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The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic led to enactment of the Families First Coronavirus Response Act in March 2020. The law ends in 2023, precipitating a great unwinding of Medicaid enrollments. As this unwinding unfolds four factors will be especially important — staffing problems, the speed of renewal implementation, the adoption of ex parte procedures,…

This author offers of narrative of hope in response to the coronavirus pandemic by viewing it as a wake-up call to lean into the adaptive moral challenge of stewardship for the future of humanity and the planet. Acknowledging the many material and social benefits of a global regime of free market urbanism built on advances in science and technology, this is a point in geohistory, the Anthropocene, when the impact of human activities on the Earth has begun to outcompete natural processes. The coronavirus has illuminated systemic moral failures and new moral challenges of the Anthropocene that call for adaptive response if we are to build a hopeful future for humanity and the planet. Pointing to millennia of human adaptive response to threats and disasters, the author asserts an evolutionary hardiness attributable as much to moral capacities as rational intelligence as a singularly defining trait fueling millennia of human adaptive learning and thrival. The current pandemic is the latest point in humanity's moral evolution of adaptive response to moments of urgent threat that have tested, expanded, and defined our character and moral capacities as a species. Rather than falter under the moral burden of the coronavirus threat and its consequences, the author views this pivotal point as an opportunity to stretch human moral horizons by taking responsibility for the urgent moral challenges we have created and inventing new ethical frameworks and tools that will lead us to new moral understandings and solutions to the moral challenges we face.

GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS NEED A POLITICAL SOLUTION. ONE OF THE MOST DIFFICULT PROBLEMS FOR ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICAL THEORY IS TO DETERMINE WHAT THIS SOLUTION WOULD BE. THERE ARE TWO BASIC CONDITIONS THAT ANY PROPOSED "WORLD ORDER" MUST SATISFY: IT MUST ENSURE THAT INDIVIDUALS AND COMMUNITIES COMPLY WITH ENVIRONMENTAL PRESCRIPTIONS, AND THAT DECISION-MAKING IS FELXIBLE ENOUGH TO COPE WITH ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS IN ALL THEIR COMPLEXITY. COMMON CONCEPTIONS OF A WORLD POLITICAL ORDER, CENTRALIST AND ANARCHIST, ARE NOT LIKELY TO SATISFY THESE CONDITIONS. IT MUST BE CONSIDERED ALSO WHAT DEVELOPMENTS IN WORLD SOCIETY ARE MOST LIKELY TO BRING ABOUT A WORLD ORDER CAPABLE OF SOLVING ENVIRONMENTAL AND RELATED PROBLEMS.