June 5th is World Environment
Day, an annual event of the United Nations Environment Programme since
1974. This year the theme is Time for
Nature.
June 5 falls at a hectic time in 2020, with
one crisis nested inside another like Russian matryoshka dolls. The United
States is roiling in civil unrest more serious than any since 1968, reeling
from unemployment worse than any since 1936, and, like most of the rest of the
world, raveled in a public health crisis more lethal than any since 1918. In the background remains the slowly
unfolding environmental crisis – of climate change, biodiversity loss, toxic
pollution, soil degradation and much else besides.
The COVID-19 pandemic is an environmental
history event as well as a public health crisis. The pathogen responsible, the SARS CoV-2
virus, until November of 2019 circulated inconsequentially among bat colonies. Like a handful of other coronaviruses before
it, SARS CoV-2 leapt to humans and became the latest in a lengthy string of
so-called emerging diseases. At least
three-quarters of the pathogens behind the hundreds of emerging infections
recorded since 1945 are species-jumpers like SARS CoV-2. It is sobering to ponder the fact that the
world harbors billions, perhaps trillions, of different viruses and only 250 of
them – so far – replicate in human cells.
Most are not configured to be able to prosper in human bodies, but some
no doubt are. More species-jumping
viruses are surely coming our way, following in the wake of SARS, MERS, Ebola,
HIV, Marburg, Lassa, zika, and longer ago, rabies and measles — to name a few.
The chief reason that assaults from
emerging diseases seem to be coming thick and fast is because the pathogens,
viruses in particular, are getting more opportunities to leap to our
bodies. Humans rub shoulders with
unfamiliar species more frequently in the world’s biodiversity hotspots. We burn forests and shrink available habitat for
wild creatures. We hunt them more
successfully than ever. So those viruses
with the right bag of tricks to circulate among us have more chances than ever
to get to us. Most of them come from
bats or rodents, social creatures like ourselves, although they often jump to
our bodies via intermediate hosts such as civet cats or the pangolins suspected
in the case of SARS CoV-2. And when they
do jump to us, our penchant for jet travel and urban habitats provide ample
opportunity for them to infect millions if our public health defenses are
unable to prevent viral spread.
In countless ways, the human relationships with the natural world are changing. But they always have. That is part of the subject matter of environmental history, as evidenced in dozens of titles in our series Studies in Environment and History. Awareness of, and anxiety about, our changing relationships with nature lies behind environmentalism, the outlook that is responsible not only for World Environment Day but the myriad movements and institutions that seek to regulate, and normally to moderate, the human impact on environments. That too is part of the subject matter of environmental history, and amply reflected in our series.
So, as UNEP wishes to remind us, it is Time
for Nature. As environmental history can
remind us, it always has been time for nature.
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