COVID-19 is Our Final Warning

Humanity is a kind of animal … connected in origin and descent, in sickness and in health.” – David Quammen

COVID-19 is a zoonosis, a spillover virus that started in wild animals, mutated to infect humans and spilled over into the population.

It’s not the first nor will it be the last. That is, unless humankind undergoes a radical readjustment to how it interacts with the natural world.

That’s the premise of David Quammen’s 2012 seminal book, “Spillover,” which traces global diseases with animal origins. It’s a trans-Atlantic tour of the unintended health consequences of human incursions into the natural world, from the well-known – AIDS, SARS, Ebola and Lyme disease – to the more obscure Nipah, Marburg and Hendra, all of them deadly. COVID-19, in fact, may be the final warning to protect and preserve the natural world in order to stop the next pandemic, which may be much worse.

“Spillover” attributes the rise of diseases afflicting humans to our predatory actions on wild landscapes. Prying viruses from their natural hosts just lets them loose to find new ones – us.

“They are not simply happening to us; they represent the unintended results of things we are doing,” Quammen stated.

Logging, slash-and-burn agriculture, mineral extraction, pollution, the hunting and eating of wild animals, and climate change hasten our own demise.

As the world’s population reaches 8 billion, hungry and expansive, the disintegration of natural ecosystems and the emergence of zoonotic diseases will follow. And every living thing will suffer.

“We humans are inseparable from the natural world,” Quammen wrote. “In fact, there is no natural world … there is only the world.”

Ecosystem disruptions in Miami-Dade County are all around us, including the poisoning of Biscayne Bay, the blasting of coral reefs and smothering of sea grasses, and the leveling of natural habitats for new developments.

The Miami Wilds project in South Dade is the most recent example. A water theme park, housing and retail development will replace one of the last vestiges of the Florida Pine Rocklands, a unique forest community that once covered 126,500 acres. The Florida bonneted bat (the rarest bat in the U.S., with fewer than 1,000 left in the wild), the Miami tiger beetle and Bartram’s scrub-hairstreak butterfly are just three of the species that have found a last refuge there. The project may consign them to the “living dead,” moving ever closer toward extinction.

Nearby and captive in Zoo Miami are their displaced global cousins – endangered and threatened species, cornered by encroachment and destruction of the wetlands, mountain ranges, tropical forests and grasslands where they once lived.

It’s a different story inside the walls of Miami’s Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science, where the newest exhibit, “Nature’s Superheroes: Life at the Limits” celebrates the superpowers of earth’s species – tubeworms that survive in superheated seawater full of acids, metals and sulfur; microscopic tardigrades that live for years without food or water; and vultures than can soar to 37,000 feet.

The exhibit, organized by New York’s American Museum of Natural History, celebrates the diversity of life on Earth, highlighting the super senses of animals and plants that allow them to survive in extreme environments. Children marveling at the exhibit learn that some birds can echolocate like bats to navigate in the dark, and southern elephant seals can hold their breath underwater for up to two hours.

Outside the museum walls, it’s a different story. In the real world, living beings with their own superpowers of sight, smell or strength are perishing.

Who’s to say we won’t need them to save us one day? In Yellowstone National Park, biologists want wolves to cull herds of deer infected with a mysterious chronic wasting disease that could spread to humans. Wolves have the superpower to detect the disease through smell or subtle changes in how prey moves, long before there’s any obvious sign of illness.

The Florida bonneted bats of the Pine Rocklands, which were brought back from perilously low numbers, are part of a misunderstood and maligned species that may be essential to our survival, too. Bats are extraordinary pollinators and insect hunters, critical to agriculture and curtailing insect-borne diseases like malaria and Zika.

Environmental activists tried to save the bats’ home in the Pine Rocklands from development. In the end, they simply asked for more time, imploring elected officials to study the science first. A trip to the science museum to learn how extraordinary each species on Earth is and how we have no right to extinguish it forever might have helped.

“No amusement park is worth the extinction of a single species,” said Paola Ferreira, executive director of the Tropical Audubon Society in statement to the Miami-Dade County Board of County Commissioners.

But then it was. Construction begins next year.  

Nature’s Superheroes: Life at the Limits”

A new immersive exhibition on view through Sunday, April 11, 2021, at the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science, located at 1101 Biscayne Blvd. in Miami, 305.434.9600 and frostscience.org; tickets: $21.95 – $29.95.

Limited, free tickets to the museum and other local cultural attractions may be available through the Miami-Dade Public Library System’s Museum Pass Program; visit mdpls.org/museum-pass for information.