Zoonosis And Human Pandemics : Exacerbated by ecological disruption (interview with author and journalist david quammen)
David Quammen (@DavidQuammen) is a journalist and the author of several books, including EBOLA, The Tangled Tree, and Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic (2012).
In this podcast episode so pertinent to this time we're in, David sheds light on how zoonotic diseases, like Coronavirus, are related to environmental conservation; how we've been making ourselves more and more vulnerable to having infectious diseases become full-blown pandemics; and more.
To start, get a glimpse below into the conversation between David and Green Dreamer Podcast's host, Kamea Chayne.
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Mission to Earth by NYADO
“Some people want to say that this COVID-19 pandemic was caused by climate change. I don’t think you can say that at all. However, it is caused by the same anthropogenic factors that cause climate change...”
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This is a conversation on Green Dreamer with Kamea Chayne, a podcast and multimedia journal illuminating our paths towards ecological balance, intersectional sustainability, and true abundance and wellness for all. This preview has been edited for clarity. Subscribe to Green Dreamer Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or any podcast app to stay informed and updated on our latest episodes.
On acknowledging our own roles in increasing the likelihood of zoonosis:
"It's not just a few people in China who say, ‘I want to eat pangolins, or I want to eat bats, or I want to eat palm civets.’
There's too much of a tendency to demonize those people as being responsible for this current situation.
All of us are doing things that contribute to the possibility of this kind of an outbreak and pandemic by the things that we do—eating factory-farmed meat is one of them, I'm afraid."
On the relationship between COVID-19 and climate change:
"There are some people that want to say that this COVID-19 pandemic is caused by climate change. I don't think you can say that at all—it's not caused by climate change.
However, it is caused by the same anthropogenic factors that cause climate change:
We are multiplying (there are 7.7 billions of us); extracting resources; extracting energy; extracting food; extracting timber; and disrupting rich ecosystems.
I think that is the main point that can be said about the relationship between climate change and Coronavirus."
On the potential role of viruses for an ecosystem's balance:
"It's possible that viruses do play a role in correcting imbalances.
There's a group of insects that become pestiferous problems for forest trees in places, for instance, like where I live in Montana. Every dozen years or so, you might see a plague of tent caterpillars—these little fuzzy caterpillars that build silk tents, inside of which hundreds of them might grow from baby caterpillars into caterpillars that are ready to turn into moths.
Suddenly, there's an infestation…
This happened in my town in Montana back in about 1992, and I still remember it very vividly. I write about it at the end of Spillover because it has a certain value as a parable to what is happening with humans.
Ecologists call this an outbreak population, meaning an outbreak of an incredible abundance in a particular species that has the capability of increasing its population level because of good conditions over the space of just a year or two, increasing population abundance by a factor of a thousand or more.
So suddenly you have tent caterpillars everywhere. The leaves are falling off, the trees are being eaten away, and people start saying that we need to get rid of them and spray chemicals on them.
But the forest ecologists say, ‘No, relax! Just be patient, because this population outbreak is going to crash; these things are going to disappear naturally.’
Sure enough, after a year or at most two seasons of this, usually before the trees die, the tent caterpillar population crashes. They're still there, but there are very few of them left, and you can hardly find one.
And what is it that causes that population crash? You can probably guess: virus.
That's a natural cycle. Entomologists can predict that will happen, and it does happen.
So is that going to happen to us?
I'm very hopeful [the coronavirus] will not cause our population to crash, but it will infect a lot of people. I think we have the capacity to deal with it so we don't reach total disaster, because we're smarter, we have science, we can tell people to social distance, and we have the potential to develop a vaccine.
We can get through this, but we have to be humble and remember that we're bringing this problem on ourselves to a great degree."
Final words of wisdom:
"Stay safe; stay well. Stay connected emotionally even while distancing socially. And even through the darkness, keep smiling.”
