tziteras

The question that's led me to write this has been how do we adapt long term, specifically here in Scotland, where I live now, to coronavirus and the idea that pandemics are here to stay if we stay this industrialised and globalised. How does a society look if it's to be resilient long term, sensible and ecologically regenerative? We do know a few things about this novel coronavirus that we seem to be slowly figuring out as it evolves and spreads, and I have almost a picture of how it might look in my head. Here is the closest I can get so far to it, on a regional scale at least: In the picture, each block is a community of several households and work spaces, and each green space is where they grow crops, or graze animals. So why this system? Around the time when it was obvious a lockdown was coming, I read a community organisation manual that mentioned how graph theory applies to limiting the spread of something like Covid-19. It advocates getting together with your clos...

Who would have known that all the old men, the old women, all their knowledge and experiences, all the people with asthma and diabetes, all the poor people and the indigenous people and disabled, the doctors, nurses and the ill would suffer and die so much from one moment to the next? But by the time all the waves, all the quarantines and thousands dying every day, we had changed our society. We had been forced to reorganise, if we wanted to enjoy a life even a little bit like the life we had before the pandemic. We wanted to go out, we wanted to have some comfort, but we wanted to have food, to be able to offer some hope to our children, we needed a basis on which to build our lives. But we dealt with it, back in the 20s. We rebuilt into a new society, and the names of those who suffered and died, of the doctors and activists, whistleblowers and rent strikers are now the names of our streets. I am standing outside a replica of an urbanisation, a block of flats in hexagonal sha...