The Bright Side of the Coronavirus: A Break for Mother Earth

             Elsewhere where we find prestigious megaprojects like Egypt’s Aswan high dam, built by Russian money and brains to produce a level of power far beyond the needs of the nation’s economy, that meanwhile blights the environment and the local agriculture in a dozen unforeseen and possibly insoluble ways.  Or consider the poor countries that sell themselves to the international tourist industry in pursuit of those symbols of wealth and progress the West has taught them to covet: luxurious airports, high-rise hotels, six-lane motor ways. Their people wind up as bellhops and souvenir sellers, desk clerks and entertainers, and their proudest traditions soon degenerate into crude caricatures.  But the balance sheet may show a marvelous increase in foreign-exchange earnings. As for the developed countries from which this corrupting ethos of progress goes out: more and more their “growthmania” robs the world of its nonrenewable resources for no better end than to increase the output of ballistic missiles, electric hairdryers, and eight-track stereophonic tape recorders.  But in the statistics of the economic index such mad waste measures out as “productivity,” and all looks rosy. 

                                              -Ted Roszak, Introduction to the 1989 edition of E.F Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful 

This article is intended to supply some context of the effects of the Coronavirus-induced global slowdown vis-à-vis similar events in recent history, as well a compilation of the positive side effects for the environment. 

                The understanding that humans have vastly altered Earth for the worse is so widely accepted that it’s not uncommon for people to refer to the Coronavirus outbreak as Mother Nature’s way of retaliating against us for our destructive actions against the natural world.  No doubt you’ve heard the slogan and seen the memes: “We are the virus.”  While I cannot go so far as the Extinction Rebellion extremists insinuating the “take down” of civilization and mock suicide, nor bring myself to support the Green New Deal in its current manifestation laden with quixotic and hypocritical decrees in pursuit of a habitable planet, I do believe that E.O Wilson is on to something with the idea of Half-Earth – a proposal to set aside half of the planet’s land as protected natural spaces.

            Under any manmade economic model (Capitalist or not), during massive periods of growth and expansion, nature suffers.  Yet when an economic slowdown occurs, trade and industrial activity become sluggish, energy and power use decline, then stagnation sets in.  Economic recessions and depressions translate into a reduction in fossil fuel extraction and pollution, which means a break for the ecosystems that have suffered so that economies might grow.  For three days following the September 11^thattacks, all commercial flights (except for those carrying Saudis) in the United States were grounded.  Due to the absence of air traffic and vapor trails which had evidently been contributing to the warming of the U.S climate, the skies above America cleared, leading to a decrease in global dimming.  The catastrophic events of 9/11 led to a brief purge of atmospheric pollution on the eastern seaboard of the United States.  Yet whatever air quality advantages were gained then were surely lost in the ghastly Afghanistan and Iraq forever wars subsequently launched. 

            Curiously, post-Iraq War conflicts in the Middle East seem to have led to an improvement in regional air quality during the early part of the last decade. According the Professor Johannes Lelieveld of the Max-Planck Institute, air pollution declined significantly after the U.S began losing occupied territory to ISIS in Iraq and Syria.  The Jerusalem Post points out that “nitrogen oxide is a form of air pollution, common byproducts of road traffic and energy production. Since the mid-1990s nitrogen dioxides in particular have been monitored from space.  Using satellite data Lelieveld says he’s found that the ongoing turmoil in the Middle East is drastically decreasing the level of air pollutants across the region.”  Be that as it may, the improved air quality was certainly not worth the violent civilian deaths and suffering at the hands of ISIS.  Furthermore, the immense amounts of energy and resources expended by the militaries involved in waging war and occupying territories in the Middle East have certainly wiped-out many times over any air quality gains attained after the ISIS insurrection.  

