Writing On the Wall: Heed the Message from this Pandemic

March 2020 will go down in history as the month when the COVID-19 pandemic rapidly spread across the globe, forcing countries, including India, to go into nationwide lockdowns. In other news that passed us by, a series of development projects — some of which are listed below — were cleared around the country in this period. These may seem inconsequential, but they are closely linked to the emergence of the coronavirus that is consuming the world.

* On 11th March, 2020, Kerala passed an extremely destructive order which allows landowners to chop down reserved trees, except for sandalwood. Environment lawyer Meera Rajesh, who works on restoration ecology in Wayanad, Kerala, says that this could open the floodgates to the culling of over five million trees, many of them over 300 years old. These trees were earlier protected by law, and include rare, endangered, and endemic species, mostly in large landholdings spread over a million hectares. The clearing will likely pave the way for further development.

* Two days later on 13th March, Prakash Javadekar, union Minister of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, announced that Goa’s proposed new airport at Mopa had been accorded environmental clearance. This had earlier been suspended by the Supreme Court owing to glaring deficiencies in its Environmental Impact Assessment report, including the failure to record its proximity to ecologically sensitive zones of the Western Ghats.

On the same day, the ministry also approved the cleaving of the Eco-Sensitive Zone of Bengaluru’s Bannerghatta National Park by 100 sq km to accommodate mining and real estate interests. This, in a city starved of water and open spaces.

Also in Karnataka, chief minister BS Yediyurappa convened a meeting of the State Wildlife Advisory Board on 20th March and bulldozed ahead with the Hubballi-Ankola railway line that will cut through the Western Ghats, one of the top biodiversity hotspots in the world.

He paid little heed to the stiff opposition of the board’s independent members, or the objections of several statutory committees including one comprising officers of the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEFCC) and Wildlife Institute of India, which stated that the “extremely fragile ecosystems of the Western Ghats will not be able to sustain the impacts, nor is mitigation the panacea that will overcome the ill effects of all development projects”.

As part of the Central Vista redevelopment project — cleared on 20th March — Delhi is set to lose much of its iconic architecture, over 2,000 trees, and green, open public places, in the four-kilometre stretch from Rashtrapati Bhavan to India Gate.

As is evident, all these projects listed above will have serious ecological consequences. The Goa airport will be constructed on the Barzan plateau, pouring concrete and muck over the 40-odd perennial streams that flow from it and into rivers downstream. The plateau, with its forests, grasslands and waterbodies is crucial to the state’s water security, as it recharges about two billion litres of water every year. Bannerghetta’s forests serve as a catchment area for streams that feed the River Cauvery, and are therefore equally important to the metro which has seen an 85 per cent decline of its waterbodies between 2000 and 2014 due to rapid urbanisation and expansion.

Ecological consequences can rarely be isolated from health, social, and economic impacts; and what is of utmost concern currently is the public health implications of such environmental destruction, especially in the light of COVID-19. The pandemic has already killed thousands, led to lockdowns across nations, and caused huge economic losses and great hardship, especially among the poorest of our people. Like most zoonotic diseases, COVID-19 is mainly an effect of habitat destruction. Activities such as logging, mining in wilderness areas, and deforestation put humans and wild animals in close proximity, exposing people to pathogens and viruses like the coronavirus, and create channels for their easy transmission.

Consider the 168-km-long Hubballi-Ankola railway line which will fell over 2.2 lakh trees spread over 600 hectares of prime forest, including part of the Kali Tiger Reserve in Karnataka. It will destroy and fragment habitats. Roads and other infrastructure will come up to facilitate the building of the railway line. Labour will move in, and so will livestock. Houses and shops will come up, likely leading to further encroachments into the rapidly diminishing forest. Cornered, the wild animals of the forest — tigers, elephants, hornbills, cobras, vultures, pangolins, bats and others — will be pushed into human habitation. One usual worry that surrounds such habitat destruction is the human-wildlife conflict that inevitably follows. What the coronavirus has brought into sharp focus is the unintended interactions that follow such deforestation and potentially lead to the eruption of zoonotic diseases.

Let me explain. Imagine birds or bats that may have been displaced when their patch of forest was cleared, so they moved and roosted on trees clustered in a settlement that came up to build that railroad. Imagine a child, bored as his parents are busy at work, wandering around and tempted by some luscious fruits scattered on the ground. He might pick up a few, unintentionally crunching on a fruit earlier savoured by the displaced birds or bats. It may contain residues of the creatures’ pee, poop, or saliva and thereby present an opportunity for that microbe to slip — to transmit — from its animal host to a human. This was how it happened with Ebola — the disease that infected some 28,000 people and caused the death of about 11,500. Its origin can be traced to a single spillover event. The first case was of a little boy in Guinea, West Africa who was playing near a tree where bats lived. Closer home, the emergence of Kyasanur forest disease or “monkey fever” has been linked to local deforestation in Karnataka state.

