This year has been indelibly shaped by the COVID pandemic — it literally changed everything.  What has become clear as a result is that environmental injustice was exacerbated by the pandemic, and if we don’t repair our relationship with the natural world we are going to face more deadly pandemics in the future.  For the early months of the lockdown, we covered COVID every day and these two themes emerged.

In May we wrote that “For communities of color in the United States, years of discriminatory policies and environmental injustice have made them more susceptible to dying from COVID-19. And now, as we’re almost 2 months into lockdown, those same communities are grappling with more severe housing insecurity and worse access to medical care than their white counterparts.”   This injustice did not change over the course of the pandemic, and now as Americans begin to get the vaccine, racial injustice is making Blacks and other minorities wary of taking it, further exacerbating the disproportionate impact on BIPOC communities.

At the same time, we learned that the pandemic originated in bats and due to unsafe interactions between humans and animals, spread around the world, leaving no country untouched. Last August we wrote about this problem — Tara Stoinski, the president, CEO and Chief Scientific Officer of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, explained our current predicament best:

“Covid-19 has made abundantly clear that our assault on the world’s biodiversity is also an assault on ourselves. It has proven that we can no longer afford to dismiss the problems scientists and conservationists uncover in faraway places. As forests are destroyed, people and wildlife increasingly come into contact; as the commercial wildlife trade expands, the crossover of diseases from animals to people occurs.  We simply must take better care of the natural world.” 

Graphic: Annabel Driussi/ODP