            But if we’re comparing historical events to the current economic standstill, the most accurate contemporary parallel would be the 2008 Great Recession, when financial meltdowns paralyzed economies worldwide for over two years, resulting in mass job losses and disruptions to trade, mining, and manufacturing, but also measurable benefits for the environment.  During this crisis global imports and exports plummeted, coal, metal, and mineral sectors dwindled, and the burning of fossil fuels burning declined.  Between 2007 and 2013, carbon emissions in the United States fell about 11%.  Whatever you may think about man’s impact on the climate, it’s hard to deny that global ecosystems and wildlife overall must be enjoying this respite from human activities with a handful of exceptions including the few unlucky felines that have contracted Coronavirus, such as the tiger at the Bronx Zoo.   (Great apes may also be susceptible, which has led to a suspension of gorilla tourism in Africa.)  Then there’s the ‘Blue Lagoon’ of Buxton which was dyed black by UK police in their incomprehensibly stupid attempt to prevent tourism.  Another area that will see energy use increase during quarantine periods is household electricity and internet services, which account for nearly 4% of carbon emissions, an amount previously comparable to the airline industry.  Shelter-in-place orders spurred internet traffic in the United States and Europe to increased by 20%, but at least people are buying plants, right?   But presently as a whole, Mother Nature must be breathing a sigh of relief as economies worldwide, with the Coronavirus acting as the catalyst, implode.  It is as if humans have temporarily stopped pummeling and battering the natural world, which has entered a state of recovery and is showing beautiful signs of relief.  Here’s a compilation of some positive environmental developments resulting from the Coronavirus-induced global economic downturn, quarantines, lockdowns, and cessation of business as usual. This less busy world will probably last for another few months, and then we’ll return to business as usual: poisoning the vegetation, excavating the land, polluting the oceans, depleting the seas, eating exotic animals, and being distracted by mass sporting events while our governments carry out bombing campaigns and drone strikes across the Middle East and Central Asia.

1.  Cargo Ships.  Since production and manufacturing in China are down, cargo ship exports are down.   80% of the products we consume are ferried across oceans on cargo ships which are responsible for underwater sound pollution, wildlife collisions, and burning “bunker fuel” or “heavy fuel oil” –an extremely dirty, high sulfur content fuel which is the byproduct of petroleum refinement.  While transport ships contribute to less than 3% of manmade carbon emissions, the heavy fuel oil burning means that cargo ships burn the lion’s share of sulfur oxide – more than all the cars in the world.  "Carbon-in-transit" emissions that are produced by transporting a piece of product in the global supply chain across borders account for 10% of all global carbon emissions and have tripled between 1995 and 2012.   Usually at sea there are around 6,000 large container ships and 100,000 transport ships, and 70% of shipping emissions occur with 250 miles of land.  While ascertaining an exact percentage of how much global shipments have dropped since the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic is difficult, and there are reports of an industry recovery since China re-opened its economy, here are some figures which illustrate the scale of the reduction in cargo sailings:

-On February 5, 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported: “Ship calls at or through major Chinese ports have fallen 20% since Jan. 20^th… the impact of factory shutdowns and other restrictions hitting China’s economic output will reduce global ocean container volumes, a major piece of global trade, by about 0.7% over the full year, or about 6 million containers… data collected on weekly container vessel calls at key Chinese ports already shows a reduction of over 20% since 20 January.”

-On February 14^th, the Wall Street Journal reported that not only are less cargo ships transporting goods, but the ones that are have less goods aboard. They wrote:   A Shanghai broker said at least one container ship that can move more than 20,000 containers left Shanghai for Northern Europe with only 2,000 full containers.  “It will pick up more at ports on its way, but loading data show it will reach Europe around 35% full.”

-On February 24^th, the South China Morning Post reported that in China “commercial vessels have stopped arriving, with port calls falling by an estimated 30% in February, and container throughput estimated to decline by between 20% and 30%”

-On February 27^th, the New York Times reported  “In January, container volume dropped 2.7% at American ports, according to Panjiva, a research unit of S&P Global Market Intelligence. And officials say they expect much bigger declines as the crisis goes on.”

-On March 10^th, the Financial Post reported that “International freight and logistics companies are reporting declines of as much as 85% in the volume of Chinese-made goods arriving in the Port of Vancouver, as the impact of COVID-19 begins to shake supply chains.”

-On March 17^th, Zero Hedge reported that the “Port of Los Angeles has published its latest data about monthly container statistics, Saxobank's Christopher Dembik writes, the drop in container volumes at Port of Los Angeles was -22.87% in February, which is the worst monthly performance since February 2009

-On April 2^nd, the Wall Street Journal reported that “container ship carriers have canceled about half their services out of China in the first quarter and are continuing to “blank” sailings on major trade routes for the second quarter as they try to preserve cash.”

