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At Least There's Less Pollution

This morning I came across this article reporting on how people in Jalandhar, Punjab are now able to clearly see a section of the beautiful Himalayan mountain range from their homes 143 miles away for the first time in their lives–and historically for the first time since WWII–because of the lockdown.

This echoes the story that went viral a few weeks back about the Venice canals returning to their natural clarity. Except while the Venice canals merely look prettier but are not necessarily healthier with reduced human intervention, the Himalayan mountains have been revealed specifically by the reduced amount of garbage being pumped into the air.

Consider it this way: those mountains should be visible to this town all the time, but the younger residents didn't even know what they were missing because of how gradual the change has been over the last 75 years. It's stuff like this that makes climate change so infuriatingly difficult to talk to people about–few people seem to care about anything that's not going on right in front of their face and it is their children who will suffer for it.

Imagine all the other beauties we've forgotten that we could enjoy because of the slow buildup of toxins in the air. As an anecdotal example, last year I was gazing up at the stars at my in-laws cottage, and my father-in-law remarked that he used to be able to see the northern lights from there when he was young. It blew my mind to consider, because I've grown up my whole life knowing that the northern lights don't appear that far south. Oh what I wouldn't give to be able to see them from the cottage today...

But anyway, this is a good thing. Beyond the fact that this temporary quarantine period has already had a positive effect on emissions, time has shown that all the experts, evidence, and incredibly easy-to-digest visuals in the world can't convince some people that we're digging our own graves–but as I said before, people respond best to what they can see with their own eyes. And things like this are pretty hard to miss, and will be sorely missed when things return to normal:

Hopefully it's effects of the pandemic like this that finally push humanity to do what it should have been doing decades ago–working on switching over to clean, renewable energy sources instead of slowly killing the only home we have.

Stay healthy and sane.
-Ryan
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