The Covid Crisis: “A Wake-Up Call” to What?1

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

The Covid crisis has been so much discussed that it's difficult to address it without falling instantly into cliché. Clearly, the initial response to it has to confront the immediate practical issue: how to limit infections and the death rate and protect the population, and yet keep the economy functioning so that essential services continue and businesses and jobs are enabled to survive: how to “get through the crisis”, in a word, with minimal destruction. This is the urgent and necessary issue, and many people, eager to get back to normal, might say it's the only issue. That would be a perfectly understandable response.

Perhaps surprisingly, however, from some people we have heard a different reaction. They have not in any way sought to minimise the seriousness of the crisis. But they have wanted to look beyond the immediate disasters, and to say that there is something in this crisis that we need to learn from. When they speak of the Covid crisis, they use some phrase like: “it gives us our last chance”, or “it's a wake-up call!”

I'd like in this paper to look at the question of what this might mean - “a wake-up call” to what? And if a wake-up call is often an alarming event, warning us that if we don't attend to this alarm, something considerably more alarming will occur - then what might that greater danger be?

Seen in this perspective, the “wake-up call” is to see the pandemic as yet another symptom of the sickness that humanity is inflicting on the earth. Our huge success as a species, signalled by the increase of the human population from about one billion two hundred years ago, to nearly eight billions today, is coming at a cost we will not be able to afford. Climate change will not end in some single moment of operatic catastrophe, like the biblical Apocalypse. To borrow a phrase from Flavelle and Moran (2020), it will be “a relentless grind of overlapping disasters, ma