Tag Archives: Covid-19

Thinking post-Covid

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We started writing Thinking Like a Human back in 2012.  That now seems a long time ago, in our own lives, and in the world around us.  At the time we had adjacent offices in the Department of Geography in Cambridge, and lots of opportunities to meet and chat.  Since then, Chris has moved to the new Cambridge Conservation Initiative building, and taken over as Director of the Masters in Conservation Leadership.  Bill has retired after a period as Head of Department.  In 2020 and 2021, Covid has made a shambles of all routines of academic life: we are working from home, and the idea of being able to meet in person and spark ideas seems something from a remote world. 

It has been replaced with a world of all-digital communication. This feels very different.  It is pretty good for some things – seminars or committee meetings, for example, or conferences attended by people from all over the world, no longer constrained by visas and costly air flights.  But it has been bad for others.  We have found it especially poor as a medium for conversation. And so, while the world of blogs, and social media of all kinds, has blossomed under Covid, we have found ourselves lonelier and more isolated.  We miss being able to talk about things we have noticed, or what we feel about things happening in conservation or the wider world.  We miss the opportunity to urge each other on to develop and write some passing thought (or to stop being silly about others).  We have found ourselves more easily drowned by the onrush of digital stories.  We have both been challenged by the simple logistic and emotional demands of lives under lockdown.

And so, ironically, in a time of digital supremacy we find we have written less since the early days of Covid-19 than at any time since we started.  It is not (we hope) that we have stopped thinking or dreaming, or being irritated, or rejoicing, but that we have found it harder to find the space to reflect and to write.  Doubtless both urge and opportunity to write will return, and Thinking like a Human will be back to business-as-usual.  Until then, we will be self-indulgent.  Our output has always been episodic (neither of us is a diligent digital animal).  But now, more than ever, we will ignore the siren call of ‘more is better’ – more words, more ideas and arguments and more readers. We will write when we see opportunity or a need, or have an idea that won’t stop bugging us.  We hope you will understand, and stay with us through what seems to be emerging as a bit of a fallow period.

Green Development?

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Recently I held in my hands a printed copy of the new Fourth Edition of my book Green Development: Environment and Sustainability in a Developing World.  It had been a long while coming.  The contract I signed in 2012 set a submission date of December 2014: the manuscript was finally submitted in 2019, a cool four and a half years late.

In my defence, revising it was hard.  When I blithely agreed to do a new edition, both I and Routledge thought in terms of a quick update, with maybe a few new bits of writing to meet some of the more enthusiastic suggestions of reviewers.

It did not turn out like that.  Too much had changed – and too much was wrong with the previous edition (not least that I found it long-winded, choked with quotations that made it hard to read).  I ended up rewriting almost every paragraph, restructuring the argument and adding new chapters.  I cut words and references fiercely, like a gardener clearing brambles.  But as hard as I cut, behind me new words took root and grew.

I should have known it would be difficult to do justice to the field of sustainability and development.  I had made exactly the same mistake twice before. This was the fourth edition of the book.  The original was written in the 1980s and published in 1990.  It was written in a world without email or Internet: I spent my small advance on my first ever word processor (the remarkable Amstrad PCW).  At that time, systematic thinking about environment and development depended on the World Conservation Strategy (1980), and the Brundtland Report (1987).  The second edition appeared in 2001 and the third in 2009.  These had to respond to the 1992 ‘Rio Conference’ and the explosion in international debate and policy that followed it (not least about the UN Conventions on Climate Change and on Biological Diversity) and the Millennium Development Goals.

Everywhere there was more to say: more case studies, more theories, more contrasting ways of looking at the problems, more arguments about what ‘the problems’ were and what perils lay in particular ways of defining them.  Everybody had an argument to make about sustainability, nature and human futures. There had been endless meetings and reports, generating well-intentioned statements that ranged from the visionary to the self-serving, the heartfelt to the platitudinous.  A huge crop of new academic writing had sprung up, with new disciplines (for example ecological and institutional economics or conservation biology) flowering and new ideas setting seed (for example ecosystem services, natural capital,  resilience and governance).

