Mick Hartley

When the wet-market theory was the main – indeed the only – contender for the source of the pandemic, much was made of the ecological pressures that gave rise to this unnatural mingling of species. Matt Ridley now dismantles the environmental theory for Covid’s origins:

With a laboratory leak in Wuhan looking more and more likely as the source of the pandemic, the Chinese authorities are not the only ones dismayed. Western environmentalists had been hoping to turn the pandemic into a fable about humankind’s brutal rape of Gaia. Even if ‘wet’ wildlife markets and smuggled pangolins were exonerated in this case, they argued, and the outbreak came from some direct contact with bats, the moral lesson was ecological. Deforestation and climate change had left infected bats stressed and with nowhere to go but towns. Or it had driven desperate people into bat-infested caves in search of food or profit.

Green grandees were in no doubt of this moral lesson. ‘Nature is sending us a message. We have pushed nature into a corner, encroached on ecosystems,’ said Inger Andersen, head of the United Nations Environment Programme. The pandemic was ‘a reminder of the intimate and delicate relationship between people and planet,’ said the director-general of the World Health Organisation, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. ‘God always forgives, we forgive sometimes, but nature never forgives,’ added Pope Francis, enigmatically. ‘Climate change is a threat multiplier for pandemic diseases, and zoonotic diseases,’ said John Kerry. Covid-19 was ‘the product of an imbalance in man’s relationship with the natural world,’ said Boris Johnson. ‘Mother Nature… gave us fire and floods, she tried to warn us but in the end she took back control,’ tweeted Sarah, Duchess of York.

In July last year, 17 scientists, including Dr Peter Daszak, who collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and was keen to exonerate his friends there, wrote an article in Science magazine insisting that the main lesson of the pandemic was that deforestation must cease: ‘The clear link between deforestation and virus emergence suggests that a major effort to retain intact forest cover would have a large return on investment even if its only benefit was to reduce virus emergence events.’

There were three problems with this argument. First, there is no ‘clear link’ between epidemics and deforestation. Aids, Sars, Mers, Ebola, Nipah, Hendra, Zika — none of these virus outbreaks has been plausibly linked to forest clearance, let alone as the major cause of them. Second, deforestation has not only ceased in southern China but went into rapid reverse a generation ago. There is more forest every year. Third, people encounter bats less, not more, than they did in the past. Urbanisation has drained rural villages of people and given them other ways of making a living than cutting trees or catching bats.

Peter Dascak, as we now know, had very good reason to deflect attention away from the possible role of virologists like himself.

The truth is that human beings did, and still do, a lot more encroaching on nature when poor and using preindustrial technology. Bushmeat — monkeys, rodents and other animals sold in markets, mainly in Africa — is a trade restricted to poor countries. In richer ones people prefer to buy poultry and pork from shops. Go further back and the massive extinctions of the Pleistocene megafauna (moas, mammoths, giant sloths, giant kangaroos etc) in North and South America, Australia, Madagascar and New Zealand were achieved by people with stone axes and bows and arrows. We Europeans ‘encroached’ on our last woolly rhinoceroses long before we invented the wheel, let alone the budget airline.

As for bats, they have moved into our houses because eaves make good roosts, not because we’ve driven them to it. But the bats that carry Sars and Sars-CoV-2 are horseshoe bats, which generally stick to natural caves. Anybody who thinks that visiting caves is a novel human habit has not been paying attention. Cavemen — the clue is in the name — were encountering bat roosts for hundreds of thousands of years.

As the archaeologist Professor Timothy Taylor of the Comenius University in Bratislava put it to me: ‘Prehistoric human beings have been almost everywhere before us. Perhaps not to the top of Everest or to Antarctica, but certainly underground wherever they could: out of curiosity; for rituals; for potting clay; for lithic resources; and, increasingly after around 5000 BC, to locate and exploit metal ores. In China and south-east Asia this becomes intensive after about 3000 BC.’

So if going into a cave was all it took to start a coronavirus pandemic, the odds are it would have happened aeons ago. There are, however, three new reasons that people go into caves today: tourism, collecting bat guano, and science. The abandoned copper mine in Yunnan where the closest relative of Sars-CoV-2 was found is an unnatural, man-made tunnel, not an example of pristine nature. After guano-shovelling miners got ill there in 2012, the only visitors to the site, as far as we can tell, were scientists, mostly from the Wuhan Institute of Virology more than 1,000 miles away. They not only went into the mine, disturbing the bats; they also captured them in nets, swabbed their rear ends for viruses and took them back to Wuhan labs. Now that’s encroachment.