Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Von Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Earlier this week, I spoke with science writer and journalist David Kwan,

whose many books include spillover, animal infections, and the next human pandemic.

We spoke about the root causes behind the current pandemic and the ways in which viruses are embedded in the same systems of ecology and evolutionary

biology that we are.

Against the backdrop of our ongoing disruption of wild ecosystems that shake these viruses

free, the novel COVID-19 virus offers an opportunity to rethink and reimagine our relationship with the natural world.

So David, thank you very much for joining us this morning.

The coronavirus is what is known as a zoonotic virus.

Could you start off by explaining what zanotic virus is?

And how it ended up infecting humans in a market in Wuhan, China?

Yes, yes.

Well, a zoonosis is an animal infection that's transmissible to humans.

And that can be a virus or a bacterium or any other sort of infectious bug.

But a zoonotic virus is one that comes out of a non-human animal and somehow

passes into humans and if it takes hold and can replicate and cause disease and transmit,

then we call that a zoonotic disease. And 60, 70 percent of our infectious diseases fall into that category.

Some of the old plagues and some new plagues like this one.

How does it happen?

Well, all animals carry, including wild animals, carry their own, in some cases, unique viruses,

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