As we contemplate the havoc being wrought by coronavirus, most of us see mainly sickness, death and economic ruin. Dr Rupert Read, spokesman for the climate protest group Extinction Rebellion — plus sometime Green party candidate, and associate professor of philosophy at the University of East Anglia — has rather a different view. In this pandemic, he writes, ‘there is a huge opportunity for XR… It is essential that we do not let this crisis go to waste.’
Read’s thoughts are set out in a paper entitled ‘Some strategic scenario-scoping of the coronavirus-XR nexus.’ The paper is not meant to be widely read. ‘NB, this is a confidential document for internal XR use, NOT for publication!’ he writes at the head.
Small wonder. After all, says Read, even if the gloomiest projections of national and global mortality turn out to be accurate, ‘the direct risk to most of us from corona is low, and the direct risk to humanity is low in the sense that even a very bad case scenario of a hundred million deaths, though horrible, would hardly break us.’
Read says that the virus ‘may overwhelm some healthcare systems’, including Britain’s NHS — in which case, ‘many of those who then need medical treatment, ill and old people especially, will not be able to get it, and some/many of them will die.’
But there is a bright side, he insists, because the virus will also test the ‘vulnerable, just-in-time systems’ of trade. This, in turn, ‘might set off cascading breakdown effects, given how interconnected we have allowed our global system to become, how fragile and un-resilient many of our systems are, and how close to the edge some of them are already. Corona might lead indirectly to partial or complete collapses, especially in more vulnerable countries.’
That is a prospect Read seems to relish.
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