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, BiologicalDiversity.org

He is the website, his Twitter handle is Noah Underscore Arc, Underscore 757.

Noah, welcome to the program, so glad to have you with us.

Oh, thanks, Tom.

I subscribe to Nature, you know, and 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 murs 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.

Yeah, so the Trump administration proposed a rule that makes it harder to protect habitat

...