The Continuing Battle for Okinawa

health care is far cheaper in such former developing world countries. I also fully understand anyone who questions this with skepticism. Should one build a business model on this reality? Should one even cultivate a for-profit health business? To my mind, we should not only crtically explore the system, but also take into consideration how individual patients themselves feel, particularly given the fate that they are now forced to endure. Martin’s project is small and – as he himself admits – it responds to a niche need. Both he and his Thai wife Nid pay attention to the fact that their project should not become too big – and possibly impersonal. For the carers and other employees, he is a reliable employer. The village also sometimes contributes to the way the Dementia Project is presented. At the same time integrating with the local community is an exciting challenge. It is a different situation with other medical or health care options. The moment major, impersonal investors with purely commercial interests get involved, such concepts become problematic. The important thing is that local populations are not overwhelmed. They need to be involved, at least partially. One also needs to be able to weigh – again and again – the interests that emerge. As far as the relatives are concerned, they have my complete compassion and understanding. No one finds it easy to send a parent or partner so far away. The reality, however, is that the care is incredibly good. The decisive element is the 24-hour, one-on-one care that is provided. For this reason, patients do not have to take calming medication. From I have witnessed, it is not a matter of ‘dumping’ but rather a matter of often painfully weighed decisions to send one’s loved ones away. For the patients, most of them probably have little or no idea where they are. Without doubt, this is ethically difficult. Even the exotic surroundings of being located in this distant part of the world is often disconcerting. At the same time, no ideal solution exists. What is important is what’s best for the patient. My feeling is that this is precisely what is happening. According to Wootli, he has far more enquiries than places available. So people are actually trying to decide what decision is best. No one wishes to keep someone there if they are not happy. This is not a matter of idealizing the situation. There are clearly many problems for the patients, such as grasping what is really happening or dealing with language, a new environment or the lack of familiar faces. During stay, however, Kurt completely opened up. Given that most of the caregivers only spoke a smattering of German, this was a point of frustration for him. He appeared delighted to be able to speak German with us. This was great for him – and actually helped him remember more. Language is obviously one of the downsides of living so far away from home. Yet while the carers can’t speak German, some of them were making the effort to learn it in their spare time, something that is very evident in the film itself. The key issue, however, is their state of dementia, the real culprit in this tragedy. One needs to constantly weigh what is best and to ensure that one is responding to the real needs of the patient.

PRODUCING DOCUMENTARIES: NEVER AN EASY PROCESS

As with most independent producers, it is not always easy to operate. In fact, it’s very difficult. Anyone obsessed by the dream of making films needs to be aware of this. It always takes an incredibly long time to put the funding and other elements into place. One is constantly forced to compromise, or at least be ready. When people provide funding, they always want something in return, such as demands on content, length and format. So these things need to be worked out. The German public, for example, is often completely different from other countries. But so are international cinema audiences. The same goes when dealing with streaming platforms, such as YouTube or Netflix. One is constantly dealing with even more different target groups, so everything needs to be tailored. Similarly, one needs to be conscious of one’s own life challenges. This means being flexible, constantly prepared to improvise, particularly projects based on personal passion and love. It’s very hard to make a decent living from such initiatives. Or even remain in the profession. You cannot imagine how many kitchens, restaurants and bars I have worked in. At the same time, it is the best profession that I can imagine. I have no intention of stopping. Plus there are opportunities linked to the job which offer possibilities to at least continue with filmmaking, such as making commercial productions. It’s all a matter of survival. Recently, for example, I worked on a journalistic format that was more appropriately aimed at the 18-28 year-old age group. Initially, it was not clear what this entailed. I wanted to produce a series of one-minute story segments that had be disseminated more effectively. It was hard at first, but then you learn to work more with graphics, plus interact more directly with audiences. I started to enjoy it. For me, the ideal place to watch a film remains the cinema. This is where you can allow yourself to be absorbed by the story or unusual film experiences, letting one’s inhibitions to leave the room. Watching films on TV or streaming is totally different. You can zap when and where you like. Nevertheless, I think the long, artistic films will continue to exist. There are many festivals and other occasions that celebrate this. At the moment, I am working on a project about technology, science and pets. Once again, it is an intercultural topic. Most of my films are about bringing the viewer closer to other worlds enabling one to embrace different perspectives. It’s very similar to dreaming – only perhaps even more surprising. Being based in Berlin is great for film-makers; it’s still very affordable and packed with highly creative people. But it never stops moving, so sometimes one just has to just to leave in order to shut oneself off and not be overwhelmed.

