Earth Day, 2020

Today is Earth Day for 2020.

It'll be the oddest one in years, due to the Pandemic. And that will cause a lot of overblown and frankly sanctimonious commentary.  No matter what a person thinks of the state of the world, the COVID 19 isn't nature's way of rising up and smacking the human race.

Indeed, while we can't really appreciate it, the COVID 19 Pandemic is to a large degree a return to the human norm.  For most of our existence we lived with the constant unrelenting threat of death by disease.  Even in times in which there were not pandemics, and that was most of the time, there was disease and quite a few diseases were endemic to populations.  Death by smallpox, measles, influenza, scarlet fever, and the common cold, was common.  The death rates we're experiencing right now were basically the pre 20th Century norm, most of the time.

That doesn't mean that this year shouldn't cause us to pause for reflection.  We have hopefully learned from this experience in a lot of ways.  And some of that education should be that the glass and steel, cubicle, money focused world that we've created, and even the most "green" among us live in and often heavily participate in without even realize it, has a lot of defects and disadvantages.  Maybe being forced out of the cubicle and into the homes we've created, to our satisfaction or horror, will cause us to ponder the big questions.