I have a habit of keeping notebooks full of meeting minutes, errant thoughts, simple math (I cannot reliably do it my head) and other stuff. (I wouldn’t call this a “diary”, but this is probably just playing semantics.) I also hoard digital correspondence; my phone can’t download apps any more because of my refusal to prune years-long text threads (thank goodness for Signal’s auto-delete feature). My thoughts and emotions, like those of any other child of the internet, are exhaustively documented across a million fractured fragments of messages to friends, random scribbles, receipts, bookmarks, screenshots, tweets, Instagram stories, and more. A vast multimedia narrative incomprehensible to anyone besides me, and whichever government algorithms are monitoring me.
My earliest physical note on the pandemic was a terse blue-black scribble on the margins of a page in a well-worn, coffee-stained black notebook from Jan 31, 2020: “Worried about SZ team”
A reference to my previous job; half our team is based in Shenzhen and in late January they were facing an extension of their Lunar New Year holiday, and thereby an extension of the lockdown put in place to mitigate the outbreak in China. This put me (and the rest of the team in NYC) somewhat ahead of the general curve of pandemic worry in the US. We knew it was a matter of not if, but when, the crisis would reach us.
By the beginning of March this same notebook was full of snippets from meetings with people who are gearing up to fight within our rapidly deteriorating public health crisis. These are interspersed between notes from my time spent in California starting a new job -- a fellowship in carbon removal, which was my attempt to jump in with both feet and help circumvent the worsening climate crisis. March 11th marks the first confirmed COVID-19 death in NYC; unceremoniously, I documented this alongside the minutes from a meeting about some of the open-source mask making work happening in the DIY Bio community.
March 10, text response to a friend asking how I’m doing: “those of us who manage to survive this pandemic are still gonna be marooned on a dying planet”
Here, I was referring to our worsening climate as a proxy for my worsening emotional state. (I have a flair for the dramatic). The IPCC recently projected that we’re on track for a 3-4 C rise in temperatures by the year 2050 at current emissions rates, and that in order to avoid the worst predicted consequences we need to fight tooth and nail to stay below 1.5 C.
We’ve all heard these numbers before, but that requirement only became more urgent during the pandemic. Intensifying extreme weather patterns will not just increase economic strain, deepen existing socioeconomic inequalities and destabilize food supplies -- our health systems will also struggle to adapt the warmer the planet gets. Pandemics like SARS-Cov-2 may occur more often and become more severe as warming weather increases the spread of disease. Whether the timeline for making it to the other side of this specific pandemic is two more months, two more years, or longer, it’s clear that we need to dramatically rethink our approach to literally everything. Public health, food security, and the sociopolitical environment are inextricably linked to the wellbeing of the actual environment.
More on this soon, I suppose.