MADELEINE DALLMEYER is a Berlin-based film-maker. You can view a preview of her documentary ‘The Village of the Forgetful' on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH9kD2c0HzI For more information, contact: dallmeyer@posteo.de

The Continuing Battle for Okinawa Pat Elder

The Battle of Okinawa – nicknamed “the typhoon of steel” – is widely judged the bloodiest battle in the Pacific during World War II (running from 1 April to 22 June, 1945). According to the Okinawa Peace Memorial Museum, some 240,000 soldiers and civilians died. Almost 150,000 were Okinawans (an East Asian ethnic group) representing a quarter to one third of the local population. Many were killed, committed suicide or went missing. In contrast, 77,000 Japanese and 14,000 American soldiers also perished as did over 400 Korean forced labourers and sex slaves, 82 British and 34 Taiwanese. Investigative reporter Pat Elder from Civilian Exposure, a non-profit news organization, chronicles the continuing indifference to the health of Okinawans and their environment caused by lethal military substances from U.S. bases in Japan’s southernmost prefecture.

ONCE RESISTANCE TO THE INVADING U.S. FORCES HAD

completely collapsed by the end of June, 1945, Okinawa became America’s most important troop staging area with air bases and naval anchorage for the planned final onslaught against Japan. As American scholar and activist Joseph Essertier reminds us, Okinawa then served as a launching pad for US military operations, but this time during the Korean and Vietnam wars. And today it continues to act as a principal base for American security in the Pacific region, primarily against North Korea and China. But the islands’ environment (Okinawa Prefecture consists of a single large island with three smaller island groups) faces more than theoretical destruction. U.S. license plates in Okinawa once labeled Okinawa the “keystone of the Pacific.” The Okinawan people’s land has been occupied by U.S. forces for decades, and during that time their land and water has been poisoned by various substances, even some designed to kill people. Roughly half of the 50,000 US troops based in Japan are stationed in Okinawa. Planned protests to mark this year’s 48th anniversary of the island’s reversion (apart from huge chunks which remain part of American base facilities) to Japan from U.S. control on 15 May 1972, were cancelled this Spring because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Essertier has pointed out that Okinawa’s natural environment is so rich in biodiversity that scientists have recently given recognition to coastal waters of HenokoŌura on the main island’s eastern side as Japan’s first Hope Spot, i.e., a place that should be designated a nature preserve. American oceanographer Sylvia Earle, founder of the Mission Blue Alliance which is a member of the Swissbased RAMSAR Network, has stressed: “This unique coral hot-spot powers a little-known but richly diverse marine ecosystem which holds more than 5,000 species in its waters including 262 known to be endangered.”

A HAZARDOUS POLLUTION THAT THREATENS THE ISLAND: TOXIC FIREFIGHTING FOAM

In mid-April 2020, however, an incident involving the massive discharge of toxic firefighting foam highlighted the dangers still present, not just from chemicals but from official procrastination. The accident was caused when mountains of suds from a fire suppression system in an aircraft hangar of the Marine Corps Air Station Futenma flowed into a local river on 10 April. The foam contains perfluoro octane sulfonic acid, or PFOS, and perfluoro octanoic acid, or PFOA. Huge clumps of foam reaching more than 30 metres high were seen floating on the river and settling into surrounding residential neighbourhoods. This was not the first PFOS/PFOA toxic release in Okinawa. The incident has also greatly inflamed local frustrations with the Japanese central government and the U.S. military. The chemicals are known to contribute to testicular, liver, breast, and kidney cancers, as well as a host of childhood diseases and abnormalities in a developing fetus. Their manufacture and importation have been prohibited in Japan since 2010, yet Okinawa’s drinking water continues to contain high levels of these substances. Both the Okinawa Times and the Military Times reported that 143,830 litres of the foam spilled outside the base precincts from a total estimated 227,100 litres released from a hangar. The Japanese mainland Asahi Shimbun newspaper, however, maintained that only 14.4 litres had escaped, completely contradicting the locally observed scale of the release.

A FIRST STEP TOWARD MORE TRANSPARENCY IS AN ABSOLUTE

More than a week (18 April) after the spillage, the U.S. military command allowed Japanese officials onto the base to investigate. This was the first access granted since a 2015 environmental supplementary agreement to the JapanU.S. Status of Forces Agreement. The 2015 agreement says the Japanese government or local municipalities “may request” permission from the U.S. side to conduct surveys.

READ MORE ONLINE @ GLOBAL-GENEVA.COM

PAT ELDER is an investigative reporter with Civilian Exposure, a U.S. organization from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, that tracks military contamination at www.civilianexposure.org. Thanks to Joseph Essertier for his edits and commentary.

Dinners with Graham Greene "I wasn't a commercially succesful writer until after the war," he said.

