Volta

There’s nothing new under the sun – lessons conservationists could learn from previous pandemics

In many industrialised societies, the COVID-19 pandemic has been painted as an unprecedented moment caused by human abuse of nature.Responses to it have, in turn, temporarily slowed down human impacts upon nature.This has led to a rallying cry against human encroachment into what are claimed to be pristine wildernesses.Reflecting upon historic, archaeological and palaeoecological evidence relating to the impacts of past epidemics within a wider historical timeframe from Africa and South America, we show that though COVID-19 is a novel disease, the pandemic itself does not represent a novel event, since diseases brought by Europeans have previously decimated the peoples living in these areas.The 'pristine wilderness' is a myth, which falsely held that these places had always been empty of …

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