David Levy – The World of Anxiety, 2020 – Apr 20
What we are experiencing in our state of self-isolation and lock down is novel and completely off the wall.
Yet here at Marinet it is precisely such novelty that we have been advocating must happen, or the alternative will be extinction of multiple species and maybe even ourselves.
We have all been like a child in a sweet shop, gorging to the point of vomiting and then doing it all over again. Generally speaking, the world has had only one model which it applies to our planet Earth and that is exploitation, diminishing all resources. Maybe there are a few exceptions, but they are very few.
When we emerge from the effects of the Corona Virus (COVID 19) the world will be a very different place, certainly much poorer with mass unemployment and the feeling of having to start all over again. There will be much blaming and lessons to be learnt but, like Grenfell Tower, little accountability because those in charge are the ones who failed us.
We knew about the risks of a virus attack yet little provision was made for personal protective equipment (PPE) or hospital ventilators and those at Porton Down, the scientific research centre, should have warned the Government to be prepared. The measures taken by our Prime Minister Boris Johnson have been questioned for the veracity of the advice upon which those measures depend and then their subsequent enforcement, many viewing this model as leading to more contamination and deaths. That will be the primary discussion in the future.
However, although we know for many people it will be gloom and doom, what is coming is also an opportunity to retackle the world we have created and to establish different, new values in different areas.
Opportunities to deliver better standards, like those set out in the Gold Standard which Marinet is advocating to Government in our forthcoming report on sea bathing water quality which all around the country is adversely affected by poor sewage treatment practices.
Currently, measurement of sea bathing water quality, even after legal but shady measurement methods, reveals how poorly we perform : we are 25th out of 30 in the quality ranking of European countries. Not so ‘Great’ is the reality for Great Britain, and that is nothing when we accurately measure the level of contamination from untreated sewage on our beaches and mud flats. Marinet believes more people could be involved in this task of revealing the reality, undertaking more monitoring and analysis across a broader range of sampling points, offering more employment and committing to a deeper engagement in solving this scandal.
On other fronts, all housing being built will have to fit energy production like pv solar panels or wind turbines for communities to make us collectively more self-sufficient and reduce our carbon footprint.
There are a multitude of opportunities for our companies to produce world leading changes for the future of our communities and so become a force for good. With luck the speed with which bureaucracy has been abandoned during the crisis will open the pathway for things to be adopted for the sake of change and the pace of change.
When the country recovers from this virus once a vaccine is found, then is the time for the public to insist for major change. They are the ones who have lost family/friends and they will want to know that such ineptitude will not be tolerated again.
This questioning should apply to governance all over the World.
David Levy