The Editors

Veteran foreign correspondent Paul Ress had the enviable knack of instantly making friends for life with many of the famous people he met, from Mikhael Gorbachev to painter Joan Miró as well as colleagues. One of his longest relationships was with Graham Greene, despite the author’s suspicion of Americans and their press, when Paul was reporting for Time magazine from the French Riviera. Here’s what Paul, who sadly died on 31 May 2020 at the age of 98, wrote in his memoir Shaggy Dog Tales a few years ago.

A DINNER WITH GRAHAM GREENE IN ANTIBES could start, so to speak, at lunch. As neither of us ever cooked, and there was only a small number of restaurants to be frequented in the Riviera resort, I often found myself lunching at the same restaurant as the writer. Almost invariably he would be reading a fat biography. “May I sit down or would you prefer to go on reading?” I would ask respectfully. “I should like to continue reading,” he usually said, “but we could have dinner this evening.” Years earlier we had reached a modus vivaldi, whoops, vivendi, about our relationship. “We can be friends if you promise me not to take notes on what I say during a meal or afterwards. Then I shall be at ease with you. And no articles about me unless I agree to them.” I willingly accepted these ground rules, and as neither of us had many friends in Antibes, we saw a lot of each other. The dinner scenario hardly varied. It was always whisky, to start with. Only the brand changed. I’d drive to his city apartment overlooking the Antibes sea front. The streets were full of uncollected trash. “It’s not the Côte d’Azur,” he remarked once, “it’s the côte d’ordure.” It was the only pun I ever heard him make. He disliked puns, especially mine. “Would you like a whisky?” he always began. “Will Grouse do?” Once he pointed to a bottle of whisky with a Japanese name, Suntory, on it. It came with a letter, he explained. “They’re offering me a free life-time supply of their whisky if I will have a character in one of my novels ask for that Japanese brand of scotch. What do you think I should do?” I suggested mildly that he knew very well what to do. Anyway, I added, you’ve not tasted it yet. It was only several pre-dinner drinks later that the bottle was opened. It tasted pretty authentic to my uneducated palate. I didn’t have the impression that he was overwhelmed. In any case, I was never offered a Japanese whisky again. It was impossible to go out for dinner without two whiskies neat. Normally we debated where to go for dinner. But one night he said we’d go to a new place. “There’s one problem with it, though,” he admitted. “The chairs are dreadfully uncomfortable. Seventeenth century chairs, I suspect. They were given to the owner by his father-in-law and mother-in-law, so he can’t get rid of them. We shall have to go there with pillows.” We always walked from Greene’s centrally located flat to any of our half dozen restaurants. I felt a bit silly walking through the city carrying a largish pillow. He didn’t. When we got to his new restaurant, horribile dictu, we found it closed. What to do with the pillows? “Shouldn’t we take them back to your apartment?” I suggested timidly. “No,” he said, “we’ll just go across the street to the Venise” (one of his favorite restaurants). It was summertime and of course there was no cloakroom attendant. “Bonsoir, Monsieur Greene,” said the owner, pleased to see his most famous customer. Greene handed him his pillow and I did likewise. The restaurateur looked puzzled but said nothing. “One of the reasons I like this place,” Greene explained, “is that they don’t object if I choose a pasta as the main

course.” He did just that, but compensated with a bottle of wine, which we shared. We also shared the bill. Early on in the relationship, we took turns paying. But he didn’t like this arrangement because he felt we never remembered whose turn it was. So, it was a Dutch treat. As we were leaving, the restaurateur handed us the pillows, but could not resist inquiring, “Do you mind if I ask you why you came to my restaurant with pillows?” Ha ha, I thought, now Graham will have to come up with an innovative explanation. “We intended to eat in the restaurant across the street,” said Greene bluntly, “but it was closed.” When we arrived in front of his apartment, Graham always proposed “a drink for the road.” I never declined his invitation. I drove home extremely carefully. Even if I had wanted to make notes about our conversation, even if I had promised never to write about our encounters, I couldn’t have recalled a tenth of what was said and what happened during the long alcoholic evenings. Greene hated being recognized in a public setting. Every so often as he walked briskly through the streets of Antibes, a stranger would accost him and say, “Aren’t you Graham Greene?” “I glaze,” he said, “or I reply, ‘you must be thinking of my brother.’ I stay away from television so that people won’t recognize me. I agreed to appear on Budapest TV because I thought that was pretty safe. “Actually there is another Graham Greene. I mean that’s his name. We’ve never met but some day I’d like to do a story about us. Our paths keep crossing. The other Graham Greene was thrown into jail in Assam and wired the Picture Post to send him a hundred pounds. The magazine contacted me and I offered to go to India and to write about our confrontation, but the plan didn’t work out.” The writer visibly enjoyed chatting about his namesake. “One day I was in a hotel in Rome and a woman named Veronica called up. ‘We met in Arabia,’ she reminded me. Obviously she knew the other Greene because I had never been in Arabia. I suggested a drink in the bar. I didn’t turn up, though, after a friend I sent ahead to the bar phoned me to say she was awful. “On another occasion in London I bought a plane ticket to New York. The airline employee said, ‘You’re not staying very long in the States, are you? You’re flying over on September 2 and returning the next day.’ I told her I hadn’t even thought of booking my return flight. Of course, the other G.G. was returning to London on September 3.” Contrary to what one might expect of an Englishman who had chosen to live in France, Greene much preferred English cooking to French cuisine. “Yes, French gigot [leg of lamb] is good,” he conceded, “but British roast saddle of mutton is better. Our lamb cutlets are superior to the French. English sausages and beer are also much

