As the humans hid in their homes, the goats descended from the Great Orme to feast on their gardens. “There isn’t anyone else around so they probably decided they may as well take over,” Carol Marubbi, a councillor for the picturesque Welsh coastal town of Llandudno, told the BBC. With nobody else around, Llandudno is now overrun with more than 120 magnificent, horned Kashmiri goats. “They are curious, goats are,” Marubbi said.

From Llandudno to Lopburi and Barcelona to Bergamo, the global coronavirus lockdown has given the natural world a chance to reclaim what we have taken from it. In northern Italy, wild boar now roam the streets in search of food. Boar have also taken up residence on Barcelona’s normally bustling Avinguda Diagonal, snuffling and trotting around where gridlocked traffic once jostled for position. In Japan, the sika deer of Nara’s vast temple complex have sprawled out across the city. Life tends to find a way.

The natural world’s invasion of our urban spaces has provided a brief moment of distraction from the pandemic. Goats! Pigs! Deer! It’s like looking out your window at a scene from some macabre Disney fantasy. It’s also supreme social media fodder and a brief and much-needed reminder that, amongst the daily death tolls and unending feeling of existential dread, goats still exist.

The world’s metropolises, normally bashing and clanging with the sounds of human progress, are now silent save for the strange duet of birdsong and sirens. It would be almost beautiful were it not for the sheer volume of human suffering. We are still in the first act of this crisis and it has already claimed more than 42,000 lives. That number has doubled in just seven days. In many countries – the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, Brazil, Turkey, the list goes on – the number of deaths is doubling every four days. The United Nations is now calling the coronavirus pandemic the worst crisis humanity has faced since World War Two. We are living our lives in a constant, ever-worsening car crash.

In this crisis, life has slowed down. Right down. So much so that the Earth itself now moves differently. Just as earthquakes shake our world, so too do vibrations caused by 7.53 billion people living their lives. In Belgium seismologists have noticed human-based vibrations fall by one-third since the coronavirus lockdown came into effect. For researchers, this makes the science of listening to the vibrations of our planet easier. Celeste Labedz, a geophysics PhD student at Caltech in Pasadena, California, tweeted that the drop in noise she had detected was “seriously wild”. We once lived in the great acceleration. Right now we are living through the great pause.

Compared to the cacophony of that unending rush, the sound of survival – of staying home, saving lives – is a whisper. But there are moments of song, of nightly applause for healthcare workers, of spontaneous human creativity. For artists, this intriguing new normal is an opportunity to explore the world as it has never looked or sounded before. We are all trapped in Edward Hopper paintings. Cities and Memories, a collaborative art project, is encouraging people to share audio recordings of their own changing soundscapes. Often, this is simply the sound of near-total silence and birdsong.

Just as human life feels the squeeze, the natural world suddenly has more space to breathe. And, when it does breathe, the very air that fills its collective lungs is different. In Madrid, average nitrogen dioxide levels decreased 56 per cent week-on-week after the nationwide lockdown was tightened on March 14. Across China, CO2 emissions fell by at least 30 per cent between February 3 and March 1. This alone is the equivalent of 200 million tons of carbon dioxide. In London, average air pollution levels are now at their lowest since records began in the year 2000. The numbers are so low that the London Air Quality Network registered the readings as a fault.

It would be easy to think just that: we are living through a glitch, a planetary anomaly. Hubris could, somehow, persuade us that this isn’t the apocalypse we were looking for. Make no mistake, it is. While our individual lives are on hold, the nation states we live in have transformed themselves almost beyond recognition. We now live in a world where more than half a billion children are no longer in school. In America alone, 3.3 million people filed for unemployment in one week. Homeless people are being told to stay in hotels free of charge. All social gatherings are banned. Governments pay people not to work. The UK has nationalised the railways and legalised at-home abortions.

At the centre of this hurricane of change is a simple, calm truth: around the world, billions of people are staying at home and washing their hands. We are fighting, in a very prosaic way, to survive. Apocalypse porn told us our fight for survival at the end of the world would be full of guns and flames and robots and muscle and shouting. It is actually full of cups of tea and Zoom calls and kindness and, yes, the tragic deaths of so many people we love. It is a different, far more human kind of bravery. As webcomic xkcd joked, we seem “determined to protect each other” – and we have a lot of pasta.

If the climate crisis is so slow it feels like it almost isn’t happening at all, the coronavirus pandemic is so fast it has recalibrated life on Earth overnight. Yet the latter shows a way forward for tackling the former. The spread of the coronavirus has been accelerated by the way we live our lives and will, eventually, force us to think about how we must change our ways. As the journalist David Wallace-Wells argued in The Uninhabitable Earth, it is easy to think that the climate crisis is a crisis of the “natural world” and not the human one; to think, somehow, that these two things are distinct and that we live outside or beyond nature. We don’t. The virus proves it. The goats also prove it.

Activists led by Greta Thunberg have heaped scorn on political leaders for failing to act decisively to tackle the climate crisis. “The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say – we will never forgive you,” Thunberg told the UN Climate Summit in New York in September 2019. That was just over six months ago. It feels more like six years. Compared to our climate crisis inaction, the swiftness of our response to coronavirus – despite the many missteps and faults – has been remarkable.

“The Covid-19 pandemic has unleashed humanity’s instinct to transform itself in the face of a universal threat and it can help us do the same to create a livable planet for future generations,” said Christina Figueres, a diplomat and former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in a recent interview with Carbon Brief. Faced with our imminent destruction, humanity has adapted to survive. But we must continue adapting. Our fight against coronavirus is a fight without an end. There will be another pandemic. And, soon, we will have to reckon with how we must change our world in response to this new reality. The climate crisis is still roaring, just out of earshot. Antarctica, the only continent on Earth without a single case of coronavirus, recently recorded a temperature of 20.75 degrees Celsius for the first time. A heatwave in a land of snow and ice.

The coronavirus pandemic did not appear out of nowhere. It seemingly originated in Hunan Seafood Wholesale Market, in Wuhan, China, where live and dead animals are sold and eaten in close proximity. This is a zoonotic pandemic, the ugly result of habitat loss and humanity’s disregard for the natural world. This is also a disease that has spread at breakneck speed, propelled to 203 countries and territories by a vast global transportation network. It has been thrown around the world by the great acceleration. The only way to stop it, to stop the exponential growth in cases and deaths, is to slow down.

The word apocalypse means exactly this: an event resulting in great destruction and violent change. As the weeks turn into months and the months into years, and the death toll, tragically but seemingly inevitably, ticks into the hundreds of thousands, we will be forced to consider the outcome of that change. The need for a slower, fairer world. One where we, as individuals, understand more than ever the impact our actions can have on the those around us. And how we must all act to protect the fragile world in which we live. The virus proves it. And so do the goats.

James Temperton is WIRED's digital editor. He tweets from @jtemperton

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This article was originally published by WIRED UK