How ecology has a huge influence on myth, culture and history

Under the Microscope: My article this week is, for a change, in the format of an interview I did with Dr Paddy Sleeman, Department of Zoology, Ecology and Plant Science, UCC. Dr Sleeman works on the problem of persistent bovine TB, on contract to the Department of Agriculture.

William Reville: Why are you a scientist?

Paddy Sleeman: Both science and religion represent efforts to reach the truth, as you are fond of pointing out in this column; they are compatible. I'm a scientist because I'm interested in the truth about matters, for example about Ireland's wild mammals, their ecology and diseases.

WR: What are the rewards of this work?

PS: The current reward is without doubt that after many years we now have the necessary understanding to do something about the problem of bovine tuberculosis in cattle and badgers - we are a fortunate generation - and there are exciting things happening in the world of ecological history.

WR: What is ecological history?

PS: Conventional history looks at the passage of time and the effects of people (especially so-called important people and their ideas). It is essentially a political history, whereas ecological history, which is becoming more accepted, looks at numbers of people, animals, plants, their interactions and the state of the environment, giving a very different perspective of what was really happening, and from this zoonotic diseases- those that pass from animals to people - stand out.

WR: Why are zoonotic diseases important?

DPS: If you look at history in the light of ecology then zoonotic diseases are clearly seen to be important - think of bubonic plague, or in our own time the HIV pandemic, which came from chimps. People think of history as about great men or women. For example, the communists used to tell us that Mao or Stalin were in the driver's seat of history. And yes, they did kill lots of people, but their effects were tiny when compared to those killed by the microbes of infectious diseases. This is reflected in culture; for example, "Ring-a-ring a rosy", the nursery rhyme, is about plague, and the Dracula myth is in reality about rabies. Diseases have shaped our past, our present, and will certainly shape our future.

WR: Does this also apply here in Ireland?

PS: Yes, very much so. Take plague. It is a disease of settlements as it is spread by ship rats which normally live in buildings. In Ireland therefore it affected the Anglo-Normans but not the native Irish, who were pastoral at that time, thereby halting the Anglo-Norman advance across the country in its tracks. We may owe the survival of much of Irish culture to plague! Rabies is normally spread by dogs and there are also cultural associations here. There were special ancient Irish laws dealing with rabies in dogs. JM Synge's great play Playboy of the Western World can be seen as a story about rabies, reflecting a big outbreak that occurred in Ireland at the end of the 19th century. Synge, in colourful and eloquent terms, has the hero Christy Mahon variously described as "a queer fellow above, going mad" and "groaning wicked like a maddening dog, the way it's a good cause you have, maybe, to be fearing now". This reflects the widespread fear of rabies at that time, which transferred itself to a fear of the unknown, or the new, be they people or dogs.

WR: So how do you see the future of diseases?

PS: With climate change, intensification of production of food and its consequent concentration of human populations at high densities, then diseases, especially emerging diseases such as zoonoses, will become a central issue. For example Africa will be utterly changed due to the HIV pandemic just as surely as Europe changed after bubonic plague.

WR: Are there lows for this work?

PS: There is a lack of awareness of conservation in Ireland, probably due to the absence of natural history in primary school when today's adults were at school. Take for example, the "developments" at Fota Estate (see www.fota.ie).

Aerial photographs show that almost half of Fota is now bare earth or building site, and there is yet more land behind the wire of the expanded animal park. The developments of the new golf course, villas, a hotel and the animal park expansion has left no room for native wildlife. It is well recognised that conservation must be about compromise but at Fota there has been none in my opinion.

WR: Why is Fota so important?

PS: Research on wild animals, for example on stoats, badgers, flies and moths, at Fota has been going on since the 1980s. It was one of the best understood communities of wild animals in the country - we even knew the species of moths that fly at night and what species of flies occur in the badgers' burrows. The major justification for animal parks is that they look after the biodiversity, especially of mammals, of developing countries that cannot afford to do so, the classic example being lemurs for Madagascar. There are three major threats to natural environmental communities, pollution, invasive alien species, and habitat destruction, and Fota is being faced with the latter two.

The fact that these things are going on while Cork is European Capital of Culture adds to the sadness of it all.

WR: What about the future?

PS: Well the next generation will be both better off and better informed and therefore put the environment at the top of their agenda.

William Reville is associate professor of biochemistry and public awareness of science officer at UCC. http://understandingscience.ucc.ie