better. I’d choose English apple pie over French tarte aux pommes. And then I am very proud of Welsh rarebit, herring roes on toast and treacle tart.” Greene also had a weakness for Irish coffee. “I sleep comfortably after drinking one, but one night in a Paris restaurant the proprietor poured out Scotch whisky for want of Irish and the result was deplorable.” Advancing years didn’t much alter Greene’s fairly rigid work routine. Between breakfast (tea, dry biscuits and marmalade) at 8:30 and lunch at 12:15 he wrote “a minimum of 300 words a morning, if possible 400, six days a week. That’s my quota. I can really write for an hour or an hour and a half at most. I like to stop in the middle of a scene because that makes it easier to start the next day. Writing a novel does not become easier with age and experience. Ever since I wrote A Burnt-Out Case in 1959, I’ve thought that each novel was the last I’d be capable of writing.” One day he complained that he was “down to only 250 words a morning. Deplorable.” When he wasn’t writing—and he never did afternoons or evenings in Antibes—he was generally reading. Although he claimed to be a slow reader, he said he averaged 13 books a month. He liked Thomas Hardy’s poetry, Browning and Evelyn Waugh. “I can read a Joseph Conrad novel three or four times, but pornography only once and then only in small doses. I find the present permissiveness rather boring. By the way, the French translation of my first published book, The Man Within, was censored by Jacques Maritain on the grounds it was pornographic!” That first novel sold 8,000 copies, an impressive number for 1929. “But I wasn’t a commercially successful writer until after the war,” he pointed out. “My first best seller, The Heart of the Matter, was published in 1948. I was in debt to my publishers and wrote book reviews to make ends meet.” Greene thought so poorly of his second and third novels, which sold, respectively, only 2,000 and 1,200 copies, that he simply suppressed them from the list of his works. They have never been republished. “For a lot of money you could find them in a second-hand book

shop. Their titles? Why should I help you?” Did he think that The Man Within was satisfactory? “No,” he admitted, “but you can’t suppress them all. You have to have a first novel, don’t you? Actually, The Man Within was the third book I had written, but the first two were turned down by publishers. If The Man Within had not been published, I would have stopped writing.” Greene objected to being called a Roman Catholic writer. “I don’t believe I have ever gone so far as to describe myself as a novelist who writes about Catholic themes. I am a writer who happens to be a Catholic. No one knew I was a Catholic until Brighton Rock and I had been writing then for 10 years.” Another legend about Graham Greene had him entering and winning all the literary contests of the New Statesman wherein readers were invited to write “in the style of Graham Greene.” “I’ve entered quite a few competitions of this sort,” he acknowledged, “but I have rarely won. Once I did win a second prize for the first paragraph of a Greene novel, under an assumed name, naturally. I wrote a plot on another slip of paper and Mario Soldati made a film out of it in Venice with Trevor Howard. It was called The Stranger’s Hand and my hand appeared on a gondola.” Greene strongly disliked just about every film version of his novels or “entertainments,” the exception being The Third Man, which most people didn’t realize he had written. What Greene liked best was “when a director, like Otto Preminger, acquired an option, for example, for A Burnt-Out Case, let it lapse once, re-acquired it, allowed the option to lapse a second time, and then never made the movie.” Greene admitted that “the money was a temptation, but the cinema versions of my novels always turned out so awful.” Four or five of Greene’s novels were situated in Latin America and the Caribbean, and he was keenly interested in the region’s politics. The overthrow and murder of Salvador Allende, whom Greene knew and admired, and the persecution of his supporters filled him, as he put it to me, “with grief and horror.” “If I had to classify myself politically, I suppose I would say I was a humanist and a socialist. Rather like [the ‘Czechoslavak Spring’ leader] Dubcek. I am certainly on the left. The destruction of the courageous Chilean effort to build socialism with a human face leaves one terribly, terribly sad. It was the way I felt when I learned of Che Guevara’s death.” Greene used to feel that The Power and the Glory, one of his early books, was his best novel. “I no longer think that,” he said. “Now I believe that The Honorary Consul is my best book of fiction.” But didn’t all creative artists think that their most recent work was their finest, I suggested? Didn’t Charlie Chaplin unhesitatingly describe Limelight, as soon as he had shot it, as the best film he had ever made? “I have seldom thought that the last thing I did was the best,” he replied. “This time, with The Honorary Consul, I do. It has certainly given me more trouble than previous novels. There were moments when I realized perfectly why Hemingway shot himself one day. I was nearly halfway through it before I was sure I’d finish it. I wrote the novel seven times, eight times in fact, since in addition to the seven typescripts there was the original manuscript. I always write books longhand. My two fingers on the typewriter don’t connect with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ballpoint pens are good only for filling in forms on planes.” Long before publication of the book-that-was-almostnot-written, the Book-of-the-Month Club selected it. It was Greene’s third Book Club choice, after A Burnt-Out Case and Travels with My Aunt. Le Monde, France’s most prestigious newspaper, and a German daily asked Greene for permission to serialize the novel in toto. “I refused,” said Greene, “because the rhythm of a novel is destroyed by daily excerpts.” Well, if Greene was not always convinced that his most recent book was his best, was he, like so many artists, bored with the work he had just finished? “Oh, I’m not bored with it,” he exclaimed unconvincingly, “but with life.”

