Reporting on Doomsday Scenarios | 60 Minutes Full Episodes

if you hear the term survivalist and it conjures images of militants and conspiracy theorists residing on the fringes and on compounds armed to the teeth well it's time to reset your Doomsday Clock a worldwide community of Preppers those who stockpile goods and skill up for extreme cast rhes is giring less for the end of days than for a disaster that calls for taking cover a climate emergency civil unrest the possibility of a dirty bomb to say nothing of a global pandemic that suddenly shuts down the world it was covid that turned abstract apocalyptic scenarios into a reality modern Preppers come at it from all angles and for all kinds of reasons we went high and low talking to a few of the millions of Americans who have joined the movement we're literally going over the edge of the mountain right now Bradley Garrett LED our crew down a narrow trail near his home in Big Bear Lake California when I moved here one of my first off-road Adventures was to figure out how to get off this mountain without using the highway and that's what we're doing right now what are we going 10 mes hour nine a former University Professor Garrett wrote a book two years ago about prepping then became a convert himself our country doesn't have the infrastructure anymore to be able to deal with emergencies in a meaningful way behind the wheel of his hybrid 4x4 he offroads not for kicks oh man but to practice what Preppers call bugging out getting out of Dodge in the event of disaster steering clear of the masses we'll take these roads and make sure that you know they're not washed out and we can still use them just give it a dry run give it a dry run yeah test running an escape route to the Mojave desert sounds like Overkill until it doesn't consider this days before our interview with Garrett a wildfire forced him to put his bugout plan into action and it climbed the ridge I mean literally right behind us literally to right here my neighbor came and knocked on my door and he said I think it's time to evacuate there were helicopters pulling water from the lake and dumping on the fire and we decided to go so we packed up the dogs and the guinea pigs and we were out the door how long it take you to pack 30 minutes that fire just a couple miles from our cabin the Wildfire burned more than a thousand acres but didn't reach Garrett's cabin we're packing up to leave still he used the close call to assess his Readiness how do you think you did pretty well we fell down on documents ver certificates credit cards they were all over the house and I had stuff in filing cabinets it was a mess I want to get it down to 15 15 minutes 15 minutes out the door getting the dogs out is no problem the guinea pigs are a little harder to Wrangle the act of gathering up animals in a natural disaster recalls the original prepper Noah of course loaded them into an arc but in 2022 ad Preppers still confront catastrophes of biblical proportions as varied as they are frequent in the last few months alone hurricane Ian showed us the wrath of nature while Vladimir Putin showed us the wrath of man issuing a warning he might use nuclear weapons if and when disaster stries FEMA the overburdened federal agency charged with leading the responses has warned Americans they should be ready to go it alone for several days John Ry is prepared to go at alone for 2 years Ry started his career in Silicon Valley and was an innovation adviser to the Obama Administration from his home in Colorado he publishes a Roundup of threats and how to prep for them best practices and bugout bag checklists his website the prepared is a leading voice for the measured segment of this growing Community we think about 15 million Americans are actively prepping right now in terms of percentage of households we are at or about to cross 10% of all households and just a few years ago that was 2% or 3% what happened to trigger this more and more people over the last decade that have accepted the reality of climate change and how that impacts the disasters and things that we go through almost every every day now what's happened with our economy since the global financial crisis what's happened with uh political discourse and institutional failures broadly speaking more and more people realizing that they are their own first responder this is a bugout bag part of R's work entails reviewing the glut of supplies on the multi-billion dollar prepping Market got unsafe drinking water here's a $25 filter and it will filter 100,000 gallons of water cell service down no for that Old Faithful ham radio you at least have the ability to communicate Remy says the uptick in prepping cuts across National divides politics economics region is there a typical prepper not anymore there used to be across the country there is a growing Darkness a belief that the end of days is near this is doomsday preppers in the past the reality TV shows that would cover Preppers they'd find someone who had the most extreme Fantastical concern like fascist alien zombies arriving on an asteroid that is so night and day from where we're at now in the foothills of Tennessee's Smoky Mountains we met Heidi Keller in her vegetable garden a restaurant supply company worker by day she lives alone and calls herself a homestead prepper ready to hunker down or bug in in a crisis you can put raw meat in here she recently acquired the hottest item for Preppers a