In the face of this growth industry, the second and third editions of Green Development grew fatter, slower, less sharp.  By the time I finally turned seriously to the new edition, the UN Conference on Sustainable Development had taken place back in Rio in 2012, and the Sustainable Development Summit in New York in 2015.  The Sustainable Development Goals had generated their own explosion of scholarship. The challenge of dealing with all this material seemed overwhelming.

Curiously, as I hacked my way through thickets of old writing and new, it was the first edition to which I turned for the heart of the new book.  Not just because it was shorter and better written (or at least I thought so), but because of the critique of the conventional model of development that it built upon.  These were the debates of my youth.  I was doing my A Levels in 1972 when The Limits to Growth appeared, and the new Ecologist Magazine produced A Blueprint for Survival.  The following year saw publication of E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered.  The very title of Only One Earth by Barbara Ward and René Dubos, also 1972, summed up the impossibility of accepted ideas of growth.   Like others of the generation who watched the Apollo missions unfold, I took for granted the idea that the Earth was a unique and limited place in an inhospitable universe.

Doing my PhD on the impacts of development projects on small farmers in the African Sahel, I discovered Robert Chambers’s Rural Development: Putting the Last First, and later the works of Murray Bookchin and Robert Goodland. I realized that development as often brought problems as solutions.  And that was what I meant by ‘green development’ in the title of the first edition.  As I wrote in my first blog for Thinking Like a Human in 2014, the word ‘green’ is so loosely used that it might seem meaningless, a rough label for any kind of ‘environmental’ argument or action.  But to me the word seemed useful to draw together challenges to the conventional development model of unceasing economic growth, of unconstrained production and consumption, and the appropriation for profit of non-human nature.

In the 1990s and 2000s, as sustainability became a mainstream idea, critiques of Western developmentalism got rather drowned out in the torrent of academic and popular debate.  Now it has come into its own again.  In the 1970s, environmentalists spoke rather piously of existential challenges to human futures.  Today such challenges are unmissable, particularly in the form of climate change.  Moreover, the poverty of international policy responses has drawn attention to the structure of the world economy, to failures and limitations of governance and the pervasive inequalities and injustices that characterize and entrench them.

The standard model of development that served industrialized countries so well for so long is once again understood as a problem, not a blueprint for the future. In the 1970s, the key concept to frame this understanding was ‘limits to growth’.   This time around, attention is focused forwards,  on degrowth.  Can we build an economy of care, of the commons, of simplicity and conviviality, of cooperation?  Can we achieve prosperity without growth?  Can we rethink economics to deliver happiness?

When you are writing a book, you can keep tinkering with the text (indeed, that is one reason why books get delayed!).  But as soon as the manuscript is delivered, that window closes.  As an author you suffer agonies until publication day, watching new publications appear, and the world you have written about start to change.

So it was with the new edition of Green Development.  In the months after submission in 2019, the newspapers were full of Extinction Rebellion protests in the streets of London and other cities, and Greta Thunberg lecturing jaded politicians about their responsibilities to the earth.   The new edition of Green Development finally appeared in print back in January 2020.  Holding the finished book my hands then, I measured it against this explosion of interest about new ways of living.  I had re-centred the book on critiques of developmentalism, but I wished I had done more.

But now even January 2020 seems a lifetime ago.  The Covid-19 pandemic, with its cascade of closed economies, locked down people, and death stalking ordinary lives, has changed the debate again. Some commentators have drawn hope from responses to the pandemic, seeing vision, courage, empathy, care, a respect for science, and sheer hard work in the common good.  To some, the radical policy innovation demanded by Covid-19 arguably shows what might be done to build a sustainable and just world. Climate change may be a slower burn crisis than Covid-19, but, as Greta Thunberg points out, it demands as serious a response.

Yet radical change is scary.  The familiar exerts a huge pull, particularly for those who have been doing well out of the existing system.  Calls to re-establish ‘business as usual’, global trade, high street shopping, cheap air flights and holiday travel, are strong.  To re-imagine human futures is one thing, to lead or even follow the policy change is unnerving and takes courage.

