From the Preface:

In the slim gap between my signing off the final text of this book affirming ‘Reasons for Optimism in Our Changing World’, and ink hitting the pages, our world changed, irrevocably. Or rather, the human world changed: the elemental world was changing a little less than usual. Who knew our machine could stop?

The Coronavirus pandemic has offered a shock to the global psychology unlike anything experienced in modern times. A collective arrest in the rehab of our homes, to explore the prisons or palaces of our minds. Whilst we huddle together (six feet apart if privileged enough to social distance) in fear, confusion, love, and hope, many voices are quickly proclaiming this is the wake-up call the world desperately needed. The pattern interruption, the stillness: a chance to reflect on our habits.

What will come next? When industries wake from their slumber, travel bans are lifted, when we can dance with strangers again – what will we have learned? Will we have made enough of a shift in how we think, consume, and live, to do things differently – to avert another crisis?

Disasters have always brought with them pivots along our historical path. The charged beauty of this moment is that almost anything is possible: both Orwellian and utopian narratives haunt us. Whilst Naomi Klein has analyzed how the shock of disasters has been misused to instate authoritarian regimes, conversely, crises have often led to very progressive changes: many national health services working hard today were a result of the 1918 flu epidemic; the First World War helped emancipate women; the Second led to the founding of the United Nations and modern welfare states.

Coronavirus has revealed our capacity for collective mobilization, kindness, and how quickly everything can be transformed. More has changed in a matter of weeks than many of us thought possible in years: and more will change again.

Might this experience enable us to fundamentally realize how connected we are with each other and the Earth? Could it wake us up to the huge financial and social costs of an exploitative relationship with nature? Might governments use this opening to make bold, positive policy shifts? What types of business do we want to survive? How will our values be transformed?

In the introduction to this book, I recall the fable of the frog in water – as a metaphor for our response to the climate crisis. The story went that a frog would quickly jump out of boiling water, but would stay in water that imperceptibly warmed, until its end.

The climate crisis emerges gradually. Too quickly for many of the Earth’s species to adapt to, but too slowly for our imaginations to track. Seven million people dying annually of air pollution (nearly 20,000 a day)* would be shocking if it happened suddenly – but it has been a slow boil to get to that number, and it creeps ever higher.

Coronavirus poured boiling water upon us, and we jumped. Will we return to our collective trance? Or can we use this pause to consider new ways of being? I hope this book might offer a voice in the conversation we urgently have to have, and some seeds of ideas we can choose to help blossom in a new – and healthier – reality.