Entry tags:
Competing & Compatible Priorities during Concurrent Emergencies
Climate emergency. Homelessness emergency. Covid-19 emergency. Sometimes the instructions we are given to deal with an urgent, acute and hopefully fairly short-term crisis like Covid-19 may be counterproductive for long-term issues like climate change. Sometimes not. Let me attempt here to tease out and unpack a few of the major considerations.
Health care services and infrastructure have always relied heavily on disposable products to help prevent further spread of disease - gloves, masks, scrubs and other garments; hypodermic needles, gauze and other bandaging materials and so forth. Certainly some products can be recycled or even sterilized and re-used, but medical waste often involves some stringent disposal protocols. Conversely, environmentalists urge us to reduce, reuse and recycle as much as possible.
Aside from hospitals, clinics and other health care facilities, there are all the places food may be sold or served. Early on in the modern-day environmental awareness movement (perhaps the 1970s and 80s), around the time when blue boxes were being distributed to people's homes, we used to get a 3-cent discount for every reusable bag we brought to the grocery store (that, of course, was in the days when we still used pennies - copper, by the way, being one of the substances least likely to harbour the Covid virus for a long time, though that's another story). Then, once they decided enough people were ecologically conscious enough to deal with it, they got rid of the metaphorical carrot and substituted a stick, in the form of a 5-cent plastic bag fee. In the wake of Covid-19, there has been a movement back to disposables. Some stores are waiving the 5-cent bag fee and many are pre-packaging more produce to prevent virus-contaminated hands from squeezing the lemons and making Covid lemonade. Coffee shops, many of which are still open for take-out and drive-through, will no longer allow you to bring in your own cup. Beer stores no longer allow you to return your empties.
And speaking of drive-through, let's discuss private vehicles. Use of public transit is being discouraged, though not completely shut down. Where stations are open, gas is selling at bargain-basement prices, so that's not an incentive to conserve - though all the shuttered businesses and people working from home certainly might be! With social distancing the new reality, carpooling is presumably a bit of a no-no too. And what about intensification, which seemed to be the buzzword for the twenty-first century as public transit infrastructure expanded? If you're confined to quarters through quarantine or self-isolation, proximity to neighbours and use of common areas again becomes something to be avoided. And that doesn't even begin to address homelessness.
I'll finish with a few positives. Environmentally-friendly transit need not be limited to public transit. We can still walk, cycle, roller-skate, etc., depending on the distance to be travelled and our state of health. With weather getting warmer and more pleasant, people may be increasingly willing and even eager to use these options. And there also are a small number of electric and hybrid private vehicles out there as well. From what I've been reading, carbon emissions are already quite a bit reduced now that so many people are working at home and not going out much. The other thing is that the Covid-19 virus apparently does not like heat. That may be good news for snowbirds returning from Florida, for our own warm springs and blisteringly hot summers, and for the warming of our planet in general.
We're told to get used to the new normal. But how many people out there, regardless of how educated and intelligent they may be, really have a good grasp of what that will mean?
Health care services and infrastructure have always relied heavily on disposable products to help prevent further spread of disease - gloves, masks, scrubs and other garments; hypodermic needles, gauze and other bandaging materials and so forth. Certainly some products can be recycled or even sterilized and re-used, but medical waste often involves some stringent disposal protocols. Conversely, environmentalists urge us to reduce, reuse and recycle as much as possible.
Aside from hospitals, clinics and other health care facilities, there are all the places food may be sold or served. Early on in the modern-day environmental awareness movement (perhaps the 1970s and 80s), around the time when blue boxes were being distributed to people's homes, we used to get a 3-cent discount for every reusable bag we brought to the grocery store (that, of course, was in the days when we still used pennies - copper, by the way, being one of the substances least likely to harbour the Covid virus for a long time, though that's another story). Then, once they decided enough people were ecologically conscious enough to deal with it, they got rid of the metaphorical carrot and substituted a stick, in the form of a 5-cent plastic bag fee. In the wake of Covid-19, there has been a movement back to disposables. Some stores are waiving the 5-cent bag fee and many are pre-packaging more produce to prevent virus-contaminated hands from squeezing the lemons and making Covid lemonade. Coffee shops, many of which are still open for take-out and drive-through, will no longer allow you to bring in your own cup. Beer stores no longer allow you to return your empties.
And speaking of drive-through, let's discuss private vehicles. Use of public transit is being discouraged, though not completely shut down. Where stations are open, gas is selling at bargain-basement prices, so that's not an incentive to conserve - though all the shuttered businesses and people working from home certainly might be! With social distancing the new reality, carpooling is presumably a bit of a no-no too. And what about intensification, which seemed to be the buzzword for the twenty-first century as public transit infrastructure expanded? If you're confined to quarters through quarantine or self-isolation, proximity to neighbours and use of common areas again becomes something to be avoided. And that doesn't even begin to address homelessness.
I'll finish with a few positives. Environmentally-friendly transit need not be limited to public transit. We can still walk, cycle, roller-skate, etc., depending on the distance to be travelled and our state of health. With weather getting warmer and more pleasant, people may be increasingly willing and even eager to use these options. And there also are a small number of electric and hybrid private vehicles out there as well. From what I've been reading, carbon emissions are already quite a bit reduced now that so many people are working at home and not going out much. The other thing is that the Covid-19 virus apparently does not like heat. That may be good news for snowbirds returning from Florida, for our own warm springs and blisteringly hot summers, and for the warming of our planet in general.
We're told to get used to the new normal. But how many people out there, regardless of how educated and intelligent they may be, really have a good grasp of what that will mean?