How has COVID-19 affected our world? What does it mean for our environment? And what does it spell for our future? Dr. Loraine Lundquist, astrophysicist, sustainability educator, and leader at CSUN’s Institute of Sustainability has quite a bit to say on this topic.

“It's all just a lot of interconnected things, between the environment, between housing, between COVID-19,” Lundquist said. “I mean, so many of them are all reflections of inequities that are in our society, and COVID-19 has really amplified those inequities and made them more apparent and more severe.”

“It’s been a really interesting thing to watch from - movement was down, cleaner skies, less smog, wildlife returning to some areas,” stated Dr. Lundquist.

Her comments echo a sentiment seen elsewhere during the pandemic, of a potential return to a cleaner and greener Earth. Still, as she noted, it would require more than having everyone stay all day indoors. It would require a great amount of societal, systematic, and structural change to achieve these goals. These changes go beyond simple things like encouraging recycling and using reusable items, they require the same immediate actions that the fight against COVID-19 had.

“We don't have to stay at home to get cleaner. We really need to do a shift over to cleaner transportation sources,” Lundquist said. “So many are saying that we should all be staying at home, although telecommuting is one of the cleaner forms of transportation, and I do think that increased telecommuting to work is going to be one piece of the puzzle, in terms of solutions that have been really jump-started and kickstarted by this experience that we're all living through.”

“We have created even larger equities as a result of the way that we feel this pandemic and this lockdown. And I know that what we've learned is how much we're willing to sacrifice when we have a perceived threat. And it's interesting for people like me who have been studying climate emergency for so long, and I've been asking for our society to take steps to address this pending threat, this emergency. To watch it, how large the steps are that we are willing to take to reduce the loss of human life and human suffering.”

“We do have to take big steps, not really nearly as big as having a lockdown, which we lose major parts of our economy,” Lundquist said. “We do need to take big steps to address our climate emergency, and it is for the same purpose. It's because we have a risk of loss of human life, and we want to prevent further death and further suffering.”

Still, Lundquist does have hope for the future. A hope that with the lessons we learned from the pandemic, we could work on having a better future.

“We have experienced already that much of the implementation of the solutions that are actually going to make our society better,” Lundquist said. “It's going to give us a more equitable society, cleaner air or water, more walkable cities, more enjoyable life, unlike the lockdown, which has been very challenging.”

However, to enjoy these results we need to move from seeing climate change as a faraway threat and treat it like something immediate and dangerous like COVID-19.

“So be creative. We already have the solutions that we know. We have the technology that we need, we know what we need to do,” Lundquist said. “And we know that it's actually cheaper in the long run to implement these solutions. We just have to collectively decide that this is what we want to do and that we actually want to solve this.”

So how can one fight against this great apathy against change? One answer is work with others who believe in the same cause as you do. “It can be really fun to connect with the group of people that are interested in things that you're interested in, or doing the kind of work that you enjoy, something fulfilling. It's all about the human connection, and that's what makes it possible to keep the work on and keep going, to keep connecting with other people that gel with it. And so that's the biggest thing that I recommend,” Lundquist stated.

Find an environmental cause you like. Work on it with friends. Protest. Write to your representatives and leaders. Do what you can to make a difference and to make your voice heard. By taking the lessons we learned from this pandemic – that the environmental damage we have caused can be undone – and applying them to our life and our actions, we can help change the world.