PAUL RESS , who spent his last years in Switzerland, was persuaded by his friends to gather some of his stories and notorious puns into a short book entitled Shaggy Dog Tales: 58 ½ Years of Reportage, published by Xlibris at $9.99 for the e-book version, $20.99 as paperback, and $30.99 for the hardback edition. The renowned British biographer Caroline Moorehead, who also worked with Paul, describes his book as a “collection of charming and funny pieces, many about a lost and vanishing world”.

Coronavirus: Community participation and credible information: the core of any serious response Nick van Praag

THE LAST TIME THE WORLD WAS GRIPPED by fears of a pandemic in late 2014, my wife was not amused when I traveled to Sierra Leone – the epicenter of the Ebola crisis – a few weeks before our family assembled for the end of year celebrations. She was less worried about me – I am always doing crazy things – than endangering her children because of what she considered the irresponsible exploits of their father. Fast forward to 2020 and we are once again in the grip of health-related fears, this time the impact of Covid-19 – not just on our families but on the planet as we know it. As we northerners ‘shelter in place’ – washing our hands, covering our faces, and avoiding each other – we must not forget people living on the fringes of our societies, such as the homeless, or those in the developing world who live in camps for refugees and the displaced, and the crowded shanty towns that surround so many thirdworld cities. For them, existence is already a daily struggle without the additional strains posed by the Coronavirus. As the pandemic takes root in under-served and vulnerable communities around the world, a response that considers their own perspective is vital if the current crisis is not to become a catastrophe. The Imperial College London report on the pandemic, which convinced governments in the US and the UK to get serious about special measures, talks about the possibility of 40 million deaths worldwide; Bill Gates has warned that 10 million people in Africa may die. Whatever happens, a disproportionate share of the victims in low-income and fragile states will likely be in the poorest communities of the Global South, where national authorities and aid agencies are already struggling to keep up.

ENABLING PEOPLE TO HELP THEMSELVES

If the response is to have half a chance, people need to know how they can best protect themselves and their families in crowded conditions that don’t allow for physical distancing and in places where there are no ventilators or intensive care units. In such hard environments, it’s all about enabling people to help themselves. The extent to which they act in their own individual and collective selfinterest depends on whether they know what to do and this, in turn, depends on whether they trust and adhere to the advice they get. Where compliance with that advice is physically impossible, they need a means to say so and for decision-makers to hear their voices. It is critical that community participation is at the core of the response, no matter how hard this seems from a distance. Tracking the perceptions of people hit by crisis is now increasingly accepted as a tool in managing performance in the world’s trouble spots. During the Ebola crisis in 2014-15 our organization, Ground Truth Solutions, did regular surveys of citizens and frontline health staff in Sierra Leone, using their perceptions as an indicator of progress in the fight against the disease and helping guide the emergency response.

