Every day brings a new story of lockdown. The news does not let us forget the experience of confinement, reminding us with new and different sorts of lockdowns daily:
· Ukrainians locked down in basement shelters waiting out Russian bombardment.
· Supreme court members locked down in chambers while protesters, angered by a recently leaked opinion, gather on the other side of a double fence.
· Iranians, Iraqis, and Syrians locked down in their homes while a series of climate accelerated sandstorms makes breathing outside unhealthy.
· School children locked down in their classrooms to prepare for, or react to, a shooter entering the school building.
We Americans thought we could put the awful feeling of confinement behind us, as we ended COVID-19 lockdowns. We look with horror at the strict, “zero COVID” policy in China where people are locked down inside their apartments for weeks and months.
Philosopher Bruno Latour suggests we think about pandemic confinements as training ground for the climate emergency. He explains how COVID-19 lockdowns provide practice for how to live within the confines of earth.
“…the lockdown imposed by the virus could serve as a model for familiarizing us slowly with the general lockdown imposed by what is called, in a mild euphemism, the ‘environmental crisis’. “
In other words, we can contemplate parallels between our reactions to COVID-19 lockdowns and the reality that – except for a couple of billionaires- we are confined to planet earth and and its limited resources.
“We know very well that the bubble of conditioned air we reside inside depends on our own actions. This is the real confinement, …”, says Latour.
Can we learn to live with the “real confinement” that is no short-term temporary lockdown? Will we give in to impulses to get back to what we imagine to be the free and unconfined normal? Or can we take from the pandemic experience some ease with confinement and seek climate solutions consistent with limits imposed by our interdependence with the earth’s eco and social systems?
Can we “… get out of the idea of getting out of it”? and instead occupy ourselves with healing and recovery of soils, ecosystems, oceans, great lakes and long COVID-19 patients?
Nicholas Christakis, a physician, sociologist, and expert on the history of pandemics suggests the following three conditions for getting through pandemics and other “collective catastrophes that must be experienced separately.” – like the climate crisis.
Develop “a collective understanding of the threat that we are facing.”
Allow “thoughts of mortality” to create “introspection about what gives life meaning.”
Realize how important it is “that Science not be seen by too many as serving political ends.”
Can we imagine a world where these conditions prevail?
Indian author, Arundhati Roy, invites us to see the pandemic as “a portal, a gateway between one world and the next”. She warns that “Nothing could be worse than a return to normality,” and believes that we can choose to
“walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”