If there is one lesson all of us should have learnt during the Covid-19 crisis, it is about how to separate the ‘essential’ from the ‘non-essential’. In the different stages of the ‘lockdowns’ endured by much of the world’s population, we have stepped out to procure (or been delivered at home) only what is ‘essential’ for daily living, foregoing a lot that we may have in pre-COVID times obtained. We are talking here, of course, of those of us who have the privilege of living beyond survival, not about hundreds of millions of economically and socially marginalised people who have even in pre-COVID times been living on the margins.
What does this teach us about possible consumption patterns in post-COVID times? Let’s remember that COVID has come at a time when we are already in the midst of multiple other global crises, including runaway climate change, the first great human-induced biological extinction, irreversible pollution of air, water, soil, and our bodies, rampant human rights violations, growing income inequality, erosion of democratic space, and illnesses of both deprivation and affluence. Post-COVID, we have to get back to dealing with these multiple crisis, which may also assist us in avoiding further COVID-like situations. This requires fundamental changes in how we relate to each other as humans; and to the rest of nature, recalling here that many COVID-like outbreaks in the recent past have their origin in the massive destruction of natural ecosystems and in forms of animal use, including the industrial production of meat for global trade.
Unsustainable and inequitable production processes and lifestyles across the world are linked to unbridled affluence. Such processes and lifestyles require the destruction of forests, the mining of lands, the damming of rivers, the conversion of enormous areas into industrial meat or monocultural crop production. Apart from irreversible ecological damage, they lead to the displacement of millions of people from their homes and lands.
