Before we go back to “normal”

Peter du ToitI'm the founder of FutureWork IQ where I spend my time assisting businesses to improve their climate literacy so as to understand the projected impacts from the expanding climate crisis and how to adapt their workplaces in the face of these impacts.

Are you seeing this too?

As vaccines continue to change the course of the pandemic (or there are lulls between waves) I am seeing lots of these types of updates.

It’s a natural reaction to the restrictions we have experienced this past year and a reflection of our strong desire to go back to “normal.”

However, it’s critical that we have the awareness that our “normal” pre-covid way of doing things was leading us on a collision course with the very systems that support life on the planet, a situation orders of magnitude more serious than this virus.

That “normal” was completely and utterly unsustainable.

The heating planet and our role in it (wantonly burning fosssil fuels) has not gone away while we focused on the pandemic.

We simply must recover smarter. We don’t have a choice.

Every single decision we now take should be made after answering this simple question “Is this burning of fossil fuels absolutely necessary? What are the other options available to us?”

We have been given an opportunity to reset the trajectory we were on. If we don’t “carbon lockdowns” are in our near future.