Link between factory-farmed animals, COVID-19 and preventing the next pandemic

While there’s much to celebrate this week as we recognize the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day, the world made a baseline mistake in developing environmental policy decades ago. It chose to treat nature as an unlimited resource for humans. This baseline allowed policies to fall short. It’s one of the reasons our planet is now superheating. Now, we are making that same mistake — leading to COVID-19, SARS, and the swine flu — with factory farming and other forms of ecocide that degrade the buffer between people and the pre-Anthropocene environment.
Degrading that natural buffer exacerbates every risk, as mentioned above. With global heating, the next pandemic could be hiding in the arctic permafrost. Solving this baseline problem allows us to trace these back to an ultimate source, and perhaps to a solution.
We suggest one stop and two starts this Earth Day. The first step involves the cessation of factory farming and factory deforesting. They’re the source of too many pandemics to allow these activities to continue. The second requires laying down new laws, instituting rights for both animals and nature. It’s the only way to enhance legal protections so that egregious actions, like the ones that led to these health and climate crises, are indictable. The third requires the immediate restoration of what’s been damaged and the all-hands-on-deck conservation of what’s left. A failure to do this and pandemics become part and parcel of daily life...MORE

They say one stop and two starts. What they propose is actually three giant steps to the left, as they join the list of special interest groups exploiting the current pandemic to further a political agenda.