And some Covid-19 policy-making is not encouraging, marked by short-sightedness, greed, selfishness, and aversion to risk.  We sense the pulling up of drawbridges, the closing off of sympathy for those who are different from ourselves.  The Black Lives Matter protests have focused global attention on structural injustice and inequality, and the bloody and coercive histories behind the wealth of ‘developed’ countries.

Thinking about Green Development, I recognise that it probably does a better job of explaining problems than offering solutions.   I comfort myself that if you don’t understand problems you can’t fix them, although this is an easy cop out.  Thinking about the book in the light of this extraordinary year, the Covid-19 pandemic holds up a mirror in which we can look at ourselves and our societies.  If we gaze into it, we see not a world easily remade, but a set of intractable challenges and tough choices.  Many of these are horribly familiar, even if they strike us as new.

Old entrenched problems are often the hardest to solve.  But one thing is very clear: never has bold thinking about what matters in the world been more urgent.

Coronavirus and Conservation: a global situation report

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The global covid-19 coronavirus pandemic has had a profound impact on all sectors of society around the world, including wildlife conservation. The nature based tourism sector has collapsed, fieldwork is often impossible, and donors are withdrawing funds. This represents a serious challenge to conservation, which will endure for years to come. At the same time, there may be a glimmer of hope in that the situation could open up new possibilities for transformative change in relations between people and non-human nature.

Bill Adams has written two excellent articles on covid-19 and conservation on this blog in recent weeks – the first considering the broad implications of the pandemic for conservation, and the second describing his personal experience of this year’s ‘silent spring’ in a Cambridgeshire village. Like Bill, each of us is experiencing the pandemic in our own way, with great variation from person to person and place to place. However, like the blindfolded men of the Indian parable who each encounter a different part of an elephant but cannot see the whole, it is difficult for any of us to understand clearly what is happening in the conservation sector around the world.

In an attempt to see more of the elephant, I circulated a short survey about conservation and covid-19 to the current and former students of the Cambridge Masters in Conservation Leadership. The Conservation Leadership Alumni Network (or ‘CLAN’) are a global network of established mid-career conservation leaders from 75 countries. Many work ‘on the ground’, and are well placed to share information about what they see happening, and their ideas for the future. The survey was circulated on Wednesday 15th April. By Tuesday 5th of May it had received 31 responses (from a total of 179 alumni) from 6 continents and from 9 different cohorts. The rest of this article is a brief situation report based on the responses. Sharing of the results on this blog has been approved by the alumni cohort representatives. To protect anonymity no specific countries are mentioned. Continue reading →

Silent Spring

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The freedom to take an hour’s walk or bike ride each day has been one of the unexpected pleasures of the Covid shutdown.   April was scarily dry, with day after day of blue skies. Blackthorn bloomed in the hedges, and the nettles, docks and rye grass began to cover up the winter’s accumulation of plastic and cans. The occasional cowslip and jack-by-the-hedge appeared, just holding their own. Repeating the same routes, you get to remember where these flowers are and look out for them, like neighbours suddenly become friends.

The most remarkable thing about cycling under Covid has been the emptiness of the roads. This has been a silent spring, although not at Rachel Carson foresaw it. The silencing this spring has been of human engines. The roads lack their usual freight of hustling SUVs, the thrusting executive saloons, zippy commuter bubbles and trucks. There have been a few delivery vans, hunting for addresses like queen wasps checking out the roof tiles for a place to nest. But the exurbia of the Cambridge countryside, the outer commuter land, has been silenced. Cars lie parked up in front of new refurbished and extended houses, suddenly redundant. Rat runs have turned into country lanes, and those vehicles that pass announce their coming, pass and fade away, leaving silence behind them.

The Covid countryside is spookily empty, like a film set for an episode of Poirot, or Lark Rise to Candleford. To travel in it is to feel the experience of previous generations, before the roads became a Scalextric track for commuters, before the roads were metalled, before the internal combustion engine drove out the horse, before even the routes between villages were turnpiked. Roads lead past the site of a Roman villa, past Saxon villages, medieval churches galore, inter-war bungalows and postwar council houses. In every village there is a war memorial. The contemporary world momentarily silenced, a bike ride traces a landscape of former neighbours, ancestors and ghosts.

