Emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, I am left with a nagging sensation that it is horrifying not only because of the death rate – which is in fact much lower than a pandemic has the potential to produce – but because it has revealed rather more fundamental underlying patterns. They describe a set of deeper crises now finally here at scale, beginning to roil and roll around us. A global pandemic, almost certainly generated by rampant biodiversity degradation, appears hot on the heels of Australia’s continent-scale bushfires and is, in turn, followed by devastating floods.
And yet life itself seemed on hold. There was a great waiting though for what no one knew. — Richard Flanagan, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams1
These crises, encompassing not only COVID and climate but also issues of social justice and chronic disease, are fundamentally part of the same entangled systems. Yet while Australia appears to have successfully “flattened the curve” on COVID-19 – at this point, at least – federal Australian policymakers, because of their traditional distance from the realities of people and place, will probably not make the mental leap that the country could also flatten the curve on these more fundamental concerns.
Perhaps it will take Australian cities to pursue bold and brave policy and practice, transforming on purpose and avoiding the horror of lockdowns and lock-ins, masks and vaccines, extinctions and ecosystem collapse. Cities are where our systems
