'Serious efforts will be made to prevent the Next Big One After This One, which surely must include reducing habitat destruction.' Photo: Jamie Morris / Unsplash.
‘COVID-19 is what upsetting the ecological balance really looks like.’
In the balance: Kersti Wagstaff on habitat destruction and humanity
Last October’s issue of the Extinction Rebellion (XR) newspaper carried a short article by a doctor, Amelia Cussans, on the health aspects of climate change. Her concern was with the effects of heat. She noticed that ‘the traditional NHS winter crises are now matched by summer crises’. Heatwaves were increasing deaths among the elderly, and raising pollen counts and airborne allergens, triggering asthma. She talked about the strain on health services – no summer low season any more. Her emergency waiting room was packed and the corridor crammed with trolleys. And yet: ‘I find myself wondering whether we will remember 2019 as the good old days when everything was under control.’ How astonishingly prescient that looks now.
Or perhaps not so prescient. The XR message was that scientists have been telling us the facts for years; we knew that catastrophe was imminent. The only question was in what form, and when. Years ago, researchers working at the intersection between ecology and virology coined the term ‘the Next Big One’. Previous Big Ones have included HIV, Ebola, Nipah, and SARS. All of these have been traced back to novel interactions between human beings and animals in places untouched by humans since the world began, allowing viruses that had co-evolved relatively amicably to migrate into new hosts – us.
We have become used to thinking of rainforest destruction in terms of loss of species and the effects on our atmosphere. But the same activities also dislodge microbes into our own living sphere. COVID-19 is what upsetting the ecological balance really looks like. As David Quammen puts it in Spillover, his definitive account of the subject for non-scientists: ‘We cut our way through the Congo. We cut our way through the Amazon. We cut our way through Borneo. We cut our way through Madagascar. We cut our way through New Guinea and northeastern Australia. We shake the trees, figuratively and literally, and things fall out… When the trees fall, and the native animals are slaughtered, the native germs fly out like dust from a demolished warehouse.’ So when Amelia Cussans concluded that ‘reversing climate change needs an astronomical international effort, but has the potential to be the greatest health accomplishment of the twenty-first century’, she was also speaking about environmental destruction.
In some senses this is happening before our eyes. It is hard to think that anything less than this pandemic would have forced governments and global money to act on the scale that they are. Serious efforts will be made to prevent the Next Big One After This One, which surely must include reducing habitat destruction. But we can be sure that some will continue to push things in their own interests, and that the poorest will continue to suffer most.
So while Quakers need to draw our strength in stillness and silence, our outward task will be to look out for those being rolled under the juggernaut of the new mobilisation, and those disappearing beneath the wheels of whatever new world order may start to emerge as the viral dust settles.
