Re-written 27/3/20:

​The coronavirus lock-down has been fun so far, with lovely weather, a slower pace of life, and people being inventive at finding ways (mostly digital) to keep a sense of community going. And it’s important that we are doing what we can to keep the pressure on the NHS from becoming intolerable. All the same, I have an uneasy feeling that it won’t feel quite so much like a holiday as the time stretches into weeks and months and the news gets more and more alarming.
 
It’s not surprising, but must be said, that government policy is skewed towards alleviating people's fears rather than developing resilience and good health, and towards separating people into little boxes rather than bringing them together into real community. It’s not a genuine answer to the problem long-term. The assumption is that we can all get back to ‘business as usual’ before too long.

The pandemic has of course pushed the climate emergency into a tired second place; but this health crisis is not separate from the wider crisis of climate change and ecological destruction. It seems fairly well established that the cause of the virus is mistreatment of the animal world (as with Ebola, Bird Flu, AIDS, and others). It is part of humans’ mistreatment of Earth and the natural world, of our disconnection from nature and using the whole world as just a collection of 'resources'.
 
As the Christian mystic Thomas Berry wrote in 1994, “We cannot long have a rising gross human product and a declining gross Earth product. We cannot have well humans on a sick planet.” Indeed we could not; what we have now is sick humans on a dangerously depleted planet.
 
Justine Huxley, of St Ethelberga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace, recently put this far better than I could: “Pandemics like COVID-19 are not separate from climate breakdown and ecological destruction. Ecologists and conservationists have been predicting this moment for a long time. We have destroyed habitats, hunted wild animals to extinction, caused dramatic rises in temperature, changed the migration patterns of animals and humans, and altered ecosystems – with blind disregard for the delicate balance held within the web of life. The risk of zoonotic diseases is just another side effect of our destructive attitude”.
 
‘Zoonotic’ is a new word for me: diseases transmitted from animals to humans. Some research concludes that all viral infections are essentially zoonotic, beginning from the Neolithic when animals were first domesticated. They increased in both number and virulence from around 1975, along with the normalisation of intensive industrial ‘factory’ farming, “the most profound alteration in the human-animal relationship in 10,000 years”.
 
It has been suggested that the chaos coming in the wake of coronavirus is a ‘dress rehearsal’ for societal breakdown caused by climate change; but it is not separate, and this may be the beginning of the real thing. The problem is so vast; our whole culture is built on exploitation, and on violence against the natural world. The hope is that coronavirus will result in people recognising the real root of the problem – that all this is the inevitable result of the way we have been living – and start to think about the ever-growing crisis in a new and creative way.

The plans for a Glastonbury bypass, as well as for one around Pilton, appear to have been dropped by both Somerset County Council and the government. My own attention has been taken up by climate change and the related ecological crisis, and now it seems that everything has been overwhelmed by corona virus. The world will most likely never be the same again. But for the sake of completing the story about the bypass, this post is put together from information that has turned up over the past month or so.

The scheme to construct bypasses around Glastonbury and Pilton was first announced in January last year, as part of a series of proposals that were intended to provide improvements to the A39 and A361 – as part of the government's proposed new 'Major Road Network'. In January this year, the Department for Transport asked Somerset County Council to supply evidence that the scheme had widespread support within the local communities.

​On 25th February, Glastonbury Town Council was informed that the County Council would now "seek to withdraw the Glastonbury and Pilton Major Road Network (MRN) scheme from the list of schemes prioritised by the Peninsula Transport Sub-National Transport Body, and withdraw the associated expression of interest for scheme funding which has been submitted to the Department for Transport ... The Peninsula Transport Board is asked to remove the Glastonbury and Pilton MRN scheme from its list of agreed Major Road Network investment priorities."

This is because "The DfT has asked for confirmation of local community and political support", which clearly is not there. Therefore, "To avoid any ambiguity about the status of the scheme it is recommended that the scheme is withdrawn from the Peninsula Transport priorities and withdrawn from further consideration by the Department for Transport."

This was reported in the Central Somerset Gazette on Thursday March 5th. Wells MP James Heappey, who had formerly promoted a bypass scheme in order to create "a strategic road into the heart of Mendip", was quoted as now saying that he "welcomed the news", and that "it was clear the government would not consider supporting this scheme."

The article mentioned briefly that the scheme had "come in for criticism" from Pilton residents, and failed to report at all that Glastonbury Town Council had firmly opposed it.

The following week, Glastonbury Councillor Paul Lund asked whether the scheme had definitely gone for good, and County Councillor Liz Leyshon replied that "The answer will be found in the minutes of the next Peninsula Transport group meeting, and when they are located or released then the town clerk will post them on our Town Council web site." 

This has not yet happened, though James Heappey's statement of the government's position seems unambiguous. It may be that he intends to see heavy traffic through Glastonbury and Pilton increased until we all cry for mercy; but in the mean time the world has become at least as uncertain as it was during the Brexit negotiations, and the future of our government's multi-billion pound road schemes and infrastructure projects may yet be hanging in the balance.