This is the Tom Hartman Program.

Welcome back, Tom Hartman here with you. On the line with us, Noah Greenwald, he's the Endangered Species Director for the Center for Biological Diversity.

Biological Diversity.org is the website.

His Twitter handle is Noah, underscore ARK, underscore 757.

Noa, welcome to the program. So glad to have you with us. Oh thanks Tom. I

subscribe to nature you know and and they have a daily newsletter and a couple of days

ago one of the one of the top stories that they highlighted was how there are an

estimated 10,000 potentially pathogenic as yet unidentified viruses in the reservoir of wild animals around the world.

And that with increasing frequency, this is where syphilis came from, it's where the flu came from,

it's where, I mean you pick your disease, right? Smallpox, measles, mumps, they all came out of animals

originally and we can identify the time that they did, you know, and many of them just came out in the last thousand years, some of them in the last few

hundred years.

And the same with MERS and SARS and now the coronavirus, these have all emerged in the last

20 years. And in every case, it was the result of humans

decreasing the habitat of wild animals,

decreasing wild habitat.

And as we were decreasing that wild habitat,

the diseases that were being kept stable

and away from us in that habitat were attacking us.

And so in that context, it seems to me really important that we not destroy the wild anymore.

Yet that's exactly what the Trump administration is trying to do.

Tell us about this.

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