Finding the Future (After COVID-19)

Now after being in the social distancing/ lockdown world for the past month or so, a new normal has started to take shape.  At Aurora, we have zoom check-in calls every morning to go over updates on projects, discuss future strategies and coordinate current and future efforts as a company.  In a way, the check-ins have provided a more cohesive mold between employees.  People are at home, sometimes kids are running around in the background, we are all sharing in this odd experience of staying put indefinitely.

Meanwhile, the turmoil happening around us is foremost in our minds.  Record unemployment, a health crisis and economic downturn.  We, as individuals, who are fortunate enough to be able to work from home, are incredibly grateful to all the workers who are directly helping with the national emergency we’re in: the healthcare, grocery and pharmacy workers in particular.  The team at Aurora has put together a list of ways to help (the list will be published in our next blog post).

While there is plenty of the bad, there is also an emerging sense of good: landlords who have told renters not to worry about rent and instead to take care of themselves and their families, the grassroots community support of people helping each other across the country with donations for fellow community members in need, healthcare workers from across the country & across the world lending a hand to help the more troubled hotspots of the virus.  The Virus.  The thing that is causing all of this- the fear, the illness, the uncertainty.  But put it into perspective, nearly every generation in history has lived through either a major war or pandemic.  I suppose COVID-19 is just our major event.  Although we were not as prepared as we could have been, at least we have advanced science on our side.  Medical researchers in dozens of countries are working on a vaccine as we speak, many of which seem preliminarily promising.

But what will the post COVID-19 world look like?

While we have grappled with the virus & its effects on our society the healing signs across the globe shouldn’t be ignored.  In fact, they should be a guiding beacon of how to move forward from here.  Due to the decrease in pollution & human activity, the Himalayas are once again visible in India, LA looks like a brand new city, endangered turtles are hatching on beaches in Brazil, a seaside town in the north of Wales has been overrun by goats (love this one).  Globally, the air quality has improved because of less fossil fuel pollution being spewed into the air.  Experts say this will be temporary, and once we ‘return back to normal’ there will once again be an uptick.  But what if we decide that we don’t want the uptick anymore?  In the immediate future, the pollution will increase once business gets going again but what if we aim for the what we are seeing now?  What if people decide to continue to see LA the way it looks now rather than what it looked like a year ago?  What if we decide that the reduced-pollution NASA images of of China is what we want.

Ultimately, the decision of how we move forward is up to us as individuals, communities, nations, a globe. 

To take an idea from Arundhati Roy’s final two paragraphs of his fantastic piece in Financial Times from April 3^rd:

We really have two choices.  We can choose to walk through the portal of the future with the heavy baggage we carried in the past and try to reconstruct what once was (even if it wasn’t working); or we can walk through it without all the luggage, the systems and ideas that weren’t working in the first place, and we can build something better from here.  The choice is ours.

Stay safe, everyone-

The Aurora Energy Team