'We Did It To Ourselves': Scientist Says Intrusion Into Nature Led To Pandemic
'We did it to ourselves': scientist says intrusion into nature led to pandemic. Leading US biologist Thomas Lovejoy says to stop future outbreaks we need more respect for natural world. The Guardian, April 25, 2020. Excerpts:
The vast illegal wildlife trade and humanity’s excessive intrusion into nature is to blame for the coronavirus pandemic, according to a leading US scientist who says “this is not nature’s revenge, we did it to ourselves”. Scientists are discovering two to four new viruses are created every year as a result of human infringement on the natural world, and any one of those could turn into a pandemic, according to Thomas Lovejoy, who coined the term “biological diversity” in 1980 and is often referred to as the godfather of biodiversity.
“This pandemic is the consequence of our persistent and excessive intrusion in nature and the vast illegal wildlife trade, and in particular, the wildlife markets, the wet markets, of south Asia and bush meat markets of Africa… It’s pretty obvious, it was just a matter of time before something like this was going to happen,” said Lovejoy, a senior fellow at the United Nations Foundation and professor of environment science at George Mason University. His comments were made to mark the release of a report by the Center for American Progress arguing that the US should step up efforts to combat the wildlife trade to help confront pandemics.
Wet markets are traditional markets selling live animals (farmed and wild) as well as fresh fruit, vegetables and fish, often in unhygienic conditions..all over Africa and Asia, providing sustenance for hundreds of millions of people. The wet market in Wuhan believed to be the source of Covid-19 contained a number of wild animals, including foxes, rats, squirrels, wolf pups and salamanders. Lovejoy said separating wild animals from farmed animals in markets would significantly lower the risk of disease transmission. This is because there would be fewer new species for viruses to latch on to. “[Domesticated animals] can acquire these viruses, but if that’s all there was in the market, it would really lower the probability of a leak from a wild animal to a domesticated animal.”...if you just shut them down.. they will be topped up with black markets--.
...The pandemic will cost the global economy $1tn this year, according to the World Economic Forum, with vulnerable communities impacted the most, and nearly half of all jobs in Africa could be lost. “This is not nature’s revenge, we did it to ourselves. The solution is to have a much more respectful approach to nature, which includes dealing with climate change and all the rest,” Lovejoy said. His comments echo those of a study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B earlier this month that suggested the underlying cause of the present pandemic was likely to be increased human contact with wildlife...
More, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/25/ourselves-scientist-says-human-intrusion-nature-pandemic-aoe
= new reply since forum marked as read
We're completely different from what we were just a 100 years ago. More moral, more ethical, superior in every way. Truly supermen, towering over life, its protector and guardian (because you need to be superior to be either).
No good, printable word comes to mind. Except perhaps, "What I've always said is even *more* true--listen to me preach and follow my precepts. I speak the truth, and you sinners must repent and see the light--my light!" Gets silly, all the manipulation to current disasters serve parochial, long-standing goals.
Here's how it works--and what he knows, if he'd just let that knowledge into the room.
When humans were still "natural" we interacted with a lot of wildlife. Nature didn't change since this. Nobody "creates" viruses in the wild. Exposure to wildlife doesn't "create" a new virus. It finds niches that can be filled, and if there's a handy mutation that allows, it fills it.
When we interacted with Gaia before, it killed us. Not only did her minions have fangs and claws, but they had viruses. And we picked them up. Our genome's riddled with long-forgotten viruses. Many of which probably killed us. Those vaccines we get in childhood? A lot of those are zoonotic in origin. From when we non-natural vertebrates interacted with the pure and pristine wild Nature some 15,000 years ago. Doing things like domesticating goats, cows, sheep, pigs. Dogs. We were few-ish in numbers, scattered. It wasn't like it was us humans in one corner, waiting to be unleashed on the world. That false dichotomy can't be taken seriously. But it's a staple of preachers.
