When COVID shut down Mallorca's tourism economy, communities improvised. A 3D printer made respirator parts, farmers and a beverage company pooled resources to save crops. The crisis revealed something unexpected: people could prioritize human life over profit.
What May said reminded me of what's been going on here in Mallorca, where basically the entire industry of the island just died. Tourism is no more, at least for this year. It's really unlikely that it will happen, and probably not next year. And even if it comes back, it will be back very reduced. So there's a huge amount of unemployment, and there was so much of this, one kind of strapline for what is social innovation is to connect unmet needs with spare capacity. And that's what I heard Mae talk about, and that's what I see everywhere. And that's what I also feel like, yes, of course, there's a fine-tuning through competitive dimensions of how life evolves, but I think it's really important to hold and see how life is really fundamentally collaborative and how in this response to the pandemic we have seen people spring up and, like here on the island, we connected the one 3D printer that could print at the quality necessary to the people who had designed how to print respirator parts and lots of people producing masks. And when all the farmers who had all the lamb that they wanted to sell to the Easter tourists said, we don't have any fridges. Then the local business that normally takes all the alcohol to the tourist hotels said, well, we've got the furgonetas, we've got the little lorries to drive the limes around, and we've got the fridges. And so suddenly this, the whole system sprang to action across boundaries to just solve for a higher common good issues that just needed solving there and they didn't have time to say, wait a minute, what's your contract? And people didn't have time to even read a contract, never mind write one. And yeah, so that's, but I think that is speaking to what all of us have said, that it's just, there's a fertile potential in crisis and the ancient ones that Mae mentioned earlier, that the fact that we do learn deeply and transformatively in crisis situations. I think that's on the individual and the collective level, and I'm actually quite impressed how we've chosen the world over to hold our elders and our weak above the economy, because for 20 years I just couldn't believe how people would say, "For the sake of the economy, we're doing this," killing thousands of people every day. Day. And suddenly we were able to say, no, we can hit the stop button on this.
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