COVID-19 is an Environmental Issue

The recent announcement about the further easing — or rather elimination of public health and safety measures in Alberta for the ongoing pandemic is both insane and harmful when considered on its own. However, I think it’s important to highlight how these public policy decisions could potentially have drastic, far reaching, extremely negative consequences for the environmental movement in Alberta as well.

First and most importantly, is the significant loss of life that will occur as a result of these policy decisions made against the public’s best interest. Removing all restrictions, mandatory quarantine periods, as well as measures for tracking the spread of the virus is only going to increase our collective death toll, especially in the face of the more infectious and deadlier variants.

Condemning our fellow humans to death is bad enough on its own, but the loss of life also means that we are potentially losing smart, motivated, empathetic, and energetic people who could be incredibly valuable to the climate movement in our province and our push towards a more sustainable future. We need all hands on deck in the fight against the climate crisis, and it is despicable that our government is willing to needlessly endanger more people because they have given up their fight against covid, leaving us to fend for ourselves.

Allowing for increased spread may also lead to further mutations and variations of the virus, which will only prolong this already lengthy disruption to our normal lives and continue to pull attention and resources away from the existential threat of a climate emergency knocking aggressively at our door.

This decision by the Alberta UCP government is aggressively anti-science, and runs counter to what many public health organizations around the world are preaching with regards to the rapidly spreading delta variant which is highly transmissible — even among the fully vaccinated, and carries a higher risk of hospitalization for those infected. The Government of Alberta’s stance on covid will make Alberta the only jurisdiction in the world without a mandatory isolation period for individuals who test positive for infection with the virus.

Decisions such as this are an act of war against science and all the good work that has been done to fight the pandemic to date. Watching our elected officials defy the warnings and advice of scientists will only serve to further erode the public’s trust in science as the best process by which we learn and validate new information. Science is fundamental to understanding the world around us, and a growing distrust in the scientific method will only add fuel to the fire of the climate emergency and biodiversity crisis. We need to trust scientists now more than ever.

I’m not the most informed person to discuss this next issue, but I feel like it is an important aspect with respect to climate change and therefore demands highlighting as part of my critique — so I hope to do it some measure of justice. The COVID-19 pandemic and climate change have both been shown to have a disproportionately greater (negative) impact on BIPOC communities including Indigenous people, who have been at the forefront of the environmental movement longer than anybody else — before the movement even had its name.

Indigenous communities continue to demonstrate their commitment towards environmental conservation and stewardship in the face of non-stop attempts at resource extraction on their traditional lands brought about by colonialism and settler capitalism. Indigenous-led land protection is crucial for the future of our conservation efforts and the battle against the climate crisis, yet these public health decisions by Alberta’s UCP government only perpetuate the legacy of colonial state harm against the original people of this land.

I hope that more people will realize the interconnectedness of our overlapping crises, not just climate change and the covid-19 pandemic, but racism, colonialism, Indigenous genocide, and our commitment to an economic system built on the exploitation of people and the environment (better known as Capitalism). We need to demand more from our government(s), and that includes fighting for policies that consider our issues through an intersectional lens, to create a more equitable society where the decisions in one sphere (i.e., public health policies) don’t compromise our activities elsewhere (i.e., climate crisis mitigation).