As I write, the meltdown democracy previously known as the United States of America is threatening to erupt back into a civil war that actually never ended—just went underground like a herpes virus in the body politic waiting to spring back to life at the requisite amount of societal stress.
That stress has a name, a serious mental affliction, and an absurd hairdo. The world could be well and truly hooped by the time you read this, or things could actually be looking up.
They were certainly looking up-ish after the recent B.C. “unnecelection,” in which the Sea to Sky region may have gained its long-awaited Green MLA. But whether this pans out or the troubled waters of the U.S. calm enough for anyone to navigate, one thing’s clear: humanity faces a raft of ongoing problems, all of which require a complete upending of convention to solve.
Yes, I’m referring to the umbrella issues of climate change, biodiversity loss, etc. Sure, a global pandemic is hogging the spotlight, but it’s intimately related to the extent that if we want to avert another we need to start tackling these other issues stat.
Although this cause-and-effect relationship was abundantly clear early in the pandemic, as the death toll mounted, it was pushed from the news cycle. But last week came a reminder.
The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) —a global group of academic, government, and non-profit scientists—released a report stating that the same forces driving extinction, habitat loss, and climate change will lead to future pandemics.
“Without preventative strategies,” it reads, “pandemics will emerge more often, spread more rapidly, kill more people, and affect the global economy with more devastating impact than ever before.”
Conclusion? Protecting land and animals will mitigate future pandemics. Given the extent of the current COVID headache, we might want to fill this prescription.
Zoonotic diseases—e.g. SARS, HIV, influenza, Ebola, Zika—occur when microbes jump from wildlife to humans. Scientists estimate half of a possible 1.7 million undiscovered viruses in common transmission sources like bats, birds, primates and rodents may have the ability to infect people. So it’s no coincidence, says IPBES, that pandemics have increased as human activities stress the environment and steer us into closer contact with wildlife. But of course, we’ve been here before.
In November 2019, pre-COVID, scientists sounded the alarm that deforestation was creating more favourable conditions for outbreaks of zoonotic disease. Then, in February 2020, delegates from 140 countries gathered in Rome, Italy, to discuss key documents in the lead-up to the 15th meeting of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) scheduled for a future date in Kunming, China.
The Kunming meeting will represent the largest global biodiversity gathering in a decade—a period of serial disappointments on the wildlife front. As a result, expectations to agree to targets beforehand were high.
The first step was a “zero draft” that featured five long-term goals for 2050 and intermediary targets to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030, including ambitious proposals to protect fully a third of the world’s oceans and land.
But the Rome proceedings were auspicious. As delegates spun spaghetti in the capital, Italy’s north struggled to contain an outbreak of COVID-19 that would soon prove devastating. With a direct link between environmental breakdown and zoonotic disease laid bare by COVID’s suspected origin in a wildlife market in Wuhan, China, dialogue on the zero draft was suffused with added urgency. But it ultimately begged a much larger question: would we finally take the destruction of nature more seriously in the wake of such a devastating global consequence?
No less an environmental luminary than Jane Goodall opined that humanity “was finished” if we failed, post-COVID-19, to adapt human food systems away from over-exploitation. Currently, the prospects look bleak.
Having already rolled back 100 environmental regulations, the Trump administration used the cover of the pandemic and weeks of civil unrest to remove longstanding protections for birds and eliminate 85 per cent of marine protected areas. In Canada, conservative governments in Alberta and Ontario suspended environmental compliance and reporting for industry.
Elsewhere, as employment was lost to COVID shutdowns, wildlife poaching skyrocketed and forests were illegally levelled with impunity. This grim track record mirrors our response to other large-scale existential threats. In the same way catastrophic climate events haven’t been able to galvanize action on reducing atmospheric carbon, the spectre of soaring biodiversity loss has failed—to borrow an all-too-familiar metaphor—to flatten that curve either.
In April, the CBD’s acting executive secretary, Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, reflected on the growing body of literature showing how large-scale deforestation, habitat degradation, agriculture intensification, wildlife trade, and climate change combine to drive both biodiversity loss and new disease.
“Two-thirds of emerging diseases now come from wildlife,” she noted. “Countries must ban markets that sell wildlife for human consumption while ensuring critical food sources for otherwise dependent communities.”
So… what next? There’s an old adage that you shouldn’t judge a civilization on its wealth, but on how it treats its working class. The natural world offers a parallel: despite contributing a yeoman’s share to all human progress, we continue to exploit it mercilessly. Nature raises no voice in defence, yet when it convulses—as with COVID—we suffer its silent outcry.
Regardless of our politics, it’s time we all started thinking differently.
Leslie Anthony is a science/environment writer and author who holds a doctorate in reversing political spin.
