Julian Summerhayes

“Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
― C.S. Lewis

Right now, there's an almost volcanic explosion of opinion and advice on what we need do after this pandemic has run its unremitting course.

It's premised on the idea that this 'shock' is of such epic proportion that we'll be woken from our pre-Covid19 torpor and begin not only to reimagine a more beautiful world, premised at least on a few things that are happening now, but we'll actually change our moribund, earth-eating ways.

We won't.

Oh no we won't.

How do I know?

I don't. 

I don't know what the future holds — mine or anyone else's. Oh sure, that doesn't stop me wishing that we'll wake up to a lifestyle more restorative of the planet, but do I seriously think that all of us, or even a majority, will want to live with less travel, less consumerism, less freedom and less of anything?

No.

Not in the slightest.

I mean it's pretty sad — no actually, it's 10x worse — that we have to have this pandemic ripping its way through the population to suddenly think, "Oh shit, look how we've messed up", let alone to conceive a new actuality in 2020ish and beyond.

...if I was going to take up the cudgels against big business, given the way Steven Donziger has been treated, I'd think very, very carefully before putting myself and my family in harm's way. 

Nobel laureates condemn 'judicial harassment' of environmental lawyer.