An unemployed parent living in a small Portuguese town said that "the natural world was very grateful that human beings stayed indoors". A change in people's socio-ecological attunements as a result of the pandemic seemed possible. For this study, the SolPan(+) team analysed over five hundred in-depth interviews conducted between 2020 and 2023 in Austria, Bolivia, Ecuador, Germany, Portugal, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. The Solidarity in Times of a Pandemic project examines a variety of topics relating to people's experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic in ten European and twelve Latin American countries.
Three years after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, the initial environmental improvements reached their limits. Participants in our study described feeling caught between hope for environmental change on the one hand, and resignation that the world would return to a pre-pandemic ‘normal’ on the other. Nevertheless, the COVID-19 Anthropause - initially discussed to describe the sudden decline in human mobility - shed new light on people’s relationship with the environment. A young woman in Bolivia, witnessing the suffering caused by the lack of rain and excessive heat, explains that the pandemic “open[ed] our vision to continue conserving and protecting our forest and to find some solutions for different [the different] changes [that are happening.] To continue taking care of our springs, our rivers, and in some way to be able to show the world this way of taking care of nature”.
The COVID-19 Anthropause encouraged people to reflect on their own interactions with the environment. It led to a broad social critique of the slowness of politico-economic changes that could ensure a healthier planet for all. Participants in our study recognised the overexploitation of the environment and highlighted how global inequalities shaped diverging experiences of the pandemic. COVID-19 intersected with other systemic crises that on top coincided with the climate emergency. In this situation, many study participants wished that something positive would be brought out of the crisis, both for humanity and for nature. As one Austrian interviewee put it, “...there is simply this hope that we will not waste this crisis”.
The COVID-19 pandemic provided an impetus to reflect on the relationships between humans and their environment and on alternative lifestyles in the post-pandemic era. The COVID-19 Anthropause is more than just a natural phenomenon. It is also a cultural event, as people have shown that they are capable of changing practices along with the formulation of a social critique regarding the kinds of structural change that is needed to create new post-pandemic realities.
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This study is freely accessible in the journal Environment and Change E: Nature and Space.
Fiske, A., Radhuber, I., Jasser, M., Saxinger, G., Fernández-Salvador, C., Rodrigues Araújo, E., Zimmermann, B., Prainsack, B. (2023). Don't Waste the Crisis: The COVID-19 Anthropause as an experiment for rethinking human-environment relations, Environment and Change E: Nature and Space, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/25148486231221017
