‘Test, trace and isolate’ is not working and is unlikely to work well anytime soon. With the Government failing, community medics and volunteers reveal how we can save ourselves.

Our collective response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been characterised by two vast failures of imagination:

1) Many people and most governments —particularly those of the United States and the UK — have failed to imagine exponential growth and how bad it can get.

What are the underlying reasons for this first failure?

Normalcy bias

Many of us who are awake to the climate nightmare cycle through periods of despair on the one hand and desperate hope against hope on the other. We veer between not seeing how we can possibly make it through the long ecological emergency, and declaring that we must and will. Between being tempted to give up, and throwing our all into a no-holds-barred defence of Mother Earth.

“Rebuilding local production is an action which will simultaneously make us less vulnerable to the ever-growing vicissitudes of the deteriorating global climate as global just-in-time supply chains are increasingly fragile.” Emma Dawnay and Rupert Read of think tank Green House argue, in a newly published report, that it is time for Britain to seek a Brexit that will really take back control.

The direction of conversation in the latest trade talks is designed to deepen the UK’s dependence on other economic systems while isolating us from our EU neighbours.

Rupert Read from Extinction Rebellion warns of the false hope of Green Revolution but argues the Coronavirus crisis has revealed our vulnerability and made a kind of restoration possible.