Environmental activist Greta Thunberg has weighed in on the coronavirus pandemic, saying the global crisis presents an opportunity for nations of the world to think more long term about Earth’s future.
“Whether we like it or not, the world has changed. It looks completely different from how it did a few months ago, and it will probably not look the same again, and we are going to have to choose a new way forward,” Thunberg said this week during a virtual Earth Day event from her home in Sweden. “If one single virus can destroy economies in a matter of weeks, it shows we are not thinking long term, and we are not taking these risks into account.”
Thunberg, 17, became a lightning rod for the climate change movement last year when she delivered a speech to world leaders at the United Nations, shaming them for not doing more to slow the warming on Earth.
“This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school, on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!” Thunberg said last year. “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet, I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying.”
The teenager’s rhetoric on climate change inspired large demonstrations around the world and earned her the designation of Time magazine’s 2019 Person of the Year.
While there is no concrete evidence linking the coronavirus to climate change, some academics say human alterations to Earth’s natural state could exasperate certain health crisis.
“You have these complex networks of interactions that you wouldn’t be seeing under less disturbed circumstances,” Dave O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, told the Washington Post. “And that provides a lot of opportunities for these diseases to explore alternate hosts and acquire some of the features that would be necessary to make them” jump species.
Some U.S. lawmakers have said the coronavirus pandemic should raise awareness of the dangers of any nation being left unprepared for an international crisis and inspire nationwide reform on the environment.
“This snapshot is being acknowledged as a turning point in the climate movement,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said this week. “Fossil fuels are in long-term structural decline. This along w/ low interest rates means it‘s the right time to create millions of jobs transitioning to renewable and clean energy. A key opportunity.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders, a vocal proponent of the Green New Deal, mentioned the changing environment in a recent op-ed for the New York Times.
“We must make certain that our communities are free of pollution in our air and water, and that we lead the world in combating the existential threat of climate change,” Sanders said.
Thunberg said that during a time of crisis, everyone on the planet should put political differences aside to achieve a higher goal.
“In a crisis you put your differences aside, you act, you go out in the unknown and take decisions that may not make much sense at the moment,” she said. “But in the long run may be necessary for our common well-being.”
