While the coronavirus disease 2019, or COVID-19 for short, is rampaging throughout the planet, Mother Nature is starting to heal the Earth’s natural environment. Since more and more people are staying home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, our planet’s natural environment is becoming less and less polluted.
In areas throughout the globe that are normally extremely polluted such as China, huge reductions in air pollution are starting to be seen. It is reported that in China, emissions fell down by 25 percent at the start of this year. I feel like this is due to the fact that there is less air and road vehicles traveling because of the orders for everyone to stay home. Also, Chinese factories have been temporarily shut down, so less coal is being used to fuel the electricity that powers these huge factories. Since less coal is being used to fuel all of this electricity in China, less carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide are being released into the air.
I believe that forcing a massive number of people to stay home is a double-edged sword for a variety of reasons. One of the pros of forcing a massive number of people to stay home is that it means that less people are traveling via airplanes, cars, etc. This means that there are less emissions getting released into the environment. One of the major cons to forcing a massive number of people to stay home is that a large majority of people are getting laid off. Even though the economy is crashing and people are dying all because of this virus, I think that this whole situation will show everyone just how resilient the natural world can be and hopefully we can all learn a lesson from it all. The lesson we would hopefully learn from this whole situation is that no matter how hard or how many times we push nature away, the natural world will always find a way to spring back up and strike us back. So instead of fighting against Mother Nature, we should learn to live with it in a harmonious relationship.
I feel like COVID-19 allowing the natural world to heal itself from pollution could be a feasible way for China and many other places around the globe to begin to insert different policies and laws against releasing too many emissions into the atmosphere and from polluting nature in general. I believe that this could be an achievable way to help implement these types of policies and laws since as more and more people are staying at home and indoors for a prolonged period of time, once they eventually go outside and see the natural changes that are happening around them, they will hopefully realize the absolute beauty of true nature. After people come to realize this, I hope people will begin to rally to push lawmakers and politicians to make more laws against the destruction of our natural world, because so far we only have one Earth to live on and it is completely possible to make it absolutely uninhabitable for our species to live on if we go back to our old ways of polluting everything.
Andrew Chase can be contacted at:
achase@kscequinox.com
