Nature’s way

LETTERS FROM THE AGNO

March L. Fianza

It is a song written in 1970, many years before humans admitted that their activities resulted to global warming. The song is a lamentation over what is happening to Mother Nature. It also tells us that 50 years ago, writers were already concerned about the environment.
    In one of its lines, it goes: “It's nature's way of telling you something's wrong; It's nature's way of telling you in a song. It's nature's way of telling you, soon we'll freeze; It's nature's way of telling you, dying trees.”
    There was the Spanish Flu in 1918, then came Ebola syndrome, the bird flu, Middle East respiratory syndrome (Merscov) and Severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars). Indeed, nature is sending us a message with the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing climate disaster.
    With these modern day diseases, it is safe to say that human behavior is the reason viruses are transmitted to people. And the solution left for humans to stop further pandemics is to reduce global warming.
    In other words, fighting the variants of COVID-19 and preventing it from spreading must go hand in hand with seriously stopping wildlife destruction. Is COVID-19 Mother Nature’s revenge?
    Climate change as a result of destruction of wildlife habitat due to expansion of mining, housing, agriculture or search for food forces the animals to live closer to people’s homes. This, even though humans discovered that seeds multiplied when sowed.
    Humans also learned to breed animals that they could butcher in the future. Because of this, our population grew. Later in the modern century, the animal population grew even faster as we learned to apply science to increase production.
    In food production, we applied artificial fertilizer that polluted rivers that flowed to the seas, producing greenhouse gasses.     Naturally, the farming industry needs automobile engines such as tractors and the necessary appliances, all contributing to water and air pollution.
    With the use of artificial fertilizer, the world raised more food than natural production could have done. Without the additional food produced, the human population could have been lesser. Then with more agricultural inventions, our population shot up again.
    In addition to the industrial revolution in the last century, scientists discovered vaccines for viruses and treatments for many diseases resulting in longer life spans. This was good but the world population increased again.
    A few months after the first lockdown was announced in March 2020, I mentioned in my column something about human activity encroaching on wildlife spaces for economic reasons. Science confirmed that this has brought us closer to plants and animals with viruses that could transfer to humans.
    Humans and the wild environment are an unusual pair but at the same time, they are both allies to each other. This means that they have to take good care of each other. The simple formula is for man to stop destroying his wild environment in order to take care of himself.
    A clear example is the report that COVID-19 originated from a market in China where live wild animals were butchered and served as exotic food for rich tourists. If so, then apparently it is in the wildlife market where human behavior results in diseases jumping from animals to humans.
    Exotic animals in China are packed in cages and transported from the wild. During travel, the animals are stressed and expel body fluids with organisms that may cause diseases to people who come in contact with them.
    After fighting the Spanish Flu, Ebola, Sars and MersCov; our scientists thought they had found solutions to the diseases as these were managed with health protocols. But when the COVID-19 pandemic came, nature was trying to tell us something. The world cannot go back to business as usual.
    Today, after lockdowns upon lockdowns, planners find solutions to balance economic growth and health. But continuous growth in agriculture, car production, tourism and other industries is not possible in a world with limited space because it does not grow bigger.
    Nature tells us that better living conditions in a pandemic call for physical distancing or wide spaces so that we do not infect each other, clean water and air, wider reforested areas where wild plants can grow and where animals can keep the viruses to themselves.