With restrictions on the ease, System Of A Down frontman Serj Tankian has voiced his opinion on what he thinks needs to happen in the aftermath of coronavirus: “We have to curb our consumption.”
System Of A Down has been hot in the news for quite some time. Between the band still struggling to get themselves recording new material after 15 years of silence, to speaking out about the current political climate in America, the metal collective has a lot to say. Now, Serj Tankian is the latest to voice his views on the state of the world.
In a recent Facebook Live chat with Tumo Center For Creative Technologies (via Blabbermouth), Tankian noted how the current pandemic will have devastating aftermath for many people.
“The lockdown’s been devastating for a lot of people — workers, people with small businesses,” he began. “It’s been a very negative experience in a lot of ways. But it’s also taught us a lot of lessons, I think. One of the things that I’ve been thinking about is what this means.”
As Tankian has been a resident of New Zealand since the mid-2000s, he noted that he’s been talking with local friends and looking at commentary via the internet that has got him thinking about the future of the world, and how things need to change.
“Someone said nature sent us to our rooms and told us to rethink what we’re doing on this planet as humanity — our consumption, the type of energy that we use, our carbon footprint on the planet,” he detailed.
“I think that’s the most important lesson for me from this involuntary pause. It started making me think that what we have as our benchmark for progress, for society, for civilisation is unsustainable. ”
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He continued by stating that “consistent economic growth worldwide in all of its parameters is really unsustainable, so we have to think of other benchmarks to guide us into the future. Maybe the happiness index, maybe the lifestyle index or some other index, maybe the equality index. We have to go forward a different way.”
On discussing what ‘normal’ means, and what we can take from this era, the System Of A Down singer detailed that him and a friend in New Zealand “came up with the idea that ‘normal’ is our own extinction.”
“Going back to normal is going back toward our extinction in terms of unsustainable growth, in terms of the type of lives that we all lead. And irrespective of the strength of alternative energies around the world, they cannot fully supplement fossil fuels. We have to curb our consumption.”
Tankian continued to say that a lot of what we need to change has to do with the way we consume food, as a “large majority of carbons are created with animal husbandry.”
“Growing animals for ingestion, for food; the amount of land that’s used; the amount of water; the amount of corn and other food substances that are used for animals around the planet has really, really set us back in terms of what we need to meet in terms of carbon reduction deadlines in the near future.”
Check out ‘Lonely Day’ by System Of A Down:
