I have been reading David Quammen for years, going back to the good old days of Outside Magazine. A while ago he wrote the book Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Pandemic, about pandemics. Needless to say, today he is in hot demand. He also recently wrote in the New York Times “We invade tropical forests and other wild landscapes, which harbour so many species of animals and plants – and within those creatures, so many unknown viruses. We cut the trees; we kill the animals or cage them and send them to markets. We disrupt ecosystems, and we shake viruses loose from their natural hosts. When that happens, they need a new host. Often, we are it.”

 All I say to that is, “ouch.”

The nCoV-2019 virus was first isolated and identified in Wuhan China in 2019. The “n” in the name stood for “novel.” Now people are calling it COVID 19. It was found in a seafood and live animal market in Wuhan. I remember seeing such markets while I visited China. I found them amazing and disturbing. Probably that was because they were so foreign to me. I thought at the time that they had the strangest animals available for purchase for food. But that is all a matter of what we are used to.

Quammen reported how despite the virus’s name it is actually not as novel a virus as we might think. Something very similar was discovered by a group of researchers in a cave in Yunnan about 1,000 miles southwest of Wuhan about 10years ago. They noted its existence with concern. The virus they determined emerged from a “non-human animal probably a bat, and possibly after passing through another creature, may seem spooky, yet is utterly unsurprising to scientists who study these things.”

Zheng-Li Shi, of the Wuhan Institute of Virology is part of a team of researchers, that identified COVID-19 was also part of the team that showed the SARS pathogen was a bat virus that had spilled over into people. “ Ms. Shi and colleagues have been tracing coronaviruses in bats since then, warning that some of them are uniquely suited to cause human pandemics.” They found that COVID-19 is

“possibly even more dangerous to humans than the other coronaviruses. I say “possibly” because so far, not only do we not know how dangerous it is, we can’t know. Outbreaks of new viral diseases are like the steel balls in a pinball machine: You can slap your flippers at them, rock the machine on its legs and bonk the balls to the jittery rings, but where they end up dropping depends on 11 levels of chance as well as on anything you do. This is true with coronaviruses in particular: They mutate often while they replicate, and can evolve as quickly as a nightmare ghoul.”

Researchers say they have been raising the flag on these viruses for 15 years. Many of them are frustrated that their warnings have been largely ignored.

Peter Dasak a scientist with a private firm, has said the research shows “these viruses are making the jump, repeatedly, from bats to humans.”

 Quammen drew the following conclusion,

“In other words, this Wuhan emergency is no novel event. It’s part of a sequence of related contingencies that stretches back into the past and will stretch forward into the future, as long as current circumstances persist. So when you’re done worrying about this outbreak, worry about the next one. Or do something about the current circumstances.”

Those “current circumstances” Quammen points out,

“include a perilous trade in wildlife for food, with supply chains stretching through Asia, Africa and to a lesser extent, the United States and elsewhere. That trade has now been outlawed in China, on a temporary basis; but it was outlawed also during SARS, then allowed to resume — with bats, civets, porcupines, turtles, bamboo rats, many kinds of birds and other animals piled together in markets such as the one in Wuhan.

Current circumstances also include 7.6 billion hungry humans: some of them impoverished and desperate for protein; some affluent and wasteful and empowered to travel every which way by airplane. These factors are unprecedented on planet Earth: We know from the fossil record, by absence of evidence, that no large-bodied animal has ever been nearly so abundant as humans are now, let alone so effective at arrogating resources. And one consequence of that abundance, that power, and the consequent ecological disturbances is increasing viral exchanges — first from animal to human, then from human to human, sometimes on a pandemic scale.

We invade tropical forests and other wild landscapes, which harbor so many species of animals and plants — and within those creatures, so many unknown viruses. We cut the trees; we kill the animals or cage them and send them to markets. We disrupt ecosystems, and we shake viruses loose from their natural hosts. When that happens, they need a new host. Often, we are it.”

