The new Chinese coronavirus is the current talk of the town. As for every emerging zoonotic disease, the relationship between environment exploitation, biodiversity and spillover casts its shadow. Therefore, just as a side note, I am driven to reread this review that appeared in December on Nature Ecology and Evolution. The main message is relatively technical, and it is that the relationship between biodiversity and disease is not linear, but depends on the geographics scale we’re looking at. But to my simple mind, a few words are useful as a remind of our grim, conflictual relationship with the living world: ecosystems are both richness and danger.
Ecosystems regularly pose a threat of disease to humans and wildlife,
Which does not mean that wiping out forests is a good way of managing zoonosis. On the contrary:
targeting conservation toward protecting ecosystems that are not currently posing a major threat of problematic disease to humans or wildlife might prevent increases in disease
and
preservation of intact, functioning ecosystems and finding sustainable, equitable interventions that discourage human incursions into those ecosystems (for example, for logging and bush-meat hunting), could reduce the risk of transmission of multiple pathogens, even if these interventions are not the single most efficient control method for individual diseases. Thus, they could represent win–win scenarios for conservation and disease control.
There is hope, then. But the whole review is interesting for whoever wants to see how little we know and how many the nuances. Ecosystems bring beauty and disaster. Despite what the term “ecosystem service” brings to mind, they’re not there to serve us. They are features of nature, and should be treated with the circumspection and respect this implies.