freeze dryer that's a pound of ground beef this is where I keep all of my canned goods inside her pantry Keller has canned freeze dried and stored enough food to get by for a year without leaving her property chicken meat roast beef and it doubles as protection from surging food prices after fire spread through nearby Gatlinburg during a 2016 drought Keller says she wanted a backup when the fires came and made me rethink my gosh I can't have everything in my house because if something does happen and there is a fire and my house burns it can't be all in one location so the longterm storage things I have someplace else where is that in a secure location it's not here Fort Knox no how far from here not far within five miles you give us more hints why would I do that you know I'm not grab one as a rule Preppers don't like to reveal too much you might say they also have trust issues with the country's infrastructure and the ability of its institutions to deliver in a crisis if there's some kind of catastrophe to what extent do you trust the government I'm not going to down the government I mean they do the best that they can but pretty much the government's not going to take care of you not because they may not want to but because there's too much going on that's common sense you're prepared to go It Alone you have to be to some degree my biggest concern for two years it took me to get a wood stove I didn't have that and I'm all El electric so I was not prepared and finally when I got it was like finally I'm I feel more comfortable now I'm okay if all it takes is a wood stove for Heidi Keller to feel comfortable when the Sun rises on post-apocalyptic America the money class will find Comfort here we drove to the belly of the country Central Kansas flat as a countertop hem by soybean in cornfields who' you actually buy this from where we met Larry Hall a former Defense Contractor turned shall we say Niche property developer in 2008 he paid $300,000 for this decommissioned nuclear missile silo he and investors put in $22 million to refashion it as a luxury bunker the survival condo considerable thickness for door to a residence inside the 16,000 lb doors an apartment building we're down to 14 except this one is jammed 15 stories into the ground jail burning fireplace over here there's room for 75 people all but three of the 14 private units have been sold this three-bedroom with TV screens posing as Windows goes for $2.4 million cash who are your clients these are all self-made people we don't have any lottery winners or um old money we have uh retired doctors professional people do they share a particular ideology no they don't I know that there's Independents and I know there's Democrats and Republicans they got the whole mix here but what they have in common is they all want to have a safe place for their family we've got a 75 ft long saltwater pool the end of the world as we know it they'll feel fine sitting poolside we rock climb unless they'd prefer to go rock climbing no one was living here fulltime when we visited but Hall says the place was hopping at the onset of the pandemic the owners for the first time ever all came here at the same time all of them so 19 kids were here it's the B sales pitch reduces to three words peace of mind this is just a common area with dozens of strangers hold up together in a crisis here's our bar he hired a psychologist to consult on design to avoid a Subterranean version of Lord of the Flies I did notice what looked like a jail cell we do have a jail cell that's because we also have a bar in a lounge and if you have a bad day or you drink too much you might get an adult timeout five different power sources keep it all humming there's a 5year supply of stored food and hydroponics to grow more the survival condo also employs doormen that is armed guards at the gate to what extent are you worried this place could be overrun during an actual crisis this place was engineered to with stand a 20 kiloton uh nuclear warhead detonated within a half mile you know you can rant and Rave and throw smoke bombs and mtof Cocktails and you're going to scratch my paint so Paul is converting another Silo half an hour away most bunkers worldwide are not fortified luxuries we get a vivid demonstration of their practicality as ukrainians take cover in Australia this man made news when he emerged on scathed from his backyard bunker after a deadly bushire here in the US one personal bunker manufacturer told us he takes a new order every other day what do you make of the spike in Bunker sales the vast majority of people should never get to the point of having a bunker and in fact I really dislike the bunker narratives because it takes away from the conversation that we should be having which is how do we make our existing homes and our existing communities more resilient rather than and I'm going to quit society and go live in a decommissioned missile silo you say you would never build a bunker why not you can only stockpile so much in your bunker I can only withstand so much time in it I would be desperate to peek out and see what's happening outside Bradley Garrett won't bunker down but he has double down on bugging out he keeps the second truck this 1972 GMC in his yard in case the lights go out for good taking out electronics and turning his hybrid Escape vehicle into the equivalent of an expensive brick the Spectre of massive power grid failure the result of a nuclear