This supply chain disruption not only translates to a reduction in the pollution released into the air and sea by cargo ships, but also a reduction in potential pollution of transported fuels such as coal, iron, and ore that are not arriving at their destination and would otherwise be burned.  Because some commodities and manufactured goods are no longer being produced and transported, there is in turn a reduction of single-use products and materials packaging winding up in landfills.  Notably, in the case of car tires, not only has the economic downturn reduced the volume of car tire and rubber imports, as well as car tire production (tires are comprised more of synthetic rubber than natural rubber, and seven gallons of oil are required to make a car tire; a truck tire requires twenty-two), but Coronavirus lockdowns mean less automobile traffic, which means less vehicle emissions and microplastic pollution from tires.  30% of a tire’s mass will wear down though use over time and those particles are deposited onto the roadways.  Over two million tons of tire particles are released into the environment in the United States annually. Tires account for as much as 28% of overall microplastic waste in the world’s oceans, and could be the largest source of microplastic in California’s coastal waters (accounting for over seven trillion pieces of microplastic in the San Francisco Bay each year). So while government and societal reactions to the Coronavirus pandemic are having terrible repercussions for the lives of humans, the seas and creatures therein will surely benefit from the reduction of cargo ship traffic.  

2.  Cruise Ships.  Although the coronavirus has not deterred people from booking future cruises, and the pernicious industry which puts floating cities of tens of millions of obese, geriatric, and bored westerners on 3,000-passenger ships so that they may dump sewage, food waste, and plastic in foreign waters will rise again, for now cruises have grinded to a halt.  Cruise ships inflict astonishing damage upon the environment.  Every day (under normal economic circumstances), cruise ships emit the same amount of particulate matter as a million cars.  Cruising emits four times more C02 per passenger than flying.  In 2017, Carnival Cruise Lines alone emitted more sulphur oxide into the atmosphere than ten times the amount of cars in European Union.  Cruise ships burn solid waste and discharge the incinerated ash into the ocean, including the physical shit of the passengers. There are numerous other problems with the cruise ship industry, and the fact that Coronavirus has temporarily suspend cruise ship operations will be a godsend for marine ecosystems. There are 314 cruise ships globally with the collective capacity to accommodate over 500,000 people, and over 26 million passengers ride on these giant, floating, shit-machines every year.  Before the Coronavirus, there were around 170 cruise ships operating.  That number is now down to less than a dozen (some without any passengers), that are in the process of completing their itineraries and are looking for places to dock.  For the sake of all marine life, and for those of us who are not morbidly obese or hopelessly lazy and desire to see the world outside the confines of colossal prison-ships of decadence that discharge their vile effluence across islands and reefs, the less cruise ships floating around the world the better. 

3. Fishing.  In addition to reductions in cargo ship bunker fuel oil, microplastics, and human feces entering the marine environment, the fish of the world will catch and additional break as marine fleets and commercial fishermen remained moored in the face of plummeting demand for seafood. While this is terrible news to the commercial fishing industry and the communities (who may be bailed-out) that rely on income from fish sales for their livelihoods, and for whom now going out to sea is outweighing the payment for catch, this is fantastic news for exploited and depleted fish stocks that are being presented with a chance to rebound.  According to Bloomberg: 

“The Covid-19 outbreak has decimated the restaurant trade and wreaked havoc with food supply chains. Demand and prices have collapsed in Asia, home to some of the world’s largest seafood and fish markets. In Spain, which has the largest fleet in the European Union, half of the ships are staying at port.  Plummeting global demand for fish and seafood as a result of the coronavirus crisis is likely to create an effect similar to the halt of commercial fishing during World Wars I and II, when the idling of fleets led to the rebound of fish stocks.  The closure of restaurants and hotels, the main buyers of fish and seafood, together with the difficulties of maintaining social distancing among crews at sea have caused hundreds of fishing vessels to be tied up at ports around the world.” 

            An NPR article noted that 50% to 60% of wild seafood caught in the U.S is usually exported (and of the seafood that’s not exported, 80% is sold to restaurants), but due to the Coronavirus international markets have dried-up.  Again, a major blow to people in the fishing industry, many of whom work for organizations much more respectable than that of the cruise ship industry, but this reprieve will likely prove to be a blessing in disguise once fish stocks are replenished. Considering the dearth of cargo ships, cruise ships, and fishing vessels, whales are probably having a particularly enjoyable migration season without as many ships scattered across the seas and fishing lines dispersed along continental shelfs.

