levels? I mean, there’s enough stuff, right? Probably we can agree that we don’t need to continue manufacturing sneakers and jeans and various incarnations of plastic shit that end up in the North Pacific Gyre? (Yes. Everybody needs a replacement pair of sneakers every once in a while. But you see what I’m getting at here.)
What would happen if we cut way back on air travel? It’s great to go places, although I’m no fan of travel for travel’s sake; it’s interesting to have important, famous, and accomplished people come to where you live and present on their ideas and accomplishments. But maybe--if we can so clearly impact the health of the earth by limiting all that--maybe we should limit all that. For decades, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance has been championing human-scaled economic and business systems with local accountability; maybe the time has finally come to take this seriously.
I’m sympathetic to the economic arguments here. What do the owners of factories, factory workers, and airline workers do if we dial back manufacture and air travel, to name a couple of possibilities?
Of course I want everyone to be able to make a living; but I don’t think anybody needs to make a killing. This is about fairness, balance, and scale. The tenets of permaculture design are Earth Care, People Care, Fair Share; I would add Self Care to that triumvirate. They’re all relevant to our current moment, and they’re all interrelated. So how about less manufacture, which would directly impact Earth Care? How about more Fair Share? How about manufacture for the social good rather than for the satiation of consumerist appetites? What about shifting from manufacturing stupid plastic crud to manufacturing tools that hospitals and healthcare workers can use? And I don’t mean only during the coronavirus crisis. I’m hoping that, as a result of this challenge, we’ll see how important it is to have enough hospitals, hospital beds, ventilators, etc. to meet moments of extreme need, and we’ll prioritize that and make it happen.
I want to remain hopeful about this moment’s extreme potential for positive change. I want to remain faithful.
I’ve had this Jackson Browne song, “Linda Paloma,” on my mind since I first heard about coronavirus because he mentions “the sun’s bright corona.” When I first heard the song, about 10,000 years ago, it was the first time I’d ever heard the word:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUjM-kEwRhw