attack or solar storm preoccupies many Preppers the current estimates from the government is that it would take 2 years to rebuild the grid two years the Wi-Fi goes down for 5 minutes and everybody panics exactly and and Preppers say that it's 72 hours to animal meaning what meaning that it takes about 3 days for people to totally lose it Preppers call this the shtf scenario the proverbial s hitting the fan a breakdown of social norms John Ry says Don't Panic just get prepping if you have 2 weeks worth of food and water in your home a radio some basic supplies that alone that little bit of effort and cost covers you for the vast majority of scenarios that's that minimum threshold that everyone should aspire to as more Americans stock up bracing for the worst while still intent on Surviving it we may be approaching the day when prepper isn't a loaded word until then is there a preferred term now the one that I prefer that's popping up is Doomer Optimist sounds like an oxymoron this is someone that that recogniz izes that disaster is inevitable but they're optimistic that they're going to be able to make their way through them they'll concede the catastrophe but they'll be okay yeah you have to live with hope you know if if you don't have hope about the future there's no point in preparing for it we're going to take you on a journey to the end of the Earth to show you a place that might someday save humankind it's a bank built to last 10,000 years but it's not money or gold that's on deposit currencies rise and fall with civilizations we were there last month when the world's most important assets were made safe from climate change and nuclear war locked deep inside the Doomsday Vault head toward the top of the planet over the freezing Arctic Ocean and you'll find a collection of ice covered islands called spard Norwegian for cold Coast they're due north of Europe administered by Norway and among the last bits of land before the North Pole down on the water is the northernmost town in the world long Yan with about 2,000 people but polar bears outnumber the people and reindeer outnumber everything it's an otherworldly place a Twilight Zone where sometimes the Sun never Rises and The Moon never sets in the dead of winter it was the last stop in the 30-year journey of American scientist Carrie Fowler it's a long way from the farm in tenness it's it's a world away did you ever worry that it wouldn't get this far oh I was worrying all the time I think but here we are from the outside it looks like a concrete wedge pounded into a mountain walk through the door and cross from a hostile Wasteland into a safe house for Humanity well I've got to say it looks like a doomsday Vault it probably is one at least we think if there are any uh big problems on the outside uh this is going to survive this was clearly built to last we we built it to last as long as we could imagine I don't know what was in the minds of the people who built the pyramids um maybe they were building to last forever too but I can't think of anything that's been built in our lifetime that's been built with this kind of time Horizon and all these pipes over our heads that's the refrigeration unit the refrigeration yeah we're 700 mil from the North Pole we are and you're air conditioning this place we're going to freeze it even further freeze it colder than the permafrost so that if the Earth warms and the power goes out the Vault will stay frozen for another 25 years 200 100 the treasure that the Vault was built to house approached an air strip at the base of the mountain nearby what's in these boxes took 10,000 years to develop and 70 years to collect now they were loaded for the last mile to Fowler's Frozen Fort Knox this is the coldest place in the mountain we wanted to take advantage of of the naturally Frozen temperatures down here and we wanted absolutely cold oldest spot we could find it is pretty cold down here it's cold it's getting colder actually these are a air lock doors it keeps the cold air in wow it's pretty big so the foundation of humanity ends up here it's about 30 yard long it's about 10 yard wide and 5 yards High material inside the boxes that came off the plane are millions of silver envelopes show me what's inside okay well we'll take a look at these two they're going to be sealed in the boxes but uh here's one sample what are they well these are chickpeas or garbanzos this is a crop you ought to know wheat wheat very good so what's in all these envelopes is seeds M this is a giant Vault built in the Arctic just to house seeds that's right it's a seed bank if you could clear away the ice you'd see that officially the bank is called the spard global seed Vault it's built to Warehouse backup copies of all the world's crops 1 and A2 billion seeds everything from California sunflowers to ancient Chinese rice if an asteroid strikes the Earth seeds to restart agriculture would come from here but science fiction aside the main purpose is to to protect against a doomsday that is unfolding right now because the plants we've been eating for 10,000 years are going extinct if you ask somebody how many kinds of apples are there they're going to say well there's red there's green there's yellow there's Macintosh there's Golden Delicious they're going to give you an answer like that maybe 25 I would guess good guess but um in fact um in the 1800s in the United States people were growing 7,100 named varieties of apples 7,100 