Reimagining a just society pt. 3 | A coming shift in perspective In retrospect, the COVID-19 pandemic may mark a paradigm shift in global society if governments and their citizens worldwide today embrace its lessons, including many still emerging. One of these lessons concerns the dangers of ignoring knowledge we already had about interconnections between global public health, economic and national security, and ecological degradation. As Dr. M. Sanjayan, CEO of Conservation international, observed, “2020 has shown our complete interdependence with nature.” Resistance to change is natural, even if sometimes illogical, and has been manifest throughout the crisis in opposition, particularly in the United States, to following (belated) public health guidelines to wear masks, avoid crowds, and limit time in enclosed poorly ventilated spaces. But what would differentiate an “anti-masker’s” stance from those who, on a national or global scale, call for a return to “normal” in the face of evidence that it was business-as-usual that contributed to the pandemic disaster? Anti-maskers promoted disinformation about the public health dangers of COVID-19; moving on from this disaster without acknowledging and acting on new knowledge we have now gained about pandemics would be a similarly deadly form of reality avoidance.