Imagine a nuclear accident in a country in December 2019 – a missile test gone wrong, resulting in a small nuclear explosion, a massive amount of radioactive material drifting around the world, killing 2.66 million people, plus trillions of dollars in health care spending, and almost triggering a global depression in business losses. What do you think we’ll be talking about today?
We’ll talk about a new global nuclear weapons security protocol mechanism to ensure that such an event never happens again.
We have just experienced a nuclear accident in the natural world. It is widely suspected that a pathogen from a bat infected another animal, which in turn infected a human being in China, and then jumped on the globalization express, causing tremendous suffering and trillions of dollars in damage. In the decades before that, unhealthy human interactions with wildlife also triggered epidemics – contact with bats or civets triggered Ebola and SARS-CoV-1 viruses, for example, and HIV likely came from chimpanzees.
We have just marked the one-year anniversary of the World Health Organization’s declaration of a pandemic outbreak of SARS-CoV-2, the agent that caused Covid-19, and it is necessary to ask the question of what sensible collective actions we are taking to prevent this from happening again.
As far as I can tell, the answer is nothing – at least not much meaningful action.
If you talk to wildlife veterinarians and other environmentalists, they will tell you that the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak from wildlife to humans is not only unsurprising, but that something like it could happen again soon. So, don’t throw away the rest of your masks.
That was the takeaway from a global webinar I hosted a few weeks ago called “Emerging Diseases, Wildlife Trade and Consumption: The Need for Strong Global Governance,” subtitled “Exploring Ways to Prevent Future Pandemics. The conference brought together some of the best experts on the interactions between animals, the wild and humans, culminating in an inspiring talk by renowned primatologist Jane Goodall.
I really enjoyed the presentation by one of the event organizers, Steve Osofsky, a wildlife veterinarian at Cornell University, who summarized why the health of wildlife, the health of ecosystems and our own health are inextricably linked.
Osofsky explained that when we say that most emerging viruses come from wildlife, we are not blaming wildlife, but rather making the point that it is our own actions that “invite these viruses into the human living room: we eat the body parts of wild animals; we capture wild species, mix them together and sell them in the marketplace; we destroy what is left of wild nature at a dizzying rate of destroying what’s left of wild nature – think deforestation – all of which greatly increases our chances of coming into contact with new pathogens.”
Osowski adds that these three behaviors have in common “a surprisingly simple underlying reason: our broken relationship with wild nature is often based on an arrogance that we are somehow cut off from the rest of Life on Earth.”
The reasoning is simple: forests, freshwater systems, oceans, grasslands, and the biodiversity within them actually give us the clean air, clean water, climate-stabilizing buffers, and healthy Food we need to thrive, while also providing natural protection from viruses.
If we protect these natural systems, they will protect us. We need to use this truth to guide everything we do in the future to prevent another zoonotic pandemic. This means that three steps must surely be taken now.
First, we need to recognize that many of the zoonotic viruses that can cause pandemics can be transmitted to humans through so-called fresh markets. Such markets sell domestic and wild animals from land and sea that carry pathogens that are mixed and sold together.
An NPR report Monday said Communist Party officials themselves believe that a mammal on a Chinese wildlife farm could be a bridge carrier for the spread of the Communist virus from bats to humans. Such farms raise civets, porcupines, pangolins, raccoons and bamboo rats and supply them to fresh markets in Wuhan. Beijing must control the consumption of wild animals.
“While we missed the opportunity to stop SARS-CoV-1 and now SARS-CoV-2 from emerging, how many more times will humans allow this cycle to repeat itself?” Osofsky asked. “It is Time that the market for the sale of wild animals (especially mammals and birds) should be allowed to be seen as totally unacceptable in places where people have other sources of nutrition.”
To be sure, there are people all over the world who need to eat wildlife to survive and make ends meet. Therefore, the wealthier nations of the world need to join together to help address the poverty and food insecurity that leads to these behaviors, not only out of compassion but also out of self-interest.
Second, wealthy countries also need to join together to support Interpol and other new efforts to eliminate illegal wildlife-related supply chains that supply fresh markets with endangered wildlife that are in high dietary and/or cultural demand.
Traders and the corrupt government officials who help them have long been able to keep the proceeds from the sale of wildlife, such as pangolins whose meat and scales are favored by some, for themselves, and the losses are borne by society when these animals spread the virus to us.
If which countries do not stop the illegal wildlife trade, the United States should threaten to ban all legal wildlife trade in that country. Out-of-control nuclear weapons can kill people, and so can pangolins in cages.
Finally, there is deforestation. How Brazil deals with rainforests, how we deal with urban sprawl, and how China deals with the rapid urbanization of wilderness areas is everyone’s problem. All three countries are eliminating natural buffers and expanding the points of contact between wildlife and humans, the places where pandemics emerge. This must stop.
“If multinational corporations are still able to conduct large-scale logging or mining in the world’s last remaining great forests without paying the price for the real risks these activities pose to all of us, we are going to get what’s coming to us,” Osowski said. “But if companies really had to pay for the pandemic risks associated with these development activities, perhaps some of these projects wouldn’t be undertaken at all.”
As Russ Mittermeier, chief conservation officer for Global Wildlife Conservation, told me, “We are amazed when spacecraft land on Mars and look for tiny traces of life that may or may not exist. ” Meanwhile, on Earth, “we continue to destroy and degrade a wide variety of ecosystems, such as tropical forests and coral reefs.” Yet it is these ecosystems that sustain our lives and enrich us.
Stopping this practice is the only truly sustainable vaccine against the next pandemic. In other words, instead of looking for intelligent life on Mars, show some wisdom on Earth.
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