And, joyously, that landscape is not silent. Blackbirds and robins fill the air with song, woodpigeons, jackdaws and rooks shout heartily about their affairs. On one back road, there is a particular telephone wire where a yellowhammer sometimes sings, and over several woods a buzzard has been circling and calling. Stop by a flowering blackthorn or, now, hawthorn (the appropriately named May tree), and the air is filled with the buzzing of bees and hover flies, a deep hum that speaks of Summer’s own engine spinning up.

This year, spring has moved ahead, but it is as if the human world is paused.   It is disconcerting to walk along a road and hear bird song; to stand on a junction at commuter time and see not a trail of cars rushing homeward nose to tail, but the road empty in both directions; to smell not exhaust fumes but hawthorn blossom; to hear not the grind of car tyres but a robin’s song. Overhead, no planes fly. The other evening, watching a skylark sawing away a hundred feet above a wheat field, I was slightly shocked to see a movement behind it – an airliner 30,000 feet higher, heading northwest, presumably on the great circle route to America.

Not only is the countryside quieter, it is also cleaner. With the lack of vehicles comes a new clarity to the air and ground. No particulates, no NOx, no sulphur, no ozone in the air. No microplastics ground from tyres, no hydrocarbons or heavy metals in road runoff. Do this for long enough, and maybe the nitrate pollution that has become such a pervasive homogenizer of lowland floras in the UK would fade away.

Lockdown offers a window into an ecological past, a vision of a possible ecological future. As Chris Sandbrook pointed out when he read a draft of this blog, lockdown’s fortuitous timing, on the cusp of a warm spring, offers the chance to appreciate the year’s ecological unfolding, at a time when it is a delight to be outside. Nature provides a solace for our suddenly grounded and enclosed lives.

This closeness to nature, and our new appreciation of each other, might lead us to imagine a different future, one where we live more frugally, we care for each other, we appreciate the support of previously unsung heroes of ventilator machine, dustbin and delivery package. We might imagine a world not built around the motorcar, where the skies are not crowded with airplanes, where nature can be found and appreciated outside our front doors, in gardens, parks and roadsides.

This is not the world we came from scant six weeks ago. It is also not the one being demanded as pressure grows to ease lockdown. The dominant concern of governments and businesses is to restore the economy, to bring the old world back. And so, while commentators like George Monbiot have urged the government to use the economic shock of covid to rebuild a different economy – a greener economy – this is not what is in prospect. Back at the start of March, the boss of Ryanair condemned ‘irrational panic measures’ in response to Covid.   At the star of April, Easyjet received a £600m loan from the government and the Bank of England to tide over losses from grounding its fleet. In the middle of April, the BBC reported that US airlines would receive a £20 billion rescue package.

As the government considers lifting lockdown, there seems little chance that the economic machine might be restarted in a mellower and less destructive gear. Nature has, briefly, thrived this spring. Restoration of the status quo will end the ephemeral rapprochement with nature, and leave only its echo behind.

The real and horribly familiar silent spring is still the default model. Agricultural sprayers are still at work. Even now, the fields of wheat and rape are largely stripped of unprofitable life. The great ecological silencing goes on, and the industrial vice around nature still tightens. Alternative visions are likely to prove mere mirages, swept away when this season of lockdown is done and the toiling machinery of our lives clanks back into action.

And yet the questions are persistent. The world we know may be one where ecosystems are routinely squeezed and run down, but can the world not be made to work a little differently? Perhaps we have become less ‘socially distanced’ from nature as we have watched this spring unfold? If so, maybe we will remember this closeness in the months and years to come, and – each of us, as we can – seek out new ways to live. Covid has scrambled all our systems of provisioning, employment, socialisation and health. We have had to live differently, and relate to people differently. Can we keep the best of that and weave it into the recovery to come?

Meanwhile, the day is again blue, woodpigeons are making scuffling love on the roof and the blackbirds are doing their best to sing all the parts of the dawn chorus. The evenings are still drawing out, and there skylarks over the field near the church. The first swifts have made it back from Africa, even if they come now as single spies and not battalions. There is a world to build, but for a moment I need to go out and listen to the sound of silence. And build up the fierce heat of remembrance for the times to come.