LEILA FOURIE: Covid-19 offers chance to build back better than before
Our next threat is climate change and inexorably rising temperatures, but in trying to flatten the infection curve we inadvertently flattened the emissions curve
Earlier in 2020 on a trip to Cape Town, I was struck once again by the incredible inequality that exists in this country. Inequality is at its most graphic, for a traveller, when you drive from the airport into town past the informal settlements that abut the N2.
The concept of informal settlements and the gross inequality was a foreign concept to my Australian guests. Their first sighting stood in stark contrast to the leafy suburbs at the foot of Table Mountain. I’d just returned from visiting my family in Australia. When I was over there the bush fires were laying waste to much of New South Wales and Victoria. Ultimately, an area roughly the size of South Korea was reduced to ash before the rains doused the inferno in February.
The environmental and social effects of what we as humans do have always seemed to be relegated to the fringe. Covid-19 has changed all of that. The worst public health crisis in living memory has laid bare the true scope of inequality across the world. Everyone has been forced to reflect on their own mortality — as well as that of their neighbours. In the process, it’s also ripped off the scabs of wounds wrought by the injustice that has never healed.
Today, that festering hurt runs through the streets of just about every city and town in the US and beyond to Europe and the world. The pandemic has unequivocally reframed our view of the world — and the economy that pays for it.
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