Will COVID-9 Lead Us to a Better, more Sustainable World?

Following prompting by a friend, I wrote the following article on MEDIUM a couple of days ago:

<go to the original article here>

Today, I added my two-bits to an email list discussion by tourism studies scholars on what tourism will be like in a post-COVID-19 world. A a couple of interesting points from the discussion, so far...

My point was that (1) it is too early to tell what and when a post-COVID-19 world will emerge, and (2) what it is like will depend on how deep the impacts are, and then how people respond to that depth, when it arrives. While I hate to be a doomsayer, I think the deeper the impacts, the bigger the more the world will be changed by it.

Some people think nothing will change, and that like other crises in the past, people will soon forget and travel and tourism will be back to the way it was before the COVID-19 pandemic. Other see things getting worse, even violent, as greed comes to the foreground during the pandemic, leaving lasting divisions and scars. Still others are like me, hoping that it will be a time of self-reflection and re-connection to our planet, leading to more Earth-friendly values and behaviors -- and thus greater Sustainability.

It is hard to find positive perspectives on the pandemic, as the popular news media are dishing up the scariest stories for their shock and advertisement value. Still, there are both opinion pieces and actual cases of places that are seeing remarkable changes in a very short period of time since the tourists have stopped coming. The best place that I have found for this is the Science and Nonduality (SAND) Conference page in Facebook.

My personal view is that there are multiple timelines that our consciousness, individually and collectively, can follow in the moment of global crisis for humankind (it is not a crisis for other beings on the planet). The timeline path that we end up experiencing, both individually and collectively. will be the one that we put our focus and attention on. So do what you can to ground your consciousness in love for the planet and for your fellow humans, so that the more positive world that we all really want can be made a reality.