different varieties of apples and how many are there today we've lost about 6,800 of those so the extinction rate for Apple varieties in the United States about 86% that pattern exists in all crops estimates are that every day one crop strain disappears and here's why seeds used to be passed down through family but today farmers are planting mass-produced industrial seeds the upside is more food but the downside is that the family variety goes extinct to understand the danger we visited a US Government Storehouse in Idaho where Mike bondman watches over America's collection of wheat seeds well we have in this room more than 50,000 different what we call accessions or collections of wheat from around the world 50,000 different kinds of wheat exactly I didn't know there were that many yeah it's I think most people would be surprised most countries collect seeds and banks for safekeeping and for 110 years the US Department of Agriculture has sent scientists called plant explorers to collect the seeds in these envelopes if there's an Indiana Jones of plant explorers his name was Jack Harland who made one of his greatest finds in the 1940s uh this is uh Pi 1783 83 This was a wild variety of wheat growing in Turkey an old farmer variety that had probably been grown there for thousands of years in the field it looked Dreadful Harland wrote in his journal it was hopelessly useless useless for food but as it turned out inside these seeds is a superhero for fighting wheat disease today the genes of humble Pi 1783 83 are a found Foundation of Agriculture breed into much of the bread we eat that's why you have to collect everything because just by looking at the material in a farmer's field you might say that one's no good let's don't collect it but you can't anticipate what value that might have there may be genes in that material that are going to be of immense value in the future this is a example of a rust on a on a small grain in this case it's oats and in each pusle there are thousands and thousands of sport pores that are dispersed through the air and can infect other plants in the past plant diseases like this cause Mass starvation think of the Irish Potato Famine but today scientists prevent famines by going through tens of thousands of plants looking for genes to fight disease or drought or any other problem turns out some of the rarest and most valuable seeds come from some of the most unstable places there was an important seed bank in Afghanistan that's right it's uh it's been destroyed in the chaos following the fighting there it was was looted and destroyed the Afghan seeds were thrown away because the looters wanted the glass jars they were kept in much of Iraq's seed collection was lost in that war and in the Philippines a typhoon washed away part of an important rice Bank doomsday doesn't have to come in the form of an asteroid Doomsday can come in the form of of an equipment failure or mismanagement just human mismanagement or a lack of funding or a typhoon or something like that and those kinds of things are happening all the time and once that crop is lost it's lost we'll never see it again and any kind of characteristic that it might have had is gone it's off the artist's pallet it's a color that we can't use anymore it's the it it may have the disease or pest resistance that we absolutely need to have to have a viable crop in the future gone Fowler runs the global crop diversity trust set up by the United Nations and bioversity international his Safe House cost $9 million Norway paid for Construction Bill Gates paid for the shipping and seeds from nearly every nation are locked inside spard may seem a strange place to build an arc for plants we went exploring by the only practical way to get around the islands are a white desert Barren and chilled to 30 below zero we're just above 78° north latitude and the North Pole is just off this way about 700 miles this is about all the light that you get during this time of year the Sun never comes up over the horizon in the wintertime it's ironic that the world's AG agricultural Heritage is being stored in a place with no agriculture at all they don't even have trees on swar but these mountains are just the place to save the resources of life itself remote from nuclear war from storms and Rising Seas these resources stand between us and catastrophic starvation on a scale we cannot imagine and we we now have I think kind of a perfect storm hitting agriculture that perfect storm is crop Extinction population growth and global warming at the University of Washington Professor David batiti has calculated that in a 100 years farmers will face temperatures unlike any in human history temperatures more like millions of years ago what were conditions like then uh well let me describe it this way you have crocodiles in eleir Island which is in uh the edge of the Arctic you have palm trees in Wyoming bti's data come from the Nobel prizewinning climate research of the UN his work is funded by the National Science Foundation batiti projects that the droughts of the past will pale in comparison to what he believes is coming if you um think about the the Dust Bowl in the US and you think about well there was a decade where you had on the average a maybe 5% reduction in precipitation you know for the growing in Southern California the Caribbean southern Europe Northern Africa um the central Asia all of these places 100 years from now will