From conspiracies surrounding the origin of COVID19 to the latest sci-fi movies, our reluctance to recognise the awesome power of nature, confounds our inability accept the need to protect it. The logic that we are fighting something man made, perpetuates the myth that we are in control. Lab technicians didn’t make COVID19. The less exciting reality doesn’t make particularly good TV news. The truth is, our existence will sooner be eroded by the cumulative effect of lots of tiny, incremental damages to wildlife and nature. It’s more like slowly drinking yourself to death. Our ego is the only thing separating us from animals. It stops us accepting that we share their fate, in order that we might stop killing them and realise that’s the solution to our woes.
Lab technicians didn’t make COVID19
Scientists refer to coronaviruses as ‘generalist, promiscuous viruses‘. In other words, they already exist in nature. Viruses and disease are important for a healthy environment and only become runaway problems, when ecosystem structures topple and malfunction.
Science is blind to this reality. Researchers can only study fragments of the recent past and a pandemic has never happened on this scale, as we are now over 7 billion people. And it’s always just too subtle and complex to point to a single cause. That’s why it’s easier for us to assume the virus is made in a lab, rather than imagine it emerges from a general decline in planetary health.
Our biggest threat is to ourselves
It’s a premise of most dystopian fiction that we will destroy ourselves through war, or be invaded by an extra terrestrial. These are both fantasies that stem from our egos.
In Amazon Prime’s The Tomorrow War, people fight aliens that thaw from beneath the Greenland ice sheet. I enjoyed the film but it also amused me. Fantasists alway have to imagine something we make or something bigger than us, leading to our untimely end.
The truth is, we are killing the animals that joined forces with us, to uphold our mutual life support structures. Bacteria and viruses do really well in this new world. They are among the many ways Earth reimposes selection pressure, in order to rebuild diversity. This is the unyielding force I talk about here. Universal laws of nature are driving in one direction, towards stability (that we can inhabit.) And we are breaking that stability by trying to control it, and making things uninhabitable.
This process is an out of control juggernaut of universal scale and power that we are standing in front of. A wise person would deftly hop aboard and take the steering wheel. There are no Marvel superheroes who can take the force of the collision for us. But we do have others to help us.
So, what’s the solution?
There is only one way.
Rebuild wildlife populations and allow ecosystemsHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More to restore under the collective influence of animals. To do so, we need to recognise our animality and work out a way to be part of that process, rather than working against it.
Spotlight
The Huanan market was the epicenter of SARS-CoV-2 emergence
Geographical clustering of the earliest known COVID-19 cases and the proximity of positive environmental samples to live-animal vendors suggest that the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the site of origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Michael Worobey; Joshua I. Levy; Lorena M. Malpica Serrano; Alexander Crits-Christoph; Jonathan E. Pekar; Stephen A. Goldstein; Angela L. Rasmussen; Moritz U. G. Kraemer; Chris Newman; Marion P. G. Koopmans; Marc A. Suchard; Joel O. Wertheim; Philippe Lemey; David L. Robertson; Robert F. Garry; Edward C. Holmes; Andrew Rambaut; Kristian G. Andersen
SARS-CoV-2 emergence very likely resulted from at least two zoonotic events
Understanding the circumstances that lead to pandemics is critical to their prevention. Here, we analyze the pattern and origin of genomic diversity of SARS-CoV-2 early in the COVID-19 pandemic. We show that the SARS-CoV-2 genomic diversity prior to February 2020 comprised only two distinct viral lineages—denoted A and B—with no transitional haplotypes. Novel phylodynamic rooting methods, coupled with epidemic simulations, indicate that these two lineages were the result of at least two separate cross-species transmission events into humans. The first zoonotic transmission likely involved lineage B viruses and occurred in late-November/early-December 2019 and no earlier than the beginning of November 2019, while the introduction of lineage A likely occurred within weeks of the first event. These findings define the narrow window between when SARS-CoV-2 first jumped into humans and when the first cases of COVID-19 were reported. Hence, as with SARS-CoV-1 in 2002 and 2003, SARS-CoV-2 emergence likely resulted from multiple zoonotic events.
Pekar, Jonathan E.; Magee, Andrew; Parker, Edyth; Moshiri, Niema; Izhikevich, Katherine; Havens, Jennifer L.; Gangavarapu, Karthik; Malpica Serrano, Lorena M.; Crits-Christoph, Alexander; Matteson, Nathaniel L.; Zeller, Mark; Levy, Joshua I.; Wang, Jade C.; Hughes, Scott; Lee, Jungmin; Park, Heedo; Park, Man-Seong; Ching Zi Yan, Katherine; Tzer Pin Lin, Raymond; Mat Isa, Mohd Noor; Muhammad Noor, Yusuf; Vasylyeva, Tetyana I.; Garry, Robert F.; Holmes, Edward C.; Rambaut, Andrew; Suchard, Marc A.; Andersen, Kristian G.; Worobey, Michael; Wertheim, Joel O.
Scientists know the coronavirus came from bats and wasn’t made in a lab
One of the conspiracy theories that have plagued attempts to keep people informed during the pandemic is the idea that the coronavirus was created in a laboratory. But the vast majority of scientists who have studied the virus agree that it evolved naturally and crossed into humans from an animal species, most likely a bat. Read more …
