Beef, soy, palm oil and wood products are four commodities that lead to a push towards deforestation. Besides the known ecological benefits of lush vegetation in such places as tropical rain-forests, scientists are now putting together a revealing, if disturbing scenario. At the edges of the world’s rain-forests deforestation is bringing people in closer contact with animals. Their habitats are being destroyed, they ravage for places to go and eat, and end up closer to humans. A consequence besides the hardship to the animal life is that this closer contact makes humans more susceptible to the viruses these animals or insects carry. Mosquitoes we know carry malaria, but they also hover over monkeys who may carry certain viruses and thus the mosquitoes carry them from the monkeys to humans. Yellow fever can be thus transmitted. Several diseases each have their trajectory, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, for example, can be traced to rodents. Ebola, is another disease that stems from contacts with humans at the forest‘s edge. Corona-virus as we know falls into that category too. The Sunda Pangolin who is able to survive in pockets of forests has contacts with animals such as bats which have contacts with humans, but the Sunda Pangolin, prized for its meat, skin and scales is also poached and illegally brought to Malaysia and Viet Nam and then into China, and there in a Wuhan wet market researchers think the corona-virus began.
Our ignorance too often leads us to ignore the inescapable connections that exist within the planetary system of living things. Still they are there and we ought to do better understanding them.