Deforestation and the new coronavirus
How the encounter of humans with wild animals can increase the risks of new pandemics.
The Planet Earth is enormous, but not infinite and today we are more than 7.7 billion people and we are still growing. Where do the future generations are going to live? How do we increase food production and water access for so many people? The answer to those questions relates to efficient land occupation. However, the more we expand our presence in the world, the more we approach the wildlife and get in contact with animals and their pathogens. This encounter might have dramatic consequences, like a pandemic. And, yes, the new coronavirus is the result of this encounter among humans, wild animals, and their pathogens.
The ability of the living creatures to reproduce is potentially infinite. Any living thing that gets what it needs (space, food, etc.) and none hampering (predators, parasites, etc.) might grow exponentially. This strange word means a simple thing: imagine that a female hare had two daughters each year, each of them had another two daughters in the following year and so on. From that first hare, we would have 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 hares and in 23 years the world would have more hares than humans! But life is not that easy for hares. Predators and diseases are controlling the population of hares in a way that despite many of them are born each year, many also die. This was also true for humans, strongly controlled by nature until some factors turned the game in our favor.
The first factor was the discovery of fire. Sitting by the campfire, we were protected from predators, we also had time to ponder about life, source of all great human discoveries, including the great idea to cook food. The extra energy of the cooked meat gave us the fuel to the growth of our brain. And a large brain took us from the position of animals at the mercy of nature to the position of nature engineers. And then, modifying nature piece by piece and inventing new ways of solving problems, we reproduced like hares and took over the planet.
The second important step was an amazing idea that our ancestors had. They realized that keep walking and hunting down animals to eat and looking for seasonal fruits to collect seemed nonsense. Why travel and be exposed to the perils of nature if we could find a safe shelter? Why hunt animals if we could lure, hold, and tame wild animals to serve us as food and transport, or grow fruits and grains? So, human beings settled and became farmers. One of the consequences of agriculture is the surplus. What to do with grains, vegetables, and fruits that small families and communities were not able to consume? To sell them! The surplus also led to other problems of civilized society: economy and inequality, but this is a tale for another time. And since time would never stop, the third human innovation was the machines. With the invention of increasingly powerful tools and machines, the industry emerged, and with the industry more surplus was generated.
The human beings are on the verge of technological and scientific development and also in the awakening of its more dangerous challenge. Agriculture, cattle, industries, schools, churches, houses, roads, public buildings, restaurants, and malls, all these enterprises have something in common; all of them need space. People are not used to think about this, but to open space to all human activities one thing must be done: it is necessary to destroy nature. Plain like that. It is necessary to cut down old trees with tractors and giant iron chains. It is necessary to ‘clean’ out of the way all twigs and shrubs with a chainsaw, to burn all the remains, and land rivers and lakes. After that, it is extremely necessary to put concrete above all for the ones walking in the streets, buying that beautiful apartment, or getting into the mall would never see that once have existed life besides the human.
At the animal market of Wuhan, there were domestic animals, such as dogs and cats, and also wild animals, such as snakes, small mammals, and bats. Strong evidence trace the new coronavirus from bats up to humans in China, but it could have been the bushmeat your uncle hunted down a few years ago. The local where the outbreak began doesn’ t matter much. The most important is to know that when we push nature’s borders and get in contact with wildlife, we may get diseases that our immune system hasn’t learned to deal with. There are many types of viruses that our body knows, but one little DNA change is enough for a virus to increase its infection rate, lethality, and time of permanence in the body that would lead to a catastrophic scenario for the humans. And that was what happened with the new coronavirus, vector of the COVID-19, which already took the life of 480 thousand people in the world.
Despite we have become dominant on Earth, we are exposed to the same rules of nature. Of course, we need to live somewhere and eat to survive but to keep inhabiting our planet we also need to re-think the way we explore nature. We need to re-think our role of nature subduers and take the role of protectors, managers of the resources that are vital for us. With respect and above all of the things, scientific information, we need to find a way to change nature in our favor in a sustainable way. Scientists are unanimous in saying that other pandemics will come. It is up to us to think about the solution to one of the biggest problems that human beings have faced: not destroying our own home.