4.  Flights and Air Quality.   The travel restrictions implemented in the wake of the Coronavirus has reduced the number of airline flights by around 50% to 80%.  In the wasteful United States, despite passenger volume having dropped by 96%, the number of flights has only declined by 50%, meaning that many flights are practically empty. Regardless, airlines are cutting flights left and right, and this will continue into the summer.  According to the Guardian, “the aviation industry accounts for about 2% of global carbon emissions, although this is concentrated among the small fraction of the world’s population that regularly flies. The reduction in flights is expected to reduce pollution levels, with emissions from the sector dropping by almost a third last month.”  So with less pollution from planes, cars, boats, and factories, the typically smoggy skylines of major metropolises like Beijing and Los Angeles are once again clear.   From America to Italy to India, this story of clear skies is repeated the world over.  After 30 years, the Himalayas are once again visible from India.  Former Indian cricket player Harbhajan Singh, wrote, “We can see the snow-covered mountains clearly from our roofs. And not just that, stars are visible at night. I have never seen anything like this in recent times.”   Despite its claim of having resumed production months ago, satellite images show drastic drops in pollution in China, including in Wuhan, where crematoriums are no longer continuously burning bodies. According to the Associated Press, NASA measurements show that “March air pollution is down 46% in Paris, 35% in Bangalore, 38% in Sydney, 29% in Los Angeles, and 26% in Rio de Janeiro.”  Relatedly, a major boon to the atmosphere are the cancellations of sporting events, festivals, conferences, joint military exercises, and other large-scale, waste-producing, consumption-driven human gatherings requiring mass transportation and astronomical amounts of resources and energy.  On top of all this, the economic slump has contributed to the plunging demand for oilin an already statured marketplace with storage facilities filled to capacity.  With less machinery burning and transporting oil this spring and summer, animals will be traversing through cleaner and quieterseas and skies.  Similarly, the meat industry has also suffered closures at the hands of the Coronavirus induced depression.  Since meat processing plants, schools, and restaurants have closed, farmers have nowhere to sell their meat, milk, eggs, and produce.  This has led to the daily dumping of millions of gallons of milk, the smashing of millions of unhatched eggs, and farm animal culling in accordance with the reduced demand. While none of this seems positive, the meat production industry is constantly singled-out as a leading contributor of greenhouse gas emissions (accounting for up to 18% globally each year).  The fallout from this devastating blow to industrial agriculture (and unfortunately small, local farms as well) will likely include a positive upshot for the environment in that pollutants produced by the sector will fall.  

5. Animals.  As human activity subsides and Mother Nature is given some more breathing room, animals are faring better in both obvious and subtle ways, although in some cases ecosystems and wildlife are faring worse.  Insofar as uplifting positive observations, there’s no shortage of stories (including fake ones) of wildlife sightings in urban areas: coyotes roaming the streets of San Francisco, boars in downtown Barcelona, kangaroos in downtown Adelaide, penguins waddling though Cape Town, mountain goats strolling through Wales, wolves in Normandy, jackals in Tel Aviv, deer in Japanese train stations, jellyfish swimming the canals of Venice, vultures circling New York City.  Outside of cities, birds are taking over beaches and towns in Peru and Lebanon, fin whales are swimming through Mediterranean shipping lanes, monkeys are flying kites in India, and predators are reclaiming Yosemite.  Absent for years, jellyfish masses are returning to deserted Palawan beaches in the Philippines. By the tens of thousands, endangered sea turtles are returning to nest on the shores of  Florida, Rio de Janeiro, India, and Thailand.  Would-be hunters are canceling elephant hunting trips to Botswana.  With less voyeurs around, pandasin Hong Kong’s Ocean Park have finally mated.  If the official story of patient zero contracting the Coronavirus from eating bat soup is true, then that bat which passed on the virus to humans – triggering a chain reaction that caused the unprecedented shutdown of world economies and the most extensive lockdown of humanity in the history of civilization – should be perceived in the natural world as something of a Jesus-like bat martyr, its death representing the greatest sacrifice and gift a single creature could ever bestow upon the rest of the animal kingdom. Indeed, in a nod to the potential pathogen spillover infection danger posed by eating the outlandish fare in their wet markets (actually, popular footage of the “Market of Terror” in Wuhan was filmed in Indonesia), China has apparently passed a ban on the trade and consumption exotic animals (now if they could only stop their soulless practice of life feeding). Undoubtedly, the wildlife is benefiting from this respite of human onslaught in more subtle ways. With less noise pollution, whales may be able to communicate across longer distances again.  Insects and plants will most likely enjoy a boost in pollination activity this year as humans ease up on their beatdown of the biosphere.  

