The Red Bulletin June 2020 (US)

Dudes on motorbikes delivering groceries to people
not allowed to leave their apartments. Every last
one of them knew they were taking some risk, and
they also knew they were providing an essential
service. So they sucked it up and got it done.
And in the process they all—by their actions,
not their words—said something truly important:
Science is real. Reality matters.
This sounds trite, but it’s not. For generations
now too much of our society has acted as if
reality was optional. We’ve watched the world
through our screens. Scientists told us that the
temperature was rising, that it was an emergency.
“For generations now
too much of our society
has acted as if reality
was optional.”
Satellites told us that the Arctic ice was melting,
and oceanographers reported that the chemistry
of seawater was shifting, becoming more acid. But
we didn’t pay much attention.
In fact, sometimes it seemed like the only
people who took the changes seriously were those
(ever smaller in number) who spent serious time
in the outdoors. Farmers who couldn’t plant their
crops; firefighters dealing with ever-bigger blazes.
And athletes who were finding ice too crumbly
to climb, skiers searching for snow during record
warm winters. If you’re halfway up an icefall,
relying on crampons and an ice axe to keep you
alive, you need to pay serious attention to physics:
The temperature of the air becomes a matter of
life and death. But most of us, most of the time,
didn’t feel it quite that way. We started to convince
ourselves that maybe science was negotiable, that
maybe physics would meet us halfway. It’s easy to
retreat to a fantasy world if you spend most of your
time on Facebook and Instagram.
Coronavirus ended that, at least for now. All of
a sudden, we were forced to realize that biology
was real. There was no way to spin the COVID-19
microbe, no way to force it to compromise. We
had to change, because it wasn’t going to—and
hence we started turning our lives upside down.
We sheltered in place, we kept our distance. All
of a sudden, every one of us had something in
common with the adventurer pulling a sled across
the Antarctic or mountain-biking the Continental
30 THE RED BULLETIN