typically experience on average 20 to 30% reduction in precipitation right so that's five times the Dust Bowl whether it's a dry climate a new virus or infestation the genes to stop a famine may be in one of these boxes when the last of the seeds descends the tunnel the lights will go out the Vault will be locked and Carrie Fowler will have achieved his life's work preserving civilization past against an uncertain future Force comes to worse this does save the world but it also has a more mundane feature to it which is it helps us every day in feeding people in what year will the human population grow too large for the earth to sustain the answer is about 1970 according to research by the World Wildlife Fund in 1970 the planets three and a half billion people were sustainable but on this New Year's Day the population is 8 billion today wild plants and animals are running out of places to live the scientists you're about to meet say the Earth is suffering a crisis of mass extinction on a scale unseen since the dinosaurs we're going to show you a possible solution but first have a look at how humanity is already suffering from the vanishing wild in Washington state the Salish sea helped Feed the World with this weather and the way things feel once I get out here it's time to be fishing that's what it feels like commercial fisherman Dana Wilson supported a family on the Salish Sea's legendary wealth of salmon he remembers propellers churning the water off Blaine Washington and cranes straining for the state's $200 million annual catch that used to be a buying station they're gone now they don't buy anymore so that building over there used to buy salmon they don't buy salmon anymore there it's it just it's it's just not here in 1991 one salmon species was endangered today 14 salmon populations are foundering they've been crowded out of rivers by habitat destruction warming and pollution Dana Wilson used to fish all summer today a conservation Authority grants rare fleeting permission to throw a net there was a season there was a season now there's a day there's a day and sometimes it's hours sometimes you might get 12 hours 16 hours that's what we're down to here the vanishing wild scuttled a way of life that began with native tribes a thousand years ago I don't remember anybody doing anything other than salmon fishing fisherman Armando bionas is a member of the lummy tribe which calls itself people of the salmon he didn't imagine the Rich Harvest would end with his five fishing boats all of a sudden you're trying to figure out well how am I going to make that paycheck for my family well for me it was like well I have a backup for a backup for a backup for a backup bonus's backups include his new food truck switching to crab fishing and Consulting on cannabis Farms his scramble to adapt is being repeated around the world a World Wildlife Fund study says that in the past 50 years the abund of global wildlife has collapsed 69% mostly for the same reason too many people too much consumption and growth Mania at the age of 90 biologist Paul Erick may have lived long enough to see some of his dire prophecies come true you seem to be saying that humanity is not sustainable oh humanity is not sustainable to maintain uh our lifestyle yours and mine basically for the entire Planet you'd need five more Earths not clear where they're going to come from just in terms of the resources that would be required resources that would be required um the systems that support our lives which of course are the biodiversity uh that we're wiping out uh humanity is very busily sitting on a limb that we're sawing off in 1968 Erick a biology professor at Stanford became a doomsday celebrity with a best seller forecasting the collapse of nature when the population bomb came out you were described as an alarmist I was alarmed I am still alarmed all of my colleagues are alarmed the alarm erck sounded in' 68 warned that overpopulation would trigger widespread famine he was wrong about that the Green Revolution fed the world but he also wrote in' 68 that heat from greenhouse gases would melt polar ice and Humanity would overwhelm the wild today humans have taken over 70% of the planet's land and 70% of the fresh water the rate of Extinction is extraordinarily high now and getting higher all the time we know the rate of Extinction is extraordinarily High because of a study of the fossil record by biologist Tony barnowski erick's Stanford colleague the data are Rock Solid I don't think you'll find a scientist that will say we're not in an Extinction crisis Barn's research suggests today's rate of Extinction is up to 100 times faster than is typical in the nearly 4 billion year history of life these Peaks represent the few times that life collapsed globally and the last was the dinosaurs 66 million years ago there are five times in Earth's history where we had mass extinctions and by mass extinctions I mean uh at least 75% 3/4 of the known species disappearing from the face of the earth now we're witnessing what a lot of people are calling the sixth mass extinction where the same thing could happen on our watch it's a horrific state of the planet when common species the ubiquitous species that we're familiar with are declining Tony barnowski colleague in the study of Extinction is his wife biologist Liz Hadley faculty director at Stanford's Jasper Ridge research Preserve in California you know I see it in my mind and it's a really sad state if you spend any time in California you know the loss of water the loss of water means that there are dead salmon you see in the river right before your eyes but it also means the demise of those birds that rely on the salmon fishery Eagles um it means you know things like minks and otters that rely on fish it means that our habitats that we're used to the forests that you know 3,000 year old forests are going to be gone so it means silence and it means some very catastrophic events because it's happening so quickly means you look out your window and 3/4 of what you think ought to be there is no longer there that's what what mass extinction looks like what we see just in California is you know the loss of our iconic state symbols we have no more grizzly bears in California the only grizzly bears in California are on the state flag that's our state mammal and they're not here anymore is it too much to say that we're killing the planet no I I would say it's too much to say that we're killing the planet because the planet's going to be fine what we're doing is we're killing our way of life the worst of the killing is in Latin America where the World Wildlife Fund study says the abundance of wildlife has fallen 94% since 1970 but it was also in Latin America that we found the possibility of Hope Mexican ecologist herard calios is one of the world's leading scientists on extinction he told us the only solution is to save the onethird of the earth that remains wild to prove it he's running a 3,000 square m experiment in the kakol biosphere Reserve near Guatemala he is paying family Farmers to stop cutting the forest we're going to pay each family certain amount of money that is more than you will get cutting down the forest if you protect it and how much are you paying out out every year ah for instance each family here will get around $1,000 more than enough here to make up for lost Farmland in total the payouts come to $1.5 million a year or about $2,000 per square mile the tab is paid through the charity of wealthy donors the investment to protect what is left is I mean really small payoff on that investment is being collected on calios Jungle cameras 30 years ago the Jaguar was very nearly extinct in Mexico now sealo says they've rebounded to about 600 in the reserve there are other places where there are reserves around the world where they've been able to increase the populations of certain species but I wonder are all these little success stories enough to to prevent mass extinction all the big success that we have in protecting forest and recovering animals like tigers in India Jaguars in Mexico elephants in Botswana and so on are incredible amazing successes but there are like grains of sand in a beach and to really make a big impact we need to scale up this 10,000 times so they are important because they give was hope but they are completely insufficient to cope with climate change so what would the world have to do what we will have to do is to really understand that the climate change and species Extinction is a threat to humanity and then put all the Machinery of society political economic and uh social towards finding solutions to the problems finding solutions to the problems was the goal 2 weeks ago at the UN biodiversity conference where Nations agreed to conservation targets but at the same meeting in 2010 those Nations agreed to limit the destruction of the Earth by 20120 and not one of those goals was met this despite thousands of studies including the continuing research of Stanford biologist Paul Erick you know that there is no political will to do any of the things that you're recommending I know there's no political will to do any of the things that I'm concerned with which is exactly why I and the vast majority of my colleagues think we're we've had it that the next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we're used to in the 50 years since erick's population bomb Humanity's feasting on resource ources has tripled we're already consuming 175% of what the Earth can regenerate and consider half of humanity about 4 billion live on less than $10 a day they aspire to cars air conditioning and a rich diet but they won't be fed by the fishermen of Washington's Salish sea including Armando bionis the tribe has been fishing salmon here for hundreds of years yeah and your generation is seeing the end of that it's getting harder and harder um I hate to say I don't want to say it's the end of it why do you feel so emotionally attached to this it's everything we know I'm fortunate enough to know where I know a lot of different things I've done a lot of different things in my life um I've Gotten Good at uh evolving and changing um but not everybody here is built like that and to some of us this is what they know this all they know the five mass extinctions of the ancient past were caused by natural calamities volcanoes and an asteroid today if the science is right Humanity may have to serve survive a sixth mass extinction in a world of its own making in January Uganda declared an end to the outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus that alarmed scientists in 2022 no cases were discovered outside Africa but Ebola remains among the deadliest of pathogens capable of jump in from wild animals to humans just as covid-19 likely did it's called spillover disease detectives warn the threat of spillover has never been higher as urban populations