Today’s civilization is “playing with fire”. It is almost always human behaviour that provokes nature to inflict unbearable pains on humans. Humans are placing too many pressures on nature with damaging consequences.
Un Environment Chief Inger Andersen asserts:
Nature is sending us a message with the coronavirus pandemic and the ongoing climate crisis.
Nature projects its wrath through various means. It causes deadly earthquakes, devastating floods, droughts, bushfires, volcanic eruptions, famines, pandemics and the other. If we take a look at the data the death tolls caused by natural disasters of the last 20 years, more than 12,00000 (1.2 million) people have been killed including the pandemic caused by the Corona Virus (data till March 2020). The data on the loss of animals and birds are beyond imagination.
Not going back far, the first accident that was the projection of Nature’s wrath was when the Australian bushfires broke out in the year 2019 killing a record number of animals, burning crores of trees to ashes.
The second wrath of nature is witnessed in Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia, Djibouti, Eritrea and Uganda where locust invasion has been going on for years plaguing the lives over there. By January 2020, the data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimated nearly 110,000 hectares were affected by the desert locust crisis in the Horn of Africa. This sends a serious message to the world community to stop the overexploitation of Nature.
Thirdly we can mention the outbreaks of diseases in the recent past such as Ebola, bird flu, Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers), Rift Valley fever, severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars), West Nile virus and Zika virus. All these turned out to be epidemics, which killed thousands of lives. It is worth mentioning here that 75% of all emerging infectious diseases come from wildlife.
We can never fail to mention COVID-19 which has been declared a Pandemic by the World Health Organization. This pandemic has taken away more than one lakh human lives so far (Till March 2020) and is still spreading far and wide killing thousands of lives.
All the mentioned diseases have been transmitted from animals and birds to humans who have shown atrocities against Nature’s creations. Reports say that the diseases from wildlife have much higher fatality rates in people, such as 50% for Ebola and 60%-75% for the Nipah virus, 3%-4% for Corona Virus transmitted from bats in south Asia. This is a clear warning shot.
To prevent further outbreaks, both global heating and the destruction of the natural world for farming, mining and housing have to end, as both drive wildlife into contact with people.
The authorities of countries must be urged to put an end to live animal markets and the illegal global animal trade.
China has banned such markets but this must be permanent. However, this needs to be done globally. There are wet markets throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa and a lot of other Asian countries too.” The ease of travel in the modern world exacerbates the dangers.
If we don’t take care of nature, nature won’t take care of us. We will have to admit it that our strongest ally will be nature against which we will have to fight for existence. But, we have not to forget that we are still insignificant before mighty nature. Hence, the only way for human existence is to pacify its wrath.
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