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    1. Traffication has crept up on us insidiously. It is a creeping barrage of
      noise and pollution that has eroded and fragmented our environment, and
      our connections with it, so gradually that we have forgotten how much
      richer and more integral to our lives nature used to be. In 2020, we were
      given a brief reminder of what the car has cost us. The COVID-19 pandemic
      was a human tragedy of immeasurable proportions but it did at least reveal
      to us, fleetingly, what an even slightly de-trafficated world might look like.
      The travel restrictions put in place to slow the spread of the disease did not
      return us to some state of pre-industrial, or post-apocalyptic, immobility;
      we were not de-trafficated back to the Stone Age. Our driving fell by little
      more than half in most places during even the strictest restrictions, and
      summed over the whole of 2020, traffic volume in Britain was only a fifth
      lower than it had been in the previous year; in the USA it fell by just a tenth.
      Yet within days of lockdown the air cleared sufficiently for mountain
      ranges and stars to reappear through the smog for the first time in a human
      generation. Satellites orbiting the planet detected a record drop in the levels
      of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. The planet quite literally stopped
      vibrating to the rumble of vehicles: all around the world, seismologists
      were able to detect faint creaks and gurgles of magma deep beneath the
      Earths surface that are normally swamped by the ground-bending shudder
      of traffic. It was also quiet. People and scientists heard new bird sounds. Natural songs. Not warped song that are more high pitched and screamed out over the clamor of tires mashing into pavement. Animals crept out into new areas, cautiously, and at different times as they weren’t blinded into a reclusive nocturnal existence.
       

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