 Quammen also reminds us of another important fact: that is that too many of us in the west, especially in Canada and the United States have erroneously believed for too long, that our continent is a fortress that keeps us immune from illnesses and problems that plague the rest of the unfortunate world. As Quammen says, the fact is that

“The distance from Wuhan or the Amazon to Paris, Toronto or Washington is short for some viruses, measured in hours, given how well they can ride within airplane passengers. And if you think funding pandemic preparedness is expensive, wait until you see the final cost of nCoV-2019.”

We don’t know what will happen. This too may pass. But we must be more alert to political leaders who cut funding for scientific research or disband important health teams in order to keep our taxes as low as possible. Low taxes are not always a good thing. Quammen has another important warning:

“We must remember, when the dust settles, that nCoV-2019 was not a novel event or a misfortune that befell us. It was — it is — part of a pattern of choices that we humans are making.”

We have to be careful when we mess with Mother Nature. We have to learn to work with nature, not against it. We have to be smart. We have to pay attention to our scientists. When we make public policy decisions we have to be guided by the best science and not let it be overridden by what we hear from ignorant television pundits.

There are actually many reasons we need a new attitude to nature. I have just found another one.

 Professor Thomas Gillespie said,

“Wildlife everywhere is being put under more stress, he says. “Major landscape changes are causing animals to lose habitats, which means species become crowded together and also come into greater contact with humans. Species that survive change are now moving and mixing with different animals and with humans.”

According to Gillespie the spread of Lyme disease is another example of a disease that was facilitated, if not caused by our disturbance of forests. People who live close to forests are more likely to get bitten by a tick that carries the Lyme pathogen.

Gillespie sees this in the US, where suburbs fragment forests and raise the risk of humans contracting Lyme disease. “Altering the ecosystem affects the complex cycle of the Lyme pathogen. People living close by are more likely to get bitten by a tick carrying Lyme bacteria.” As John Vidal reported in the Guardian,

“Richard Ostfeld, distinguished senior scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York pointed out that “human health research seldom considers the surrounding natural ecosystems, there’s misapprehension among scientists and the public that natural ecosystems are the source of threats to ourselves. It’s a mistake. Nature poses threats, it is true, but it’s human activities that do the real damage. The health risks in a natural environment can be made much worse when we interfere with it”

Ostfeld also pointed out that rats and bats are often the problem because they are strongly linked to the spread of zoonotic disease because they are the most likely to promote the transmission of pathogens. That’s why he says, “The more we disturb the forests and habitats the more danger we are in.”

Felicia Keesing, professor of biology at Bard College, New York, added another dimension to the problem. She said, “When we erode biodiversity, we see a proliferation of the species most likely to transmit new diseases to us, but there’s also good evidence that those same species are the best hosts for existing diseases.” It reminds me of what Viktor Frankel said about the Nazi death camps: the worst of us survived.

We have to be very careful when we mess with nature. That is not something we are accustomed to doing. We are accustomed to doing with nature as we please. As we are now learning, that can be very dangerous.

Now that we are in the midst of a global pandemic that has a large part of the world spooked, many are pointing the fingers at others. That’s what we do in dangerous times. We look for someone to blame. Everyone is looking for scapegoats, none more than Donald Trump the so-called leader of the free world. He keeps calling the coronavirus “the Chinese flu.” No doubt he does that to deflect attention from his early negligence in which he referred to the coronavirus as a “hoax.” Well the hoax has come home to roost. Like a magician he wants us to look where he is pointing rather than looking at what he is doing.

Searching for scapegoats is seldom useful. Except in one circumstance. Remember Pogo, the ancient comic strip. He said he had gone looking for the enemy and found it. Much to his surprise he found it was “us.” We are the enemy. And we might be the enemy again in the case of coronavirus.

As John Vidal senior environmental writer at the Guardian that I have been reading for many years said,

“Only a decade or two ago it was widely thought that tropical forests and intact natural environments teeming with exotic wildlife threatened humans by harbouring the viruses and pathogens that lead to new diseases in humans such as Ebola, HIV and dengue.

But a number of researchers today think that it is actually humanity’s destruction of biodiversity that creates the conditions for new viruses and diseases such as COVID-19, the viral disease that emerged in China in December 2019, to arise – with profound health and economic impacts in rich and poor countries alike. In fact, a new discipline, planetary health, is emerging that focuses on the increasingly visible connections between the wellbeing of humans, other living things and entire ecosystems.”