6.  Dark Sides.  There are darks sides of the pandemic’s effect on wildlife and the environment. Poachers in South Africa and Botswana are taking advantage of declines in tourism to kill rhinoceroses and hack off their horns (but more poachers are being killed, too) in empty refuges and parks where the pachyderms are usually safe.  Since the start of the pandemic at least six rhinos have been poached in Botswana and nine in South Africa, and those are just the ones we know about.  In the last decade over 9,000 rhinos were poached.  The Amazon Rainforest has seen a spike in illegal deforestation since the start of the pandemic.  According the Wall Street Journal, “With hundreds of environmental enforcement agents sidelined by the pandemic, deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon has increased to its fastest pace in years—and the season when clearing typically accelerates hasn’t even begun yet.  Satellite data collected by Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research from August 2019 through March show 2,031 square miles of new clearings, nearly the size of Delaware. The newly deforested area is 71% larger than the previous high for the equivalent period, which was recorded in 2016 and 2017.”  Medical waste disposal is also impacted by the Coronavirus.  According to The Verge, “Hospitals in Wuhan were generating up to six times as much medical waste at the peak of the outbreak as they did before the crisis began.”  While the drop in elective surgeries may offset the increase of pandemic-related waste produced as a whole, the reckless disposal of personal protective equipment has increased to the point that discarded masks and gloves are apparently being spotted in greater numbers in oceans worldwide.

7.  Humans.  While widespread suffering and immiseration have been brought on by the Coronavirus pandemic, there are many ways in which people benefit from quarantines and lockdowns. Europeans may see fewer Islamic terrorists entering the continent on jihads since ISIS has issued a travel warning to its fighters, telling them to avoid “the land of the pandemic.”  Similar to how a truce to end the civil war in the Ivory Coast was reached when it qualified for the 2008 World Cup, a ceasefire has been declared between Saudi Arabia and Yemen so that they may focus on containing the Coronavirus instead of killing each other in the ungodly war they have been fighting for the past five years. In addition to alcohol sales, divorce rates are up in quarantined urban areas in the United States and China.  Thus, the Coronavirus has forced an expeditious end to many unhappy relationships. On the surface, skyrocketing unemployment and twenty-two million Americans losing their jobs is not a good thing, but it may result in people rearranging their lives for to better, so they may aim for their goals and achieve things beyond their wildest dreams.  People may take advantage of this period of reduced consumerism to garden, create art, read, spend time with family, play outdoors, meditate on their past, contemplate their future and on the fragility of life.  (Between 1965 – 1967 during the bubonic “Great Plague” years in England, Isaac Newton fled Trinity College in Cambridge to his home hamlet of Woolsthorpe in the Lincolnshire countryside where he experimented with light and prisms, discovered differential and integral calculus, and formulated a theory of universal gravitation.)   Importantly, we might learn as a country to better prepare for future crises of this scale.  (And at the end of the day, we are actually doing quite well in the battle against Coronavirus, and are lucky to be grappling and contending with such a serious pandemic in this technologically-advanced age of plenty.  As the Indian proverb goes: Do not blame God for having created the tiger, but thank him for not having given it wings.)     We may finally shift our manufacturing sector back home and become less reliant on China for our medical supplies, appliances, and accessories.  We may learn as individuals and as nations to become more self-sufficient so that we’ll no longer depend on government handouts or other countries for our survival and success.  We may take steps to retain some of the recent gains seen in the natural world, so as to become better stewards of the environment, forging a new dominant economic path forward and aspiring toward a different way of life – one that is not predicated on unsustainable systems of insane trade and takes into greater consideration the lives of the billions of other organisms we share our time alive with and that also call this planet home.  

Or, we may not.