DEALING WITH THE PERCEPTION GAP

We need this same approach to deal with Covid-19 if we are to determine whether or not people trust and understand the messages and actions of health specialists. Do people know what to do to keep the virus at bay? What will encourage them to comply with measures intended to protect them? Do they believe the response is making progress against the spread of Covid-19? We need to know whether people understand what they should do – and the extent to which they will do so – because we have learned that the cooperation of an informed and engaged population is central to effectively tackling killer diseases. It is also important to explore people’s take on other factors that will determine their resilience, such as social cohesion as communities unravel under the pressures and livelihood support as they struggle to make ends meet. Right now, there is a major gap in our collective understanding of the way ordinary people see things. The many polls we see are mostly conducted online and ignore the views of people who are not. When they do cover fragile states, they are not representative of the broader population, certainly not those at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. Significantly, they are not linked in a systematic way to decision making in the health coordination structures. From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, people will be affected by the Coronavirus. As it spreads, we need to understand how ordinary people experience the response in their cities and villages, and the shifting balance between activities designed to tackle the outbreak and those intended to meet the long-term economic challenges. There is a raft of national and international organisations involved in the response, adding to the importance of making sure that decision-makers have access to community feedback to guide their decisions and their messaging. My family, thankfully, never got close to contracting Ebola. But my wife’s concern highlights how perceptions are central in health emergencies. As national health authorities and aid agencies scramble to respond to Covid-19, racing the clock to provide health supplies and information to the most at-risk communities, understanding how people experience the crisis will be critical to whether the response averts catastrophe – or leaves individuals and families in the world’s hardest places to grapple helplessly with the unimaginable fallout.

NICK VAN PRAAG is the head of Ground Truth Solutions, an international non-governmental organisation based in Vienna, that helps people affected by crisis influence the design and implementation of humanitarian aid.

Pangolins and pandemics: digging for the roots of COVID-19 William Thatcher Dowell

Wet market with wildlife products in China. (Photo: William Dowell)

Overcoming COVID-19 may be our most immediate concern, but it would be a mistake to think it will all be over when this pandemic ends. Failure to deal with pressing environmental issues, global warming, the destruction of the world’s forests and the population explosion, will lead to more catastrophes. We still have time, but barely.

WHILE REPORTING IN SOUTHEAST ASIA during the 1990s, I used to stop at a place we called the ‘Endangered Species Restaurant.’ It was on the road from the Thai border back to Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh. The corpse of a monkey was crucified to a wooden frame that leaned against the wall. The monkey, along with various body parts of other unidentified animals, made up the luncheon menu. Later, while reporting in the Congo, I observed the natives along the Congo River eating live caterpillars, doused with what looked like red pepper, the local equivalent of popcorn. Unusual animals weren’t the only target in a Third World environment hungry for protein. My wife’s father had worked as a bush doctor in the Congo during the 1950’s. One of his tasks was to inspect meat in the local market with a sharp eye for anything that looked vaguely human. The global palate is clearly a lot more complicated than the bland fast food fare you find at a McDonalds or Burger King. The Chinese, like many cultures, have a reputation for being ready to experiment with their food sources and their local markets can include wild animals, just as African populations eat “bush meat”. The COVID-19 pandemic may provide a new incentive for many people, including Chinese, to consider more carefully where the food on their plate actually comes from.

WILDLIFE MARKETS MAY PROVE RESPONSIBLE…

While scientists are still working to identify the cause of the outbreak, major attention has focused on the pangolin, a scaly anteater, highly sought after in parts of Asia for its delicate culinary qualities as well as for its scales that are valued by Chinese traditional medicine, and which is sold in Villager in the Congo region preparing crocodile meat. (Photo: William Dowell) “wet” markets near Wuhan. Traces of viruses that match COVID-19 have also shown up in snakes, that were sold as food in the market, as well as in bats. Bats are known to serve as a reservoir for coronaviruses. Over time they have built an immunity and can carry the virus without being harmed by it. The pangolin may have served as an intermediate amplifier. Its reduced immunity allowed the virus to expand in it until an unsuspecting consumer ate it. There have also been suggestions that the virus might have escaped after an accident in one of Wuhan’s two biological research laboratories in Wuhan. Both handle dangerous viruses similar to COVID-19. US intelligence experts have tended to downplay that as unlikely given the presence of the virus in animals that were being sold for food. The consensus favours the pangolin as the vector, and it very likely emerged from a “wet” market in Wuhan, China. The consumption of wildlife, of course, is nothing unusual in certain parts of the world, whether iguanas (often referred to as ‘spring chicken’) in the Caribbean, song birds in Italy and Spain, or bear and deer meat in the United States. In Africa, particularly in central and western parts of the continent such as Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast and Mali, so-called ‘bush meat’ – an extremely valued source of protein for poor people – is regularly sold in markets or along roads. This consists of wild animals, usually cooked, dried or smoked (the best way for preserving the meat) ranging from cane rat and fruit bats to monkeys, snakes, duikers and turtles. According to conservation groups, even chimpanzees and gorrillas are killed for ‘bush meat’. These markets traditionally sell both domestic and wild animals that are alive, destined to be slaughtered on the spot and then cooked and eaten. Especially in China, freshness is highly valued when it comes to food. Snakes, another delicacy sold in the market, were also an early suspect. Like the pangolin, the snakes appeared to have traces of viruses similar to SARS-CoV-2, the cause of COVID-19. On the basis of previous coronavirus epidemics, bats are a further suspect as the original source but do not feature as an edible item on the stalls though they could pass the virus to other animals kept in such close quarters.

