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Thinking about how interconnected the natural world is how our every action can have consequences we never dreamed of can be uncomfortable.

Environment and biology researchers around the world are separately confirming a doozy of an example: Our fondness for a nice cut of beef helped unleash the viral pandemic that is ravaging the globe and its likely to cause more.

The chain involves several links, but it isnt mysterious: Production of beef cattle and the grains to feed them uses up way more land and water and produces way more carbon than just about anything else we could eat. That hastens climate change, which is rendering more of the world too hot or wet to support crops.

That forces people in developing nations to move farther into forests and jungles, destroying habitat for various animals and plants.

Once you have a rainforest chopped up into fragments, you get encounters between people and animals that would not otherwise bump into each other. Sometimes the people are in search of the same foods the animals like to eat. Sometimes the animals venture onto the humans fields in pursuit of those tasty crops.

Heres the critical link: Disturbed, changing habitats are especially good for weedy species such as bats and rats, which happen to be really good at hosting viruses. Often theyve infected other wildlife with those viruses. So when those human/animal encounters lead to a bite or a scratch or making a meal of the animal, a virus that has never before been in humans can jump to a human host, kicking off an outbreak against which humans have no immunity, vaccine or even experience.

Hence the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that has sickened 3.1 million people and killed 218,000 across the globe since December. Scientists still are studying its exact origin, but believe it found its first human at a wet market in Wuhan, China, possibly via a pangolin that was bitten by a bat.

The newest study to address this came from Stanford University last month. Researcher Laura Bloomfield studied people carving out farms at the edge of Ugandas Kibale National Park and found that those searching the fragmented forest edges for building materials were most likely to have contact with wild primates, known carriers of disease.

Scientists believe a primate was the source from which HIV, the virus that causes AIDs, found its first human. The Ebola virus is transmitted by various bat species and might have originated with one. In all cases, humans were venturing farther into wilderness areas.

It doesnt take a science denier to shrink from hearing this. Most Americans are used to eating plenty of meat, driving every day, turning up the A/C when its hot and other perks of our prosperity. We dont feel were immoral for enjoying these things.

But that doesnt change the effect that these behaviors, so familiar and innocuous to us, have on the larger world.

Some environmental activists lament the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic has distracted public attention from the urgent need to counter climate change, but the two arent entirely separate problems.

Human behavior consuming resources and producing waste has an impact that cannot be denied. Changing our behavior, particularly as the richest-living society on earth, is hard. Perhaps the frightening power of the coronavirus pandemic can make more people consider that change is necessary.

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Editorial: Like it or not, we helped the virus find us - The Columbus Dispatch