2/11 A more appropriate question might be: “What are the broad benefits (including social, cultural, environmental, and financial) of people farming, trapping, trading, and consuming wild animals, and flying long-distance frequently, compared to the costs of these behaviours?”
3/11 Regarding "benefits from bats", other wildlife, or nature in general, I think it is a dangerous route to try to translate them into their economic value, because that is too limited.
4/11 Paul Kingsnorth states it well: “Every year, it seems, the areas of life that remain uncolonised by scientific or economic language or assumptions grow fewer."
5/11 "The success that science has had in explaining what can be explained has apparently convinced many people that it can explain everything, or will one day be able to do so."
6/11 "The success that economics has had in monetising the things that science can explain has convinced many that everything of value can be monetised."
7/11 "Environmentalists and conservationists are as vulnerable to these literalist trends as anyone else, and many of them have persuaded themselves that, in order to be taken seriously by those in power to save or destroy, they must speak this language too."
8/11 "But this has been a Faustian bargain. Argue that a forest should be protected because of its economic value as a ‘carbon sink’, and you have nothing to say when gold or oil of much greater value are discovered beneath it.”
9/11 Regarding your words “bats causing disease”, bats are as innocent of causing disease as the sea is of drowning people. Both the COVID-19 pandemic and drowning at sea, however tragic, are caused by human behaviour.
10/11 To the best of our knowledge, the emergence of COVID-19 is the result of human activities at and around wildlife markets, amplified by human travel. The same human behaviour is considered to have been the cause of the SARS outbreak in 2002-2003.
11/11 Other emerging diseases like highly pathogenic avian influenza & MERS also have human behaviour as the root cause. So we need to evaluate the broad benefits and costs of such behaviour in order to prevent the emergence of diseases like COVID-19. Please leave bats be.
