Nexuses of Species Reintroduction, Biosecurity Approaches, and Pandemic Outbreaks

It has been argued that biodiversity as “dynamic natural variability” and biosecurity as “an intentional strategy of constraint” (Buller 2019:183) have opposing goals. Generally, approaches to promoting biodiversity aim to protect, conserve, and preserve a species or ecosystem at status quo and/or prevent or stem biodiversity loss. Biosecurity proponents go further, preventing invasive and/or alien entrants into a habitat and managing the populations of existing undesirable organisms (including by way of eradication).

With the advent of settler agriculture and livestock farming, wolves in Europe and North America were viewed as biosecurity threats to human life and property and accordingly destroyed wherever possible even up to the 20th century (Buller 2008). As wolf hunting technologies modernised, and popular sympathies shifted to wolves’ helplessness against seemingly omnipotent hunters, communities called for the protection and conservation of wolves as essential elements of biodiversity (Buller 2008).

To illustrate the competing philosophies of biodiversity and biosecurity, adherents of the former considers the wolf integral to the biodiversity of its habitats in Mercantour, France and to the regulation of the health and numbers of its prey, while the latter view holds that the reintroduction of wolves violates the 3 explicit purposes of biosecurity measures of the Food and Agriculture Organization, i.e. “[to] protect agricultural production systems, and those dependent on these systems”; “[to] protect human health and consumer confidence in agricultural products”; and “[to] protect the environment and promote sustainable production” (Buller 2008:1590).

In many ways, species reintroduction stands in direct opposition to biosecurity. Where biosecurity seeks to prevent intrusion and protect the dynamics and environs of existing species and habitats, species reintroduction programs are manifestly aimed at interposing organisms in habitats from which they have been largely absent. When species are reintroduced – i.e., translocated to a habitat to which theyonce belonged but from which they were wiped out or died out (Buller 2019) – biosecurity concerns may arise in terms of the effects of such reintroduction on both extant wild organisms as well as and humans and our societies and economies (Buller 2019). Extant wildlife may find it challenging to adjust to the abrupt insertion of new prey or predator in the trophic web (Buller 2019).

Given that reintroduced species may inadvertently bring with them vector organisms or pathogens detrimental or even lethal to local human and non-human organisms in the introduced habitat (Buller 2019), and since areas subject to species reintroduction and other modes of re-wilding “are also associated with disease, infection and pathogenic contamination” (Buller 2019:191), the frequency and scale of species reintroduction initiatives may correlate with or even contribute to current or indeed future outbreaks of pandemics.

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References:-

• Buller, H. (2019). ‘Introducing aliens, reintroduction natives: A conflict of interest for biosecurity’ in Dobson, A., K. Barker and S.L. Taylor (eds.) Biosecurity: The socio-politics of invasive species and infectious diseases. (London: Routledge, 2019).

• Buller, H. (2008). ‘Safe from the wolf: biosecurity, biodiversity, and competing philosophies of nature,’ Environment and planning A: Economy and space, 40(7) 2008, pp.1583–1597.