COVID-19 is believed to have originated in bats, transferred to pangolins, and then infected humans in a wet meat market in China, though not yet confirmed. A word of caution here, wild animals are not in themselves a threat, nor are they scary virus-transmitting machines; the hysterical calls for bat or pangolin culling are not only baseless, but counterproductive. It is humanity’s destruction of forests — and the parallel intensification of wildlife trade — that creates the conditions for new viruses and diseases such as COVID-19 to cross the species barrier and jump into us. In the wild, animals have developed a defensive immune system to these microbes. When they are chucked out of their homes — through deforestation — or when caught, caged, and butchered for consumption, animals become stressed, their immune systems weaken, creating increased opportunities for those microbes to mutate.

In other words, when miners move into the verdant forests that buffer Bannerghatta, the animals therein — elephants, leopards, hornbills, vultures, slender lorises, pangolins, and others — could spill over to neighbouring cities, and potentially increase the risk of disease transmission.

This is not scaremongering or some doomsday prophecy. Would you have believed some two months ago that you would be a prisoner in your home, unable to fly to meet your mother, hop into a bus or the café next door? Or that you would shirk away from a business handshake or from hugging your dearest friend? That people would start hoarding facemasks and soap and that the livelihoods of millions would be lost overnight? Or would you have called it apocalyptic fiction? The coronavirus pandemic has shown us, in the most tragic manner, the extreme vulnerability of humanity and the civilisation we have built.

A vaccine or cure for COVID-19 will not mark the end of our troubles. There are other, perhaps deadlier viruses where this one came from; today, an estimated 75 per cent of all emerging infectious diseases come from wildlife. Unfortunately, none of this in taken into consideration in environmental governance. While “development” and growth imperatives are usually cited to allow for such environmental destruction, those claims seem hollow. For example, the justification  for the Hubbali-Anokla railway line is that it will facilitate transportation of iron ore for exports from the Bellary-Hospet sector (Karnataka) to the Tadadi port further north in the state. However, with significant declines in mineral production, iron ore cargo is likely to be unavailable — yet there is unseemly haste to push this project. Kerala’s move to allow felling of previously protected trees, even discounting the threat of zoonotic diseases, can only be called suicidal. As we are well aware, the state witnessed severe floods and landslides in 2018 and 2019, leading to the death of over 600 people, loss of property, and economic damage well over Rs 400 billion for 2018 alone.

Zoonotic diseases are not the only fatal health impact. The loss of trees and the construction of the Central Vista redevelopment project will add to the toxic load on Delhi, routinely ranked as one of the most polluted cities in the world. Delhi’s people — and those of other polluted cities, of which India has 13 of the world’s top 20 — suffer from impaired lung function, thus making them more vulnerable to respiratory diseases like COVID-19. Recent research indicates significantly higher rates of death of COVID -19 patients from polluted areas; people from polluted environments are more likely to die from the coronavirus than those breathing clean air.

Zoonotic diseases are the hidden cost, the “collateral damage” of economic development. Scientists warn that today’s civilisation is “playing with fire”. In an interview to The Guardian, executive director of the UN Environment Programme Inger Andersen stresses that while our urgent priority must be to protect people from the coronavirus and contain its spread, “…our long-term response must tackle habitat and biodiversity loss”.

Environmental decisions cannot be taken in a silo, nor can economic development be the only driver; public health considerations must be factored in. Some believe the coronavirus is “nature’s revenge”. It is not. As David Quammen said in a recent NYT article: “We made the coronavirus epidemic.” The coronavirus is our own brutal message to ourselves. And though we may survive the pandemic in some fashion, I am unsure whether we will survive ourselves.

Update: As this article goes to press, news comes in that the Standing Committee of the National Board of Wildlife, in a VDO meeting, on 7th April 2020, granted clearances to a number of damaging developmental projects in and around Protected Areas. The proposals will roughly mean loss of about 185 acres of national parks and sanctuaries. Of particular concern are: a highway project through Goa, that will destroy and fragment a vital wildlife corridor; a broad gauge railway line that will impact tiger corridors connecting three tigers reserves across Telangana, Maharashtra, and Chhattisgarh; and a hydroelectric project that will drown about 900 hectares of pristine forests and the endemic myristica swamps of Karnataka.

There are no lessons learnt. For the Minister of Environment, Forests and Climate Change, it is business as usual, even in these times, in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic.