To prevent pandemics, stop disrespecting nature
A leading conservationist and biodiversity scholar, with decades of experience in the Amazon, reflects on the lessons of COVID-19.
Like much of the world I am sheltering in place because of COVID-19. It’s not the first pandemic of my lifetime: I experienced pre-vaccine polio epidemics, when parents would talk about the scary disease in front of children by spelling it aloud, thinking they wouldn’t understand. Many of these adults had lived through the influenza pandemic in 1918. And in recent years we have all followed the news nervously as Ebola, SARS, and MERS have surfaced in human populations in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
Except for polio, which is transmitted only from human to human, most of those disease agents were part of natural cycles that involved only animals. They spilled over into humans because nature was
