making PANDEMICS

Marie-Monique Robin

(La Découverte, 354 pages, 2021)

Marie-Monique Robin leads a new investigation on how the crisis of biodiversity has spawned an epidemic of pandemics. She brings up the human responsibility for the health crisis that the world is going through. Her argument is made clear right from the beginning: the ecosystem degradation, caused by deforestation, urbanization, industrial farming, and globalization, leads to the emergence of new pathogens and endangers public health. 

Willing to set alarm bells ringing, Robin provides detailed interviews with luminaries of the scientific community, such as world-class virologists, historians, and epidemiologists. The backbone of her own research, they underpin her argument that human activity spawned the sudden mutation of zoonotic diseases into human ones. Together they analyze the COVID-19 pandemic, the unsuccessful preparedness, and the disease ecology—the role of environmental factors in the origin and transmission of pathogens. 

In the second part of the book, she demonstrates how the loss of ecosystems has made us more vulnerable to such pathogens, viruses and bacteria. Biodiversity is key to public health, as shown by the Dilution Effect—a phenomenon where “an increase in biodiversity results in a reduction in the prevalence of an infectious disease.” Animals are the principal hosts for viruses, and ordinarily pathogens wouldn’t break through into the human sphere. However, as industrial farming, pesticides, fertilizers, and urbanization have considerably reduced the number of such predators, the number of pathogens jeopardizing human health has soared.

Robin concludes that, rather than ceaselessly chasing vaccines or extending lockdowns, the only way we can eradicate pandemics is by preserving biodiversity. Emphasizing public policy, she aims to define a “worldwide health ecology” by limiting demographic growth, reducing poverty, and preventing deforestation.

Compelling and well documented, Robin’s investigative work will likely become a reference for everyone helping to tackle this global problem.

Marie-Monique Robin is a TV journalist and renowned documentary filmmaker. She was awarded the Albert Londres prize for Voleurs d’organes: Enquête sur un trafic (Bayard, 1996). She also published The World According to Monsanto: Pollution, Corruption, and the Control of the World’s Food Supply (The New Press, 2010).