WE’VE been noticing the birdsong too. Some experts say it’s because the roar of the city or town has quietened, revealing the orchestra that was always there. Others assert that the birds themselves are emboldened to sing by the empty streets, the brighter light, the clearer air.

We’re also sharing memes of animals roaming the suburbias of the world: goats in Llandudno, hogs in Barcelona, cougars in Colorado, deer in Essex, coyotes on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

The thrill of this is both beautiful and terrible. Look at nature tentatively returning – now that we’ve stilled our infernal machines.

And about three weeks ago, at the beginning of the lockdown, one of our busted-up, otherwise inert iPhones suddenly burst (I kid you not) into a dawn chorus of tweets and trills. An old birdsong alarm setting, it falteringly starts up every day about lunchtime.

We take it as a plea for atonement, forgiveness. “Sorry for the last 10 years of distracting you. Please continue to stop doing what you have been doing”. And of course, we tweet this out, too.

So when we emerge (however temporarily) from our quarantine – scuttling to avoid cars and catch buses or tubes, immersed in the same old clamour – will we urbanites remember contemplating such wonders of nature?

Will the quietness, and the clear skies, and the paws and the wings – never mind the massive collective drops in emitted carbon – finally join up the dots in our heads?

Will we recognise and hear the calls for entirely new systems of energy, distribution and production – and then act accordingly, politically? Will we now protect what we have come to love? So many of my radical friends and colleagues think a great shift is under way. I really, really don’t think it’s a done deal.

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I wouldn’t deny there’s a clear political opportunity here for massive change. We have been shown (as we were in the 2008 crash, but even more clearly this time) that we can actually steer the juggernaut of global capitalism, rather than just desperately hang on to it.

As the French sociologist Bruno Latour has wittily noted: “The incredible discovery is that there was in the world economic system, hidden from all eyes, a bright red alarm signal next to a large steel lever, that each head of state could pull at once to stop ‘the progress train’, with a shrill screech of the brakes.”

The metaphor is stark, though. Does a train on its tracks allow for anything other than stop, forward or reverse, on predetermined lines?

And if its last stop was a whole planet consuming so much it needed the resources of three or four planets to satisfy its demands, isn’t reverse the only option? Yet how does that feel to passengers who have already made the exhausting journey, so far?

We may have to physically disembark, huddle together in the surrounding forest, and soberly calculate our next moves.

Some are definitely holding out, like latter-day Romantic poets or hippies, for our reconnection with nature as the most powerful motivator towards a next system.

From the US, the applied philosopher Bonnitta Roy sent up a huge conceptual flare last week. On the What Is Emerging website, Roy wrote about how our “social imaginary” – the collective stories that justify our economics, law, politics – stands in the way of “our interbeing with the natural living world”.

By this, Roy meant “the biotic forces and planetary processes through which we, along with all other life forms, have evolved ...”

“When we settle into our deep interbeing,” continued Roy, “we know the world not through complex systems thinking or computational logic, but through a perceptual receptivity that comes via feeling and direct experience.

“We know that when we cut down a forest, we cut out a piece of our lungs. That when we put toxins in the water, we destroy our immune system.”

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NOW, can you ever imagine feeling like that (which is how many existing hunter-gatherer cultures feel)? What “direct experiences” would you need to have, even to get a fraction of that nature-love?

(In a country such as Scotland, these become political questions very quickly. The sheer bounty of our natural landscape often collides with property law, a declining population and timid government. We could live in a garden of “interbeing” here – if we had enough political and economic sovereignty over our conditions. More on this later.) To be clear, this isn’t quite “back to the land”. Roy points to the huge outburst of mutual aid under coronavirus, and the way that human-centred care and service work is being revalued. She thinks it indicates the possibility of a different economy. Sometimes called the “foundational” economy, it’s one where essential goods and services (food, energy, transportation, communication, healthcare and education) would operate locally, with small and transparent supply chains. It could even run on its own digital, blockchain-enabled “citizen currency”.

This sector would be insulated from those bits of capitalism which deliberately “manufacture complexity” in order to take their cut on global transactions.

To pick a story from last week: in what sane world are chickens sent from the US to China to be processed, and then sent back to the US? Other than those benefiting from the costs involved in such an elaborate trade, in whose interest is this?

This is the kind of bold reframing of our current condition that you’d want such a strange and unprecedented event as the coronavirus to generate.

And as in so many things, Scotland sits ready to respond. We could use the opportunity of full powers, and a declaration of independence, to become the global herald of such changes.

We are almost a perfect mix to develop them. Abundant natural resources, modern systems of power and knowledge, a vibrant and democratic culture and a social consensus that could be potentially supportive of radical shifts.

Yet this needs a boldness of vision, for how Scotland might play its full part in the calming of a disordered nature. Just displaying the “golden thread of managerial competence” (as a Scottish minister once put it to me), in a moment of security and crisis, won’t be enough. Indeed, if a movement of independence is also a movement of independent-mindedness, it may be just what we psychologically need to get through the coming turbulence.

According to Professor Anthony Costello of University College London, we face five or six waves of coronavirus lockdown before a vaccine is ready.

Let’s assume that most of us can’t access our quasi-spiritual “interbeing” (though to give Bonnitta her due, I think it’s worth a try). Absent that, we are all going to be thoroughly unsettled and buffeted by these cycles – go inside, go outside, back inside, repeat ... is this what we have to endure now? Can’t someone give us a goal of a better, stabler society than this?

I’m glad to report that my colleagues in Common Weal are formulating exactly this kind of platform of politics and arguments. They want to use Covid-19 “as an opportunity to transform this country”. Watch their space.

In the meantime, I’m going back to watch a tweet I found with some pictures of Islay living. And I’m remembering being under a sky full of Gruinart geese, honking their way to Canada … I’m a wired-up, irredeemable cyber-fool. But I also know the power of being in nature. And there’s no point in being switched on and “smart” if it heedlessly plays its part in toxifying the planet. Call it “interbeing”, if you like – but a new smarts is definitely needed.

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