immanence

When we look back at this time a few decades hence, what changes will we take the pandemic of 2020-21 to have ushered in? How will it have transformed work, recreation, travel and transportation, food, politics, and everything else? The following are some initial thoughts toward a hopeful eco-justice based perspective on how the world might have begun changing.

Despite the expectation of an impending return to normalcy, many observers are recognizing that the post-Covid world will be in some ways very different from what came before. Judging by the spate of recent prognostications (for instance, here, here, here, and here), it will be less open and global, more multipolar, and probably more unstable; less growth obsessed, and more cautious and conservative in its expectations; less individualist and more collectivist, more concerned with security and with local resourcefulness; but also more virtual.

In professional and academic fields (like mine), virtual work will have replaced some of the travel that accompanies these, in addition to having become an increased part of daily activities. The arts and recreation will have changed, too: writing in The Guardian, Charlotte Higgins points out that “hybridity – adapting events to have a combined online and live existence – is surely here to stay.” Politics might be more divided, with the pandemic having strengthened the populist movements that were already sliding off the highway of consensus reality, but that’s not certain. At the same time, as a silver lining for many of us, the world will have begun reckoning more directly with inequality — not only due to coincidental events like the killing of George Floyd, but due to the recognition of the differential health impacts and risks associated with pandemics, with climate change, and with everything else that can go or is going awry in the world.

Three overarching trends seem most clear:

• (1) international travel and tourism will be dampened,
• (2) reliance on local resources will be emphasized (especially in communities that had previously depended on income from that travel and tourism),
• (3) and reliance on the internet, for work and for play, will be even greater than before.

The first two trends reflect a “localization” that is consistent with visions of a more ecologically sustainable, or “ecotopian,” future. Until the airline industry figures out how to fly us around on solar and wind energy, it’s pretty safe to guess that we’ve passed “peak global tourism”; there may be brief rebounds and upswings, but the longer term trends won’t be skyward. This also means that a greater reliance on what’s around us — neighborhoods, cities, ecosystems, ecoregions — might come to seem more rational than neoliberal globalism had taken them to be.

The third trend, however, suggests greater dependence on a system that leaves us vulnerable both to digital forms of warfare and terror and to technological catastrophe. It’s not crazy to presume that the next pandemic will be a technological one — a digital virus or plague, a general systems breakdown, or even the technological equivalent of a world war. We are already in what realists would describe as a technological cold war, and both ends of the digital frontier — the legal end represented by behemoths like Amazon, Alphabet/Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Huawei, Tencent, et al, and the shadowy underworld of cyber crime and piracy, state-sponsored cyberwarfare, cryptojacking, ransomware, illicit porn, IoT attacks, and all the rest — are evolving rapidly and uncontrollably.

Here’s how the movement to build a more ecologically and socially just and sustainable world ought to factor these things into its calculus of strategies.

For those working to make socio-ecological change, the internet is indispensible. It is how we communicate today, how we share information, get informed, and build community, not just at the global level but locally as well. Yet we must prepare for a time when it may “go down.” It’s important, then, to make the internet more socially regulated and more secure, less vulnerable to being hijacked by shadowy actors or by authoritarian state interests. Media ecology — both in the sense of understanding and managing the political-economic systems that allow media to function as they do and in the sense of the “ecologizing” of media, the making of all media into ecomedia — will be critical.

Ultimately, however, an ecologically sane future requires rebuilding local and regional networks of food production, manufacturing, waste reduction and upcycling, and everything else. The globalized world will need to remain global in its communication infrastructure — and get much better at that, so that it isn’t torn by rival realities with their own “alternative facts” — but it will also need to become better buttressed with local supports in the material production of reality. Local and regional ecological knowledges will need to get integrated into production chains so as to facilitate the building of sustainable food systems, energy systems, and economies that could stand alone if they had to.

Long-term ecological integrity is hardly possible without that local attention. This is where technological innovation will be most needed: in the design of locally and ecoregionally rational food systems, energy infrastructures, and transportation systems, which would make every city a green city in a sustainable ecoregion. That, in turn, requires considerations of social and community equity that are far from today’s reality. In the long term, there’s no way around any of this, and it will take tremendous resourcefulness and motivation (which is where the arts and religion come in, but those are topics for another day).

That’s the vision for green, socially-just progress (a vision that’s well presented in David Newell’s recent book Global Green Politics). If vision was viral, we’d have a chance. But against the interests of globally organized (and disorganized) capital, working legally as well as criminally to support its short-term economic goals, it will be uphill all the way.