…BUT THE CHINESE ARE FAILING TO TAKE PROPER ACTION

China initially tried to shut down its wet markets shortly after the coronavirus outbreak hit Wuhan, but then gradually relented. The markets, which resemble the livestock sections of farmer’s markets in western countries, are too pervasive and are the main source of food for too many people to close them down completely. This is despite calls by anti-wildlife trafficking groups, such as the World Conservation Society in New York, for the permanent closure of all wildlife markets given the threat of passing on viral diseases like SARS-CoV-2. The real problem, of course, is the unsanitary conditions that exist in many of these poorly controlled wet markets. The animals are kept in cages, often stacked one on top of the other. Captive animals are frequently splattered with urine and faeces from the cages above them, and all the slaughtering at one place can often occur in the same place. The danger of contamination with an unexpected virus increases substantially when wildlife is crowded next to domestic animals. The pangolin holds a special place on the endangered species list. Estimates suggest that pangolins account for up to 20 per cent of the illegal trade in threatened species. During the 1990s you could buy pangolin meat for around $7 a pound. The price today is easily $300. Specialists note that young Chinese do not eat wildlife as much as their parents these days. But for some in China’s fast-growing middle class, with money to burn, serving a pangolin for dinner is a powerful status symbol, proof that one has arrived. China has repeatedly banned the sale of pangolins, along with other endangered species, but outlawing the animal has only increased its market value. TRAFFIC, a network monitoring the global trade in wildlife, reported that despite repeatedly outlawing its sale, some 90,000 pangolins were smuggled illegally into China between 2007 and 2016. And mainland China is not the only destination for the illegal trade. In January 2019, according to the New York Times, a shipment of nine tonnes of pangolin scales, taken from roughly 14,000 animals, was seized in Hong Kong. That was followed a month later with the confiscation of some 33 tonnes of pangolin meat in Malaysia and then, two months later, 14 tonnes in Singapore. China’s trade in wildlife products coupled with COVID-19 also has other forms of global impact.

COVID-19: ONLY THE LATEST DISASTER IN THE WAY WE TREAT NATURE

Everyone was in on the game. No one thought it would trigger a worldwide pandemic that would cost trillions of dollars and possibly alter the global economy. The pandemic, which began in Wuhan, is just the latest indication of a catastrophic reaction to human encroachment on nature and, more specifically, increasingly stressed endangered species. There have been repeated warnings that disruption of the world’s natural habitat threatens what could amount to a sixth extinction. The wanton destruction is not without consequences. Estimates are that up to 70 per cent of the new diseases appearing on the planet are zoonotic; in other words, carried by animals. While the impact of COVID-19 has proven catastrophic, scientists warn that as many as 1.7 million viruses may as yet be unrecorded. Widespread destruction of rainforests and woodlands, the unprecedented expansion of global tourism and increased crowding in cities have naturally exposed more people to new viruses and exotic diseases than at any previous time in history. Inexpensive worldwide air transport makes it possible for a virus to travel to almost any location on the planet in a few hours. Pollution, climate change, an uncontrolled population explosion over the last century and the loss of natural habitat are all combining to place an unendurable stress on the planet’s ecosystem.

HOW CAN SOMETHING SO SMALL DISRUPT OUR LIVES?

The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates how a submicroscopic particle that is not even really alive (they need a living organism to replicate) can totally disrupt the planet. A retrovirus is literally nothing more than a strand of RNA (ribonucleic acid) accompanied by a few proteins and wrapped in a protective coating. Simple soapy water disrupts the coating, rendering the virus ineffective. That is why frequent hand washing is so important in the pandemic. Under an electron microscope, the proteins are seen as the little knobs that stick out from the body of the virus. In a number of ways, a retrovirus is like a few bits of computer programming. It can’t reproduce itself. Instead, it penetrates the nucleus of a cell. An enzyme, known as a reverse transcriptase, converts the RNA strand to DNA, which then hijacks the cell getting it to reproduce the virus along with the altered cell. At first, the COVID-19 virus, more formally known as SARS-CoV-2, was dismissed as little more than a bad case of the flu. It is now emerging as a great deal more than that. Worldwide, the virus has killed more than 170,000 people and infected more than 2.4 million. While many do survive, scientists are learning that the damage that COVID-19 does to the human body is far more terrifying than originally realized. The patients who succumb to the virus experience a lack of oxygen which eventually allows a liquid buildup in their lungs that literally drowns them. The only medical solution at that stage is to artificially put the patient into a coma and then plant a tube in the trachea and have a respirator take over the patient’s breathing. Nearly half the patients never wake up again. The virus enters the human body through the lungs, but it then immediately bonds with an enzyme known as an angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), which exists on the surface of the lungs and on other organs, as well. Once that is accomplished, the virus can easily enter the blood stream and pass to other organs in the

