“Pandemic is not a word to use lightly or carelessly. It is a word that, if misused, can cause unreasonable fear, or unjustified acceptance that the fight is over, leading to unnecessary suffering and death.”
Ivonne Higuero is an environmental economist — or, in Trumper terms, a loser — with a decades-long career with international organizations that specialize in sustainable development.
She has been Secretary General of CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, since October, 2018, around the time Trumpers decided that while they had never liked environmentalists much, now was the the time to get positively medieval on what’s left of Earth’s precious — and precarious — wilderness resources.
Trumpers look at the name “Higuero” — never mind the outré spelling of her Christian name “Ivonne” — and no doubt write her off as yet another uppity Mexican, leaving aside the fact that she’s actually from Panama and her post-secondary bona fides include Duke University (Durham, North Carolina) and Missouri University of Science and Technology — which, oddly enough, is based in the US midwest state of Missouri.
Since the unwelcome arrival of the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic earlier this year, she has repeatedly gone on record as pointing out that the illegal trade in wildlife — everything from the bushmeat trade to so-called wet markets, where wild animals are served up as human food — has encouraged the spread of pathogens into the human population, directly, through the food chain, and indirectly, by eroding wildlife habitats which — crazily! — act as a natural barrier between zoonotic viruses and spillovers from animals to people. Who knew?
Trumpers equate her to a loud, obnoxious bully who goes out of her way to terrorize the delicate sensibilities of the fossil fuel industry, at the same time questioning the manly fragility of trophy hunters. After all, what is Don Jr. to do if not cost US taxpayers $75,000 for Secret Service protection just so he could fly all the way to Mongolia to gun down a rare and endangered mountain sheep for the trophy wall? The Argali sheep, the largest of sheep species and renowned for their large horns, is listed as “near threatened” on the IUCN Red List of Endangered Species, which is another way of saying there are not that many of them.
Shooting defenceless mountain sheep partly on the taxpayers’ dime is one thing, and certainly worthy of CITES comment.
With the Covid-19 pandemic showing every sign of growing, though, and not slowing — hey, Trumpers, could we please just start accepting facts as, well, facts — the issue of how, where and why a deadly virus jumped
from animals to humans has taken on an added, worldwide urgency.
This past week Higuero penned an essay in the South China Morning Post headed, ‘How regulation of endangered wildlife trade can prevent the next pandemic’ which — spoiler alert! — points out that if Covid-19 was caused even in part by the unregulated trade in animal parts, regulatingsaid trade might, just might help prevent pandemics in future.
Conveniently, Higuero wrote her opinion piece in English, not Chinese, so Trumpers can’t use the excuse that they don’t read Chinese and so, like, who cares if it’s in Chinese, if it’s in China-language it doesn’t mean anything, and so it doesn’t exist.
The South China Morning Post is an English-language newspaper in any event, and based in Hong Kong, not China, but pointing that out would only confuse Trumpers even more.
“We know zoonotic diseases emerge when pathogens carried by animals — wild or domesticated — spill over to humans and subsequently adapt for human-to-human transmission,” Higuero wrote, describing something eerily similar to the Trump campaign, though science itself has yet to pin down whether Trump himself is either wild or domesticated.
CITES, Higuero noted, is the global regulatory body that oversees the international trade in more than 36,000 species of wild animals and plants; the organization has no say in domesticated animals, but it does have jurisdiction over trade in wild animals that are farmed, ranched and/or bred in captivity.
CITES supports efforts to ensure that the international wildlife trade is legal, sustainable, and traceable — three things that Trumpers rank somewhere between their disdain for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and their obsessive hatred of Hillary Clinton.
Higuero supports the ‘One Health’ approach, which focuses on the links between human health and that of the planet. Through CITES, One Health envisions a world in which interactions between humans and wildlife are safe and sustainable, which in turn reduces the risks to nature, ecosystems, endangered species — and we human beings.
That’s a message even a Trumper can understand. Acceptance, on the other hand, is a whole other kettle of fish.
©South China Morning Post
©Twitter - Ivonne Higuero