COVID-19 has revealed again that Earth is a small planet, and we’re all in this pandemic together. Yet, in judging our collective efforts to scrape by and prevent future tragedy, humanity would only scrape by with a passing grade.
We all need to up our game if we’re going to succeed at preventing and managing future pandemics, let alone slower-moving climate and ecological crises.
Success requires embracing pre-emptive action and rejecting the flawed notion that over-preparing is a sign of weakness. Coming into the COVID-19 crisis, a range of outcomes were possible.
For true success, humanity should have prevented the novel coronavirus from ever having evolved to infect human hosts. A next-best level of success would have had us immediately