body including the liver. That explains why different symptoms as well as damage to the heart, kidneys and bowels have been reported along with problems with inflammation throughout the body.

DESPITE INCOMPETENT POLITICAL LEADERS, PANDEMICS ARE ACTUALLY WELL-UNDERSTOOD

Just as the virus hijacks living cells, this depends for its effectiveness as an engine of destruction on the vulnerabilities and habits of people who have become the major agents of contagion. COVID-19 is extremely dangerous precisely because the main actor responsible for spreading the contamination now is an ordinary human being. Getting people to realize that is not an easy proposition. When the president of Astronauts from the International Space Station who recently returned to earth in mid-April 2020 said that even from the United States faces a situation in which more than 40,000 Americans have died and outer space they could witness a far cleaner environment inadvertently brought about by the spread of coronavirus resulting in the closure of polluting factories and a staggering drop in road transport meaning massively reduced C02 emissions. (Photo: NASA) he still refuses to wear a protective mask in public, despite the advice from some of his country’s medical experts, you might think that something is terribly wrong with the people we depend on to lead us. The fact is that pandemics are very well understood. They follow predictable patterns that are relatively easy to model. The first real breakthrough occurred in 1927, when two British scientists, A. G. McKendrick and W.O. Kermack, published a paper entitled A Mathematical Contribution to the Theory of Epidemics. Their most important insight was that the end of an epidemic has nothing to do with how many people have died, or how many people are still susceptible to be infected. The only thing that counts is the number of susceptible individuals who come in contact with each person who is infected with the virus. The critical formula that determines this is usually referred to as “R0” – pronounced “R-naught”, the contagion coefficient. “R” represents the reproductive capacity of the virus. The “0” or “naught” represents the number of people likely to come into contact with someone carrying the virus. If you can reduce that number to one or less, you are home free. If not, a slightly larger number than one will dramatically increase the rate at which the epidemic spreads. believe right now, the pandemic will eventually end. When it does, it would be a mistake to think that the problem is over. The rampant natural destruction, which made the outbreak possible, will continue unless serious attention is paid to re-establishing a sustainable environmental equilibrium. When a virus encounters a susceptible host with little or no immunity, it expands out of control. There is literally nothing that can stop it until it so overwhelms everything around it that there is no place left to go, nothing left to infect. The only option left for the virus is to implode, killing its host and itself along with it. There is a current theory that that pattern is not limited only to viruses. The human population, which now includes nearly 8 billion people, has also been expanding at a rate that also seems out of control, even though the rate of increase has slowed somewhat in the last few years. As far as nature goes, there is literally nothing standing in our way except the limited resources of the planet. (See Tira Shubart’s article on how the recently returned astronauts in the International Space Station viewed the impact of COVID-19 from outer space). If we continue to destroy the world’s natural habitat and drive the rest of nature towards extinction, TESTING IS THE KEY humankind may reach the point at which existence is no longer sustainable. We will undoubtedly get through Without a vaccine, which could take a year to develop, the best way to reduce the contagion coefficient to less than one is to identify everyone carrying the virus and to isolate them before they can infect anyone else. The only this pandemic. What we should be concerned with is the next cataclysm which might take place if we don’t reestablish a sustainable balance between ourselves and the environment on which we depend. way to do that is to institute widespread testing so that you have an accurate picture of exactly who is carrying the virus. (See Andy Cohen’s article on Switzerland’s failure to implement a proper testing strategy) All this may sound impossible, but it is not. It is how WILLIAM THATCHER DOWELL , is the Americas editor of Global Geneva. As a foreign correspondent he has reported widely across the globe for news organizations such as TIME, ABC News and NBC. Dowell is also co-author with Winter Nie of the book “In the Shadow of the Dragon: The Global Expansion of Chinese Companies –and How Singapore, Korea and Hong Kong were able to rapidly put It Will Change Business Forever“. Dowell is also a a co-editor of The a halt to the outbreak of SARS. Although it is difficult to Essential Field Guide to Afghanistan.