Can we make sacrifices when scientists say it's necessary?

In the Czech Republic we have lived with school quarantine and national lockdown for six weeks now.

The entire service industry—beyond grocery stores, gas stations and pharmacies—is shut down. Major factories have closed. All of the borders are closed. Road and air traffic has been cut to a minimum. People rarely leave their homes. Everything happens online.

Children study at home. Adults work online. The only activity you are allowed to do outdoors is go to a natural area to walk or bike alone. People who still have jobs and open businesses are allowed to go to work and one family member at a time can go shopping for food.

Image by Arie Farnam

That’s it. That is the new normal.

Everyone who leaves home must wear a face mask. Only if you are in your vehicle alone are you allowed to be without a facemask. If you are in your vehicle with your child, who shares your household and air every day, and you are not wearing facemasks, you are very likely to be stopped and fined.

It has been six weeks and while the economic strain may force some changes in May, there is no real end in sight. In some places Covid-19 lockdown may not be entirely enforced. But here it is strict and it isn’t just the authorities enforcing it. Social pressure is intense if any individual is seen outdoors without a mask.

My husband who rides his bike on the “communing with nature” exemption is often yelled at for not wearing a mask while speeding down a scarcely used rural road at 40 mph without a mask. Doctors say wearing a facemask during physical exertion is unsafe and can lead to heart attacks and that the distances involved make such exercise safe without a mask, but the media spin is all about Coronavirus with none left over for details.

The media reaction around Coronavirus has been off the charts. Fear has spread like wildfire. People I never would have believed would go in for such fear or be willing to change their way of life so drastically for anything have fallen into line like so many ants.

On the one hand, I hear criticisms over the phone from my few advanced students who work in medical fields. They say that, yes, COVID-19 is a bit worse than the flu and, yes, we should be concerned, but they worry that the fear reaction has been blown out of proportion and they wish people were more careful about other diseases that have caused and continue to cause preventable deaths.

I am watching the social situation with a certain amount of analytical interest. I would not have believed such massive economic and social restrictions would be accepted so enthusiastically by the public for anything short of an air raid or a nuclear attack. But the restrictions have been followed willingly and peer-enforced by the vast majority of the population.

Much of it appears to be motivated more by fear than by an altruistic desire to protect that portion of the population which is truly at risk of serious illness or death from COVID-19. But still even the idea that fear could motivate people to sacrifice in this way is novel and surprising.

I’ve spent much of the past ten years trying to raise concern about climate change and implementing what measures I could in my own life. It’s very hard to do something like that on your own. Anyone who is concerned about COVID-19 and trying to do voluntary social distancing in an area where authorities are not imposing it will now understand what I felt for years over climate change.

Frankly, the “sacrifices” we are making regarding COVID-19 aren’t that bad. The worst is probably that I may not see my family in Oregon this summer, and depending on what this does to the airline industry and the wider economy, it may be a long, long time, if I do see them in person ever again.

That hurts. No doubt about it. The thought of never being able to go home again hurts a lot. But I’ve always known that if real steps were ever taken to combat climate change, long-distance air travel would be one of the first things to go. I’ve been ready to give that up. It just didn’t make any sense to sacrifice my own family for a symbolic savings that would not in reality change anything for those dying due to the catastrophic effects of climate change.

The other sacrifices we are making because of COVID-19—staying home all the time, living in close quarters with family, being isolated from friends, foregoing social engagements and entertainment, taking economic and financial hits—these are not fun, but they are easily survivable. The hardest thing is dealing with insanely demanding and insensitive teachers, who insist my kids must do long lists of make-work exercises in order to keep them “occupied,” but refuse to teach online or provide interaction with kids.

All the actual teaching, explanations, motivating and corralling distracted kids must be done by parents, if teachers refuse to interact. With kids with special needs, that is easily a full-time job for me—a job I’m not paid for that prevents me from doing the work I might get paid for.

The combination of complex technological struggles and kids with learning and behavioral disabilities makes it one of the least pleasant times I have ever lived through. It is definitely less pleasant than the five months I spent on short rations in Siberia amid extreme economic crisis when I was nineteen, and that is saying something. But it is primarily the actions of insensitive and oblivious humans that make it that way, not the actual conditions of quarantine.

Other than the school issues, quarantine is easy if you live in a place where it is handed down from above. Work schedules have been accommodated to it. Food deliveries are sporadic but they keep coming. Official support for the measures and the fact that everyone else is doing it makes it easy.

My kids used to complain bitterly about the restrictions on our lives caused by combatting climate change. They could see that few of their friends take the train on a regular errands or walk and bike to school. They could see that their friends eat differently, don’t have to recycle and have a lot more plastic stuff at home. Even my husband resented our climate-related “Victory Garden.”

But the kids are fine with COVID-19 restrictions. It’s exciting and they feel like they are part of a community effort when they put on masks. They ask almost every day, if their friends can visit, but it is the other kids’ parents saying “no,” more than me. I’m not the one putting on the brakes and asking them to make sacrifices this time. They can see the facemasks on everyone’s faces when they watch people out on the road and even live in TV studios. They are happy about being home from school, though unhappy about the extra load of schoolwork. Most importantly, they don’t see it as my doing.

It’s easy when you don’t have to fight your family over it.

Many friends have started to refer to Victory Gardens online because of COVID-19. People who used to dismiss my calls for gardening and self-limiting to combat climate change are now ordering seeds and shovels.

The end result is actually much better for the climate and the people struggling to survive in flood and drought zones than anything activists achieved before. Long-haul air transport is now rare. The roads are empty. Everyone shops online for food and does without new plastic stuff because only grocery stores are open.

It’s easy when you don’t have to explain endlessly to dismissive and jocular friends why you choose limits.

I have to say that I am pleasantly surprised, even relieved to see that our society is capable of this. If we can do this over COVID-19, surely we can do it for the much greater, already very deadly and equally scientifically certain crisis of climate change.

The missing elements, of course, are the media frenzy and the official support for limits.

I used to have difficulty even imagining a scenario in which people in our society would actually act on climate change. Now it isn’t so hard to imagine. All I have to do is replace the word “Coronavirus” in the news cycle with “climate change,” and the scenario is all too realistic The intense media focus on the virus has infected every corner of the blogosphere, including avidly trend-bucking ol’ me.

If this amount of media attention was paid to climate change, I guarantee we would see significant remediation. Even if authorities didn’t act of their own accord, popular pressure would soon force them to. The onus now seems to really be on those who wield pens and cameras. It is our move in the struggle to save the world.

The media focus made Coronavirus the defining issue of 2020. Media focus can do the same on climate change. There are no more excuses. It’s a choice.