Just as later the domestication of grains and adoption of agriculture led to a of illnesses, so the domestication of animals and adoption of herding led to a lot of dead people. We've changed our lifestyle radically in the West in the last 100 years, and are suffering for it. Evolution, if we continued, would let those more suited to this new lifestyle to survive better, reproduce, and redefine the genome. It's darwinian, but evolutionists *are* darwinian. It's this nasty idea that evolution stopped as soon as we were at a point where we could be labeled H. sapiens. But just look at sickle cell trait and lactase persistence as examples of evolution in action.
When the European stable of animals got to the new world, they brought viruses with them. Europeans (and most of the old world) were familiar with them. But these animals were the first "smallpox blankets" (besides people, the only documented "smallpox blankets"
. Note that we nasty people also adopted and brought new animals into our stables along the way--the old Neolithic package of ungulates that we had had been augmented in Roman times by chickens from SE Asia. And in the New World we added turkey.
The bush meat markets in Africa just sell what people in the bush have eaten since speakers of click-languages moved into Cameron, and before that when Neandertals still lived in Palestine. Same for the wet meat markets. These are far from being new, novel things. That's how we lived 1000, 2000, 20,000 years ago. And all the same viruses that could jump now were around, in older forms, then.
He's really dismissing indigenous views and calling them inferior. Now, they're dangerous--but always have been. In relatively small ways.
Part of the reason that they're a problem isn't just that they're long-standing practices but newly trendy. You want to discover "your true culture" and you're from Cornwall, you help to resurrect the extinct language and consciously adopt foreign folkways. Same if you're Polish or adopted Korean. "Your culture" is apparently determined by where your genes were 50 or 150 or 350 years ago. But if you're African or Chinese, then "your culture" isn't the standard package of domesticated critters but bush meat. It's not just indigenous (though it still is, in the hinterland), it's modern chic. Heaven help us if the people into the Neolithic diet really realized the scope of critters that would have been eaten as part of the actual Neolithic diet.
What makes those citified folkways dangerous (to him, and therefore in need of judging and extirpation) is the ease of travel. If a village along an African river got trashed by a virus burning through it in the 1920s, not a problem. By the time somebody heard about it the problem was over. An infected person would be sick before s/he was able to walk much farther than the next village, which would be the first to turn away the sick person. Now, when somebody there gets infected with a similar virus, it's a 20 minute drive to the next village and a few hours to the next city, and 12 hours later that person could be on a place to Paris, Beijing, or Boston, gifting people with virus as s/he goes. Instead of being sick and dying while watching the Ebola River flow by.
Ease of travel also applies to the meat. If it took 3-4 days for the monkey meat to make it to market in a city, well, by then it's rank. Transporting live animals was annoying. But it was also uncultured to do this--if you want to be Western you eat the three or four dominant hoof meats. Want to be true to your grandparents' roots because you need to learn your "true culture", there's demand for the meats in big cities. We have trucks, we have refrigerators. Again, tech helps transport the virus.
Solutions? Educate people. But just don't exploit deaths for your long-standing ideological goals unless you want to be seen as cynical and manipulative--albeit a reformer and teacher of righteousness. (The two sets of traits so often co-occur. Preachers and corruption. Who'd have thunk it?)
What would happen if the bush markets quasi-domesticated some of the animals for health reasons? We domesticated critters and plants before. We have pisciculture now when we didn't much before. (Although some Aboriginal tribes in Australia and some peoples in SE Asia and Africa engaged in it in prehistory, which, in the case of Australia, was just 400 years ago.) Of course, some things might be hard to raise (bats?) and preachers of truth would be out and about bashing things like having a tamed supply of monkey meat--they already object to monkey meat.
Or perhaps there could be set up irradiation stations so that if you had bush meat you could irradiate it prior to market--it might take a lot of rads, but it's doable. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30860018)
It's a problem. Instead of a pre-set solution from decades ago, thought out for one reason and always applied to secure that goal, let's just work on finding a non-ideological solution to the problem.
