“We cut the trees; we kill the animals or cage them and send them to markets. We disrupt ecosystems, and we shake viruses loose from their natural hosts. When that happens, they need a new host. Often, we are it.”
ALWAYS, absolutely always: the source of any evil is within ourselves, not the outside. Today, like at Adam’s Fall, WE are the ones destroying the world, and destroying ourselves in the process. We say the ‘yes’ that inflicts the fall. We should be the ones taking up the cross, not the world.
This is difficult to look at, because the guilt is ours – mine and yours – by allowing this destruction to go on for the sake of our comforts. But if we are to have any hope, any future, there is no other way forward (as persons and as humanity) except to repent, where ‘repent’ has its authentic Christian meaning of ‘metanoia’ = PROFOUND CHANGE.
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‘(…) humanity’s destruction of biodiversity creates the conditions for new viruses and diseases such as Covid-19, the viral disease that emerged in China in December 2019, to arise – with profound health and economic impacts in rich and poor countries alike.
Is it possible, then, that it was human activity, such as road building, mining, hunting and logging, that triggered the Ebola epidemics in Mayibout 2 and elsewhere in the 1990s and that is unleashing new terrors today?
Research suggests that outbreaks of animal-borne and other infectious diseases such as Ebola, Sars, bird flu and now Covid-19, caused by a novel coronavirus, are on the rise. Pathogens are crossing from animals to humans, and many are able to spread quickly to new places. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that three-quarters of new or emerging diseases that infect humans originate in animals.
Some, like rabies and plague, crossed from animals centuries ago. Others, such as Marburg, which is thought to be transmitted by bats, are still rare. A few, like Covid-19, which emerged last year in Wuhan, China, and Mers, which is linked to camels in the Middle East, are new to humans and spreading globally.
Other diseases that have crossed into humans include Lassa fever, which was first identified in 1969 in Nigeria; Nipah from Malaysia; and Sars from China, which killed more than 700 people and travelled to 30 countries in 2002–03. Some, like Zika and West Nile virus, which emerged in Africa, have mutated and become established on other continents.
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Why is THIS barely in the news and almost never on our conscience?