As the novel coronavirus has emerged and spread around the globe, science writer David Quammen has not been surprised.
As the novel coronavirus has emerged and spread around the globe, science writer David Quammen has not been surprised. He’d warned of just such a scenario in his unsettling 2012 book, Spillover, which detailed how — as we continue to disrupt the natural world — viruses are increasingly spreading from wild animal populations to humans.
A global pandemic like COVID-19 was inevitable, Quammen says in an interview with Yale Environment 360. What was not inevitable, given the alerts that scientists have been issuing for a decade or more, was the utter lack of preparedness. “I am surprised at how unprepared we’ve been and how badly we, meaning this [Trump] administration but also state governments, have managed this,” he says.
For his reporting, Quammen has crawled into bat caves with researchers in search of emerging viruses, visited wild animal markets in China that are prime hot spots for viral transfer, and traveled to African villages ravaged by Ebola. The heart of the issue, he tells e360, is “our relationship with the rest of the natural world, which is consumptive, intrusive, and disruptive.”
Read more at Yale Environment 360