Many years ago I had a summer job at Manitoba Hydro and my supervisor was a very smart man. HIs name was Al Boily  I was his assistant on a digger, a large vehicle that was used to dig holes for utility poles. I had to tamp the mud and dirt into the hole around the pole with a heavy iron bar after it was inserted. First of all, he taught me how to work. That was a big job, for, if truth be known, I was as lazy as grass. I needed to know how to work and to forget all ideas of money falling into my lap. This was a very valuable life lesson. One of the most important of my life. He taught me one more valuable lesson. I remember him objecting to Vapona No Pest Strips. Remember those? These were produced to hang in buildings such as open garages where they would attract bugs especially flying insects. Then they got stuck to the sticky strip that contained some chemical to hasten their demise. I thought they were a great invention. After all I hated flies and mosquitos. But Al told me, “John, what’s bad for bugs is probably bad for people too.” That made a lot of sense to me. Scientists now employ a similar principle.

So many things we do are harmful to other creatures and we are entirely careless about that fact. This might be very unwise!

In the last few years we seem to have been plagued (literally plagued) with various pestilential outbreaks. In 1996 it was Ebola a deadly virus until then barely known to humans, until it spilled over out of the forest in Africa in a wave of small epidemics. It was far away in Africa so who cared? Right? Wrong! All of us should care.

In a village of 37 people in Africa 21 people were killed by Ebola. Many of them had participated in a project of killing, carrying, skinning, chopping, and then eating a chimpanzee from the surrounding forest.

John Vidal tells how in 2004 he travelled to Mayibout to investigate why deadly diseases were emerging in apparent hotspots in the rainforest. He found people that were traumatized by the deadly virus that killed up to 90% of the people it infected. Those are pretty tough odds. Many of the children who loved the tropical rainforest before that were terrorized by it after the deluge.

Not that long ago people believed the tropical forests would be a source of viruses and pathogens. Now scientists are getting more sophisticated about it. We are the source.

As Vidal said, “But a number of researchers today think that it is actually humanity’s destruction of biodiversity that creates the conditions for new viruses and diseases such as Covid-19, the viral disease that emerged in China in December 2019, to arise – with profound health and economic impacts in rich and poor countries alike.”

Now scientists are adding an entirely new discipline that studies the visible connections between the well being of humans and other living things including entire ecosystems. It seem Al Boily is right. What is bad for nature is bad for us too.

As a result of this new discipline a number of scientists are now inquiring whether or not “human activity, such as road building, mining, hunting and logging, that triggered the Ebola epidemics in Mayibout 2 and elsewhere in the 1990s and that is unleashing new terrors today?”

Kate Jones and her team of researchers says that her team is investigating exactly that. “We are researching how species in degraded habitats are likely to carry more viruses which can infect humans,” she says. “Simpler systems get an amplification effect. Destroy landscapes, and the species you are left with are the ones humans get the diseases from.”

Thomas Gillespie, an associate professor in Emory University’s department of environmental sciences, who studies how shrinking natural habitats and changing behaviour add to the risk of diseases spilling over from animals to humans made the point, “Pathogens do not respect species boundaries”

He also said, without any sugar coating,

“I am not at all surprised about the coronavirus outbreak,” he says. “The majority of pathogens are still to be discovered. We are at the very tip of the iceberg. I am not at all surprised about the coronavirus outbreak,” he says. “The majority of pathogens are still to be discovered. We are at the very tip of the iceberg.”

Humans, are creating the conditions for the spread of diseases by reducing the natural barriers between host animals – in which the virus is naturally circulating – and themselves. We fully expect the arrival of pandemic influenza; we can expect large-scale human mortalities; we can expect other pathogens with other impacts. A disease like Ebola is not easily spread. But something with a mortality rate of Ebola spread by something like measles would be catastrophic.”

All of this is a direct result of our casual and careless attitude to the natural world. Doing as we please without regard to other people or other species has a price. Are we willing to pay it or should we rather change our attitude. Arrogance is seldom pretty or helpful.