Humanity is in crisis. But we’re not the only passengers on spaceship earth, are we?
In my own little escape pod in the woods, we’ve been wondering aloud how the natural and animal worlds are seeing or responding to the human emergency.
Do they know? What do they know?
I have no idea. But I do know that a fisher went by the window in broad daylight, and the cat’s a bit stranger than usual, and there are fish and swans and dolphins in Venice for the first time in ages, and even the notoriously polluted air in China is clearing up.
As we wait desperately for a return to a new normal, you kind of have to wonder if the fishers in the woods outside my window and the fishes in the canals in Venice and a lot of other creatures in a lot of other places aren’t feeling some kind of longed-for relief now themselves.
Everyone I know who is still able to do so is taking long walks these days, appreciating places and paces they haven’t enjoyed in forever.
The evidence of the destructiveness of the old normal is fast becoming obvious. When humanity emerges from this crisis, what sort of humanity, exactly, will we be?
Colin Steele 