#this is like my 50th post about light pollution

[quinn-fucks-shit-up]

instead of a temperature blanket I'm going to make an infinitely more depressing light pollution blanket where the colours are just the colours of the sky out my window at night

[elsquibbonator]

Pondering the Pandemic-- Part 2

Last year, I wrote a post on how the “environmentalism fad” of the 1990s seemed to be making a comeback, with plastic waste in the oceans and forest fires in the Amazon rainforest making headlines all over the world. Now, a year later, those issues have all but vanished from the news. Not because they actually disappeared, however, but because the COVID-19 pandemic has essentially replaced them as the global concern du jour. Stories about straws in the ocean cannot, it seems, compete with a pandemic for front-page news. 

In my last post I discussed how the COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to a number of pseudoscientific stories about animals. But the pandemic has indeed had an environmental impact. With many countries, including the United States and China, enforcing lockdowns on their citizens, international travel has all but ground to a halt. This has resulted in a dramatic drop in global greenhouse gas emissions for the first time in many years, as well as a decline in water pollution.

It would be tempting to imagine this as a sign of humanity’s relationship with its environment beginning to improve, but this is not the case. The pandemic, however long it will last, is ultimately a temporary event, and when it ends, things like greenhouse gas emissions and water pollution will almost certainly return to their historic high levels.  I write this post on the 50th anniversary of Earth Day--an American holiday dedicated to environmentalism that was announced in 1970. Its 20th anniversary in 1990 was marked by a renewed interest in environmental matters. But the 1990s were a different time. America had no enemies, very little crime, and a thriving economy. In such circumstances, environmentalism was something that the news was willing to discuss. 2020 has proven to be different. We now have an economy on the verge of recession and a global pandemic. Environmental concerns have not become any less objectively important in light of these events, but they now have to compete for public attention, in a way they did not 30 years ago.  In an ideal world, environmentalism and COVID-19 safety would both be great concerns in 2020. But it seems as though the public can only handle one major crisis at a time. The fact that Americans only seem to concern themselves with environmental matters if there is no other crisis to distract them bodes ill for the future of the environment as a whole. At 50 years old, has Earth Day been forgotten?