Maskageddon: Lockdowns over, but have we learned?

For over the past couple of months, I’ve been gathering photos of our new ‘best friends’ that have been carelessly discarded and left to tarnish our beloved Mother Nature. Yes, thats right, its those germ filled masks we’ve come to know and loath – or love depending on your view.

Cast yourselves back to the very first lockdown way back in March 2020, we had no idea what was about to hit us – in fact I remember the day I was sent home from work like it was yesterday, waving goodbye to my colleagues and thinking how strange it was, saying “Oh, I’m sure I’ll see you all in a couple of weeks or so when this has all blown over.” And I bet I wasn’t the only one that naively believed or thought that.

Its been a tough time for all of us and we have all been affected by Covid-19 in some way or another, and some worse than others – but we have all been through it together. Covid-19 will forever be a turning point in history for our generations. It will be studied about in years to come, just like we were taught the horrors of World War 1 and World War 2 – the ramifications of such apocalyptic type events taking their place in the history books.

The virus changed our entire way of life, even to the extent of if being against the law to hug or visit our own families, yet there were certain silver-linings to what Covid did for our planet. It was during the first wave of infections when alongside reports of millions of deaths across the globe, we were also reading about how nature and our animal neighbours were beginning to flourish, during a time of unease and fear. While human nature was forced to adjust and change, Mother Nature and her creatures were discovering the benefits of our absence. Carbon emissions were falling, changes were seen from space, the air became cleaner, the oceans and rivers became clearer, and animals went where no animal had been before, with the likes of Coyotes being spotted on the Golden Gate Bridge and Sheep taking over a children’s empty playground, discovering the joys that could be had on roundabout. We were amazed. We were watching and witnessing the affects of what our lush, blue and green home would be like, if we no longer dominated and damaged her. But have we learned?

After months of isolation and lockdowns, we saw the decline of pollution with our very own eyes and we revelled, as we watched the earth almost heal itself. Fast forward to the periods of our staggered releases when restrictions dipped, and we got little tastes of our freedom, we took to the outdoors, to our parks and gardens for what little human contact we could grasp. But during those desperate attempts of normalcy, we yet again took our home for granted. Instead of reading reports of ‘smog’ from cities clearing and the waters in Venice canals improving, we were seeing photos of the rubbish and trash left behind in our wake.

As we slowly started to feel like life, pre-pandemic was returning, we quickly forgot just how large of an impact we have on the earth. We forgot just how much our environment was starting to thrive without our interference, without our cars on the road and our litter in the streets. It didn’t take long for us to revert back to our careless and ignorant nature, something of which you would think we would have learned from in the past 18+ months, after witnessing just how destructive our species can be – after all, who else can be to blame for the pandemic, than us ourselves?

It was at this point in which I felt the need and want to write about this. I was walking the streets not only seeing the physical aftermath of the virus, but also of the disregard and disrespect we have for the nature surrounding us. No longer was it just the same old waste of plastic bottles and bags being thrown in the undergrowth, but the very things that we had been using to protect ourselves against the spread. It made me angry, but I also couldn’t believe the irony of face masks now becoming part of the problem, instead of being the solution.

Finding all of these masks just left discarded in different areas, just proved how our concern as well as joy over the improvements of the earth were short lived. It begs the question of will we ever learn from our mistakes as a collective? Will we ever start to take responsibility for our actions and their consequences?

Littering isn’t a new issue as we are all well aware, but given the drastic and unprecedented events of the past 18 months, and being witness to just how the disappearance of our presence on our environment, was able to briefly open our eyes, you would have thought that maybe it would have inspired us to change. You would have thought that just maybe, we realised we need to do better, we need to really consider the effects of our behaviour and how we treat our home, after all, we only have the one.

Our species seems to have this great gift of self-destruction, we have become set in our ways when it comes to many issues, but the care of our planet should be the one that we strive to always achieve and live by every single day.

Covid was – and still is – the infection that challenged us, but we are the infection that continues to challenge our planet.