I am one of 7,773,458,922 (and changing faster by the millisecond) affected by the COVID-19 irruption into our lives; 32,782,280 of us were born this year alone. These numbers are staggering beyond my imagination, and yet our fates are deeply intertwined: to keep ourselves and each other as safe as possible, we are asked to stay apart from one another as something entirely invisible – a tiny virus – circles the planet.

This book is not about the science of viruses, nor about how to address the pandemic per se from a public health perspective. Rather, it focuses on social, political and economic dimensions of the current world situation with an eye towards what comes after the pandemic. In this chapter, I look at overarching themes that stand out to me as I make human and social sense of where we are. I focus in particular on how this crisis fits within the larger set of overwhelming crises we are already facing, detecting opportunities for transformation, and looking at how to respond, individually and collectively. Overall, like other contributors, I see this crisis as an immense opportunity while also being a dire catastrophe in the making.

What crisis makes possible

One of the lesser-known stories of the events surrounding the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 is the rescue of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers via boats in a matter of hours. It happened organically, spontaneously, as any boat that was in the water responded to the call to get people from the tip of Manhattan Island. No command and control. Not even much co ordination. Simply people mobilizing to care for others they didn't even know. The numbers and speed of evacuation exceeded anything ever done before, faster even than Dunkirk in the Second World War.

When 95% of the town of Greensburg in Kansas was levelled by a tornado in 2007, those who chose to stay and rebuild the town co-created a new design that would be the envy of environmentalists. This outcome would be surprising anywhere, and even more so in a town situated in a deeply conservative state.

This phenomenon, documented in particular in Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell, is well known and intuitively understood.