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The Coronavirus crisis has changed our daily lives. It has affected annual rituals, such as March Madness and St. Patrick's Day Parades. While crises take an emotional and economic toll, they also provide opportunities for change. Because they upset the status quo, they force individuals to think of the world in new ways and spur reorganizations of our daily lives. Of course, once the crisis is over, behaviors could return to the status quo. If behavioral changes are desirable, the post-crisis challenge is how to sustain them.
Next month, the world will celebrate Earth Day. Due to Coronavirus, online events will replace “traditional” Earth Day celebrations involving mass gatherings. Could this new format be employed to focus conversations on pro-climate ideas and behavioral changes introduced by Coronavirus policies?
Why Should Earth Day Matter?
At a poetic level, every day should be celebrated as an Earth Day. But there is something exciting and profound about annual rituals. They bring people together at regular intervals and focus their attention on specific issues or ideas. Even the family holiday dinners that some dread are important markers and provide a sense of continuity and meaning to our lives.
This is why April 22 is important. It compels us to reflect on how far we have come since the 1970s in protecting our environment, but also on how precarious our earth remains in spite of this progress.
By some count, 20 million Americans (10 percent of the US population) participated in the first Earth Day celebration. It was a bipartisan event with Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-Wisconsin) and Representative Pete McCloskey (R-CA) serving as national co-chairs. This large-scale citizen mobilization probably helped in the creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of major federal laws protecting air, water, and endangered species.
Earth Day is now celebrated across the world. 2020 is the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. Many groups wanted to leverage these celebrations for more aggressive climate policies. A plethora of events were planned, including Earth Day “strikes” (similar to the September 2019 strike inspired by Greta Thunberg), rallies, and community events, such as cleanups, conservation efforts, and teach-ins. University campuses, in particular, were brimming with excitement about Earth Day events.
2020 Earth Day will probably mobilize hundreds of millions. However, Earth Day organizers will employ non-traditional formats such as a global “digital” strike with “nonstop series of videos, of petitions, of things you can do that will run the 24 to 48 hours of Earth Day.” Many will probably discuss the recent book, Our House is on Fire, co-authored by Greta Thunberg and her family.
Could We Make Behavioral Changes Permanent?
Coronavirus has severely affected economic activity leading to dramatic drops in air pollution in China and Italy. Some suggest that these pollution reductions have saved almost 77,000 lives in China alone!
Could these policies continue? Probably not. Once the lockdown is lifted, economic activity will resume. Factories will restart, fossil fuel consumption will bounce back, and traffic jams will return. Air pollution will revert to “normal” levels.
But Coronavirus policies have also forced behavioral changes. This is where Earth Day could play a role in sustaining them.
Take the case of telecommuting. Individuals reluctant to conduct virtual meetings are now thrust in the world of video conferencing using tools such as Apple's Facetime, Google's Hangouts, Microsoft's Teams and Skype, and Zoom. Let’s call these individuals “Generation zoom” or “zoomers.”
Zoomers might realize that telecommuting is actually a nice option. They can get the work done without the traffic hassle. Those flying a lot for work might salivate at the prospect of not having to wake up at 4:00 am to catch the flight, avoiding airport chaos, and not having to sit in uncomfortable airplane seats for hours (and getting fed on peanuts, literally). Organizations may also like the idea; after all, telecommuting saves time, money, and could eventually improve employee morale (though it might stress zoomers out initially).
Proponents of strict rationality might question the above logic. If Zoom was better than in-person meetings, people would have adopted it already. If they did not, it would mean there was a catch in the “zoom promise”.
Enter psychology and behavioral economics. The argument is that individuals are “boundedly rational.” Humans are prisoners of habit, and they avoid taking unnecessary risks. Consequently, they may “satisfice” and not choose the theoretically best option. Public policy interventions can guide people so that they discover these options. View this way, Coronavirus policies “nudged” the zoomers to try something new and better.
This sort of behavioral inertia is especially relevant for “experience goods:” products whose value consumers can correctly assess only by experiencing them. Anticipating these problems, companies offer free product trials and product return policies. Car dealerships allow customers to test drive cars, Costco offers free food samples, and newspapers entice readers with a free subscription period that stretches for several weeks.
But new behaviors and experiences need to be reinforced to make them permanent. This is where the ritual of Earth Day comes in. It provides a platform for communities to talk about their pro-climate behaviors and brainstorm how these could continue post crisis.
Zoomers could also demand that their organizations make these changes permanent. For example, some universities many have upgraded their Zoom license to offer Zoom Pro to their students, faculty, and staff. Perhaps universities can be persuaded to continue this type of access even when in-person classes resume.
From Social Distancing to Social Solidarity
Social distancing potentially undermines communities. We can no longer go to the farmer's market, attend local gatherings, or visit the local library. Spontaneous chats with neighbors over the fence are frowned upon. And we certainly miss the knocks on the door to place the order for Girl Scout cookies.
Coronavirus may have brought out compassion (although some suggest otherwise, see this and this). There are reports of people helping their elderly neighbors. Many are donating to food banks, realizing the huge economic toll this pandemic is imposing on underprivileged. Foundations and firms are joining these efforts—and even this is insufficient to tackle the growing hunger problem.
Earth Day discussions should help us think about what it means to be a member of a community in times of major crises. Individuals could share how they demonstrated or received kindness and compassion. Or, how they expressed solidarity in other ways. "From Milan, near the northern epicenter of the crisis, to the capital Rome and Naples and Palermo in the south, social media showed people on their balconies or leaning from windows and singing the national anthem or popular songs over the past couple of days."
Climate change is described as a tragedy of the global commons. In response, individuals could become the Garrett Hardin type of uncooperative herders who want to maximize their profits at the expense of others. Or, they could become the Elinor Ostrom type of collaborators who come together in social solidarity to sustainably use the commons. Earth Day discussions should reveal how social distancing did not force us to bowl alone.
The climate crisis is unleashing economic and social dislocations that might cause conflict. While the Coronavirus crisis will probably be contained in a few months, the climate crisis will spread over generations. Social ties will be tested, and social bonds will come under enormous strain. This is why social solidarity is essential to ensure that societies can cooperatively handle climate challenge. Strategies and collective memories of the Coronavirus crisis will help.
To conclude, the virtual Earth Day gatherings should involve collective reflections on how the low-carbon lifestyles forced upon us by Coronavirus could continue. They should allow us to catalog the ways we came together and how these bonds could be nourished to confront the climate crisis.
