![]() ![]() This is the second of a series of three articles. Using technology, we carve new spaces for ourselves out of ecological systems and, in the process, transform those spaces, the creatures and microbes that live there, and the forms of potential interaction between those spaces, those microbes, and ourselves. How did it get there? Although some current theories point to an origin in bats, perhaps transmitted through another wild animal sold in the market, what is increasingly clear is that throughout human history, down to today, the human-wildlife interfaces across which zoonotic diseases jump to create plagues are deeply shaped by techno-human incursions into ecosystems inhabited by these pathogens and their hosts. At least as we understand it at the moment, it appeared first in a food market amid the concrete and steel of the modern city of Wuhan. Virtually everything about this virus is unnatural. As the novel coronavirus spreads around the world, it cultivates patterns of sickness and death shaped by the human-built world-a world Richard Scarry’s Busytown books help us understand.
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