There’s nothing new under the sun – lessons conservationists could learn from previous pandemics

In many industrialised societies, the COVID-19 pandemic has been painted as an unprecedented moment caused by human abuse of nature. Responses to it have, in turn, temporarily slowed down human impacts upon nature. This has led to a rallying cry against human encroachment into what are claimed to be pristine wildernesses. Reflecting upon historic, archaeological and palaeoecological evidence relating to the impacts of past epidemics within a wider historical timeframe from Africa and South America, we show that though COVID-19 is a novel disease, the pandemic itself does not represent a novel event, since diseases brought by Europeans have previously decimated the peoples living in these areas. The ‘pristine wilderness’ is a myth, which falsely held that these places had always been empty of people, thus helping to legitimate the creation of protected areas, and their political control by both colonial and national administrations. We therefore question the assumption behind what has been termed the ‘anthropause’ – that the supposed reduction in anthropogenic activities caused by the current pandemic presents a new opportunity to study anthropogenic impacts on nature: numerous previous occasions exist where depopulation resulted in anthropauses. Such responses to COVID-19 suggest further interdisciplinarity is needed in the field of conservation, in spite of advances in this direction.