With the time afforded by enforced leisure during the pandemic, I tried my hand at some creative non-fiction. Here’s an extract from an essay, ‘Creative Frailty: some thoughts on global catastrophe, the gift economy and the third age‘, which appeared in the online journal Axon in 2020:

… it is impossible to know what the long-term effects of the coronavirus pandemic will be, especially on the environment, as humans urgently re-build their societies and economies. Because there is evidence that the chain of virus transmission involved bats, pangolins and ‘wet markets’, there will no doubt be talk about the need to remake our relationship with animals; but whether and how far this will translate into large-scale action on behalf of the world’s fauna and flora is doubtful. What is clear is that the climate crisis and its associated harms are primarily a political catastrophe: anthropogenic climate change and other environmental damage have been known about, reported on and campaigned against for at least four decades. The current scale and pace of destruction and the despair it trails in its wake have been brought about because governments and big business have so far taken little or no action proportionate to the need. What to do? I have no answers beyond the obvious, that a sea-change is needed in our politics and economics as well as in our policies…