David Bilicky

IT is hard not to recognize the devastating results of the latest pandemic. Every country in the world battles day and night to keep their citizens safe and alive. Our civilization is facing a danger that to many of us seemed impossible to emerge.

For thousands of years human beings have been convinced that the natural world is something we can take advantage of without any consequences.

This belief, a cornerstone to human complexity, created a paradigm through which we compare, understand and judge non-human existence of creatures and forms. Certain of our superiority and uniqueness, we distanced ourselves from the very cradle that the natural world had always been for us.

Throughout time, the world’s greatest civilizations have faced many dangers and risks such as war, famine, poor leadership, climatic changes, or invasions threatening their collapse. Various diseases caused by cell-less organisms like viruses could be considered, perhaps, the most ravaging of all. Many scholars believe that it was Antonine Plague, the world’s first pandemic, which contributed to the decline of Roman Empire, and its ultimate fall. A couple of hundred years later, in the 14th century, the world experienced a new virus pandemic brought from Asia to Europe via trade routes. It killed millions in China and the Middle East, and wiped out almost a third of Europe’s population – earning itself the moniker the “Black Death.” Since then, viral pandemics have been registered in every century and as the general level of literacy increased, reports on them became more common.

There are a few key factors as to why such diseases spread so fast. Increased international trade, rising human population, dense urbanization, close contact with domesticated and wild animals – to name a few. The origins of many viruses remain unknown, however, viruses from wildlife hosts, in particular, have been a major threat to public health worldwide.

The emergence of Ebola, SARS, HIV/AIDS, influenza, or COVID-19, occurred when an animal virus switched hosts and adapted to be transmitted within human populations. The lack of proper safety measures taken under wild animal-human contact is primarily to blame. Consumption of bush meat and the illegal wildlife trade are also major reasons why millions of people have died over the last century.

As our population grows, we move further into areas of the world previously uninhabited by humans. Our agricultural expansion converts ancient rainforests into palm oil plantations and grasslands used for cattle. The billions of tons of greenhouse gases we emit each year accelerate global warming, leading to the melting of glaciers and thawing of permafrost peatlands. This, in turn, results in uncovering gargantuan areas of unexamined soil and surfaces containing bacteria and viruses that could be far more fatal than any of the viral infections we have experienced so far.

The new coronavirus pandemic was foreseeable and, therefore, preventable. Our civilization will not face collapse this year but, if no action towards improving the health-care system and protecting the natural environment is taken, next time our species might not be so lucky.

(The author is a student of Chinese Language at Shenzhen University, and Global Studies at Arizona State University.)