Threats of extinction, climate change and emerging diseases are three big, brown, churning, murky rivers of woe, with some channels interconnecting now, but flowing parallel, independently to a great degree, but coming from the same source … the human footprint.
Pangolin, Photo: Adam Tusk (CC BY 2.0) www.tuskphoto.com
[Editor’s note: This article is a joint publication of SEJournal and The
Revelator.]
This past May, as the world started to emerge from the restraints of the
COVID-19 epidemic, a paper in the journal Nature warned that future
pandemics were coming, due to climate change, chemical pollution, invasive
species and other factors.
The most likely cause of fututheere outbreaks, the researchers found, could
come from a threat we don’t talk about enough: biodiversity loss.
The threat of emerging pandemics will be even greater, according to the
paper, when these factors combine. “For example,” the authors wrote,
“climate change and chemical pollution can cause habitat loss and change,
which in turn can cause biodiversity loss and facilitate species
introductions.”
It’s a warning that science writer David Quammen, author of the
award-winning 2012 book Spillover, has been sounding for years.
As he said on a panel at the 2023 Society of Environmental Journalists
conference in Boise, Idaho, the threats of extinction, climate change and
emerging diseases are “three big, brown, churning, murky rivers of woe, with
some channels interconnecting now, but flowing parallel, independently to a
great degree, but coming from the same source, … the human footprint.”
Connecting the Dots
Quammen has been writing about the extinction crisis since 1981, initially
as a columnist for Outside magazine.
Since then his work for National Geographic and other publications, as well
as his many books, has taken him all over the world. He’s written about
emerging diseases, including HIV and COVID-19, as well as climate change and
other threats.
And he encourages other journalists and people working in environmental
fields to do a better job connecting the dots.
“When many journalists and activists talk about climate change, they tend to
think that this is the big, all-encompassing problem and everything else is
a subcategory,” he told me by Zoom from his book-lined home office in
Bozeman, Montana.
“It’s important for people to understand: We do not have one huge problem
called climate change, in which all other problems are subsets. We have
three coequal problems that need to be understood fully in their severity
and in their independence as well as their interconnectedness. Those are
climate change, loss of biological diversity, and emerging pandemic
threats.”
For journalists, as well as the public, that means we need to look a little
deeper.
“Climate change is a problem that comes to us, right? It comes home to us.
It comes to everybody,” Quammen said. “Loss of biological diversity can be
happening at a distance.”
That might make the changes hard to see, especially if your vantage point
doesn’t change much.
“If you go out and about, if you’re a traveling journalist as I’ve been,
then you have seen with heartbreaking concreteness the loss of biological
diversity over the decades. For instance, the decline in insect populations
around the world, the decline in migrating songbird populations, the decline
in populations of a lot of other creatures that perhaps need a particular
high altitude or cold habitat, ranging from bumblebees to polar bears.”
Seeing these species, seeing these places, offers journalists an opportunity
to illustrate to readers how these major environmental issues connect and to
bring them to life — and hopefully help readers feel connected to them in
return.
“Connectivity is just one of the very great truths,” Quammen said. “It’s the
essence of ecology and the essence of human history, which I think of as a
subcategory of ecology rather than the other way around.”
Making It Real
Illustrating that connectivity is especially important when we’re writing
about far-flung wildlife that people won’t encounter in Bozeman or Boise or
New York City.
“Most people were never going to see a pangolin, polar bear or lowland
gorilla except maybe in a zoo. My particular career and route through life
have given me the opportunity to see those creatures and a lot of others in
the wild. And I’ve felt that it was part of my duty, as well as my
opportunity, to try and make those creatures real, at least at one remove,
in the minds and the hearts of readers who will never have the same
opportunity.”
That could help, for example, to provide some emotional understanding of the
wildlife trade threatening all eight species of pangolin (a trade that’s
been linked to the COVID-19 pandemic), or the loss of sea ice threatening
polar bears.
“My job and my opportunity are to go out there as a proxy for other people,”
Quammen said.
“I get to say, ‘Hey guys and gals, this is happening. Look at this creature
through my eyes. This is a magnificent, appealing, complex, amazing
creature. And yet look at this situation that this creature is in. It’s
outrageous, it’s heartbreaking, it’s dangerous, but it’s reversible.’”
‘Golden Thread of Hope’
Despite the dangers he’s chronicled, Quammen brings a lot of humor to his
work.
“I am one of those people who believes that almost nothing is too sacred for
a joke to somehow enrich the contemplation of it,” he told me. “I really
believe that when you write a rich piece of nonfiction, a piece of
journalism about the environment, about the living world, if you can make
your audience laugh and cry and think and maybe see the world in a slightly
different way, that’s the goal. Because those moments are best when they
come unexpectedly, and they knock the reader a little bit off balance.”
He also brings another H- word to his work, as he discussed in a recent
interview with Orion, where he said hope is a duty when writing about the
extinction crisis.
Sure, there’s a lot of gloom in the extinction crisis, but Quammen told me
we should always be looking for solutions, or at least small bits of
progress.
“I think we should all do that,” he said. “I do that in my most recent book,
The Heartbeat of the Wild, where I write about some situations, some
efforts, some conservation models around the world that are working pretty
well, and therefore they give me hope.”
That hope, he admitted, “is sandwiched between a lot of concern and doom and
pessimism.”
And, he cautioned, writing about it “should never be programmatic.”
Too many gloomy articles contain “a hopeful ski jump at the end,” Quammen
said. “It’s autopilot, it’s predictable. There are other ways to lace a
golden thread of hope through the narrative tapestry that you’re creating.
And I think it’s important to do that.”