Big ships can turn around: What Covid-19 tells us about the climate crisis

The seriousness of the climate crisis and the magnitude of the things we need to take it on can feel totally overwhelming. Climate touches everything we do as a species and everything will need to change in some way.

Honestly, some days it can feel like too much. Too much to think about. Too much to do.

But things can and do change, all the time. What’s the saying about the only thing constant is change? Even big ships can turn around. Sometimes very, very quickly.

Think back to early 2020 when all the Covid-19 shutdowns started and how dramatically things changed – overnight.

For me, the moment it started feeling very real was the evening I read on my news feed that the NBA stopped their season right in the middle. The NBA! This had to be serious.

Entire countries shut their borders virtually overnight. Within days, companies flipped their business models. Within weeks, the world had been remade.

It can feel like a blur now, but think back. Human ingenuity was everywhere. People like my aunt LuAnn were sewing masks at home and delivering them to hospitals. A friend in the UK was 3D printing face shields at home for healthcare workers. Governments set up mass Covid testing stations and with businesses shut down, they passed laws to pause mortgage payments and tenant evictions.

In California, where we seemed to be able to do almost nothing about homelessness for decades, we were suddenly able to convert hotels and motels into desperately needed homeless housing.

We can and will do whatever it takes when we want to.

Sometimes, changes made as an emergency reaction can bring lasting benefits. California now has more homeless housing – permanently. Once cities across the US got a taste for sidewalk dining, there was no going back. Many employers that were able to move to work from home during the early stages of Covid have embraced flexible working options indefinitely. More people now have more time for themselves and their families. Everyone seems to have reconsidered how and with whom we spend our time. Some of us traded suits for shorts and never looked back.

Of course, not all reactions can or should keep happening. Kids have paid a high price for missing so much in-person school and so many businesses were crushed by the shutdowns. And there are a lot of things we didn’t get right. The reality of the millions of lives lost is a tragedy at a scale we have not seen in most of our lifetimes.

But we have also shown ourselves something important about what we as humans are capable of. We’ve shown that we have what it takes to show up for and take on the other big challenges we are staring down.