grow and come into contact with wild animals and their viruses since 2009 American scientists have discovered more than 900 new viruses as we first reported in October now the US government is doubling down sending irus Hunters to Global hotspots to find the next deadly virus before it finds us we joined a team from the University of California Davis and their Ugandan Partners in the rugged impenetrable Forest on the search for pathogen X we landed in kahii a speck of a town in Southwest Uganda as we headed off to the impenetrable Forest we soon saw how it got its name it's so thick with trees Vines and roots that ugandans call it the place of Darkness as our 4x4s bumped and swerved along deeply rded tracks we passed T Farmers loggers villagers all living on the edge of the forest where the risk of infectious disease spilling over from animals is highest Wildlife epidemiologist Christine Johnson handicapped the stakes how would you rate the odds of another pandemic I would say another pandemic is guaranteed guaranteed it's not a matter of if but when that's why we're so committed to preparation let's go Johnson leads the UC Davis team and has been hunting viruses around the globe for decades we were headed to an abandon M shaft to look for bats Johnson told us bats are prime suspects for SP over they Harbor more viruses lethal to humans than any other mammal new bat species and new viruses are still being discovered it seems like a really daunting task for you to find pathogen X before it finds us it's definitely achievable but it absolutely it's all here right now right it's not like we're exploring outer space all of these viruses and and and all of the wildlife are right here on our planet the bats would start flying at dusk we waited as the UC Davis team and their Ugandan Partners hung a fine mesh net across the entrance of the cave we wore masks and goggles to protect ourselves against any early risers Berard seeday one of uganda's top Wildlife vets told us this area used to be all Forest now villagers had planted a cornfield right up to the mouth of the Batcave increasing the risk of spillover as if on Q we watched women carrying water cut through the corn field while school children ran home the transfer between bats and humans it's much more likely when you've got people living so close exactly the population has grown people have moved into areas they never occupied before that shrinkage of the buffer the habitat between people and wildli has become so narrow so that increases the contact we're talking about people who are now living CL right on the edge of the impenetrable Forest exactly governments cannot stop people from moving in some of these areas because they have nowhere else to go bats are known to carry Corona viruses the same virus family that spawned covid-19 as well as lethal Ebola virus make sure's so we had to dress head to toe in protective gear once the Hazmat suit was on we added two sets of gloves a mask and a face shield to guard against flying guano and other toxins that's We Begin I must assume everything is contaminated exactly the impenetrable forest was soon pitch black and we had only the light from our headlamps to guide us soon they' trapped a large large Egyptian fruit bat Wildlife vet Bernard zebede gently disentangled it and put it in a fabric sack we followed him back to the makeshift lab glowing in the dark the bat sacks quivered in the ghostly light it felt like we were on the set of a sci-fi movie oh he's a big guy yeah up close the bats did little to dispel their fearsome reputations we watched as the fruit bat grew agitated trying to escape the scientist held its nose to a test tube filled with a mild anesthetic finally the bat succumbed epidemiologist Christine Johnson told us the bat would be swabbed for a suite of viruses does this hurt the bat at all no it doesn't hurt the bat we we get the right size swab so that we're just doing an oral sample it might be a little uncomfortable the bat's wings were examined for parasites and ticks that might also have pathogens all the samples would be sent to a lab for DNA sequencing Johnson told us a virus's genetic code can help identify which might cross to humans okay there he goes there he go after the tests were done the bats were released groggy but unharmed the next day we joined Tiara Smiley Evans a UC Davis epidemiologist and Wildlife vet we were looking for monkeys oh yeah and baboons like bats primates carry many viruses that have leapt to people Smiley Evans told us catching an outbreak early at the point of spillover is vital to containing it it sounds like there's no shortage of viruses that can infect humans that come out of the forest there are probably more pathogens that we don't know about than ones that we do know about we need to gather more information and more intelligence about what may be out there and able to spell over before it does so they come right down to the hospital yeah in the back uh it bus up right against the forest we met her at the Wendy Community Hospital on the edge of the forest this really is something it's so close we saw baboons casually strolling on the hospital grounds sometimes getting into patients rooms whenever you're creating a new opportunity for humans to come in contact with Wildlife populations that they were never in contact with before your you're creating a brand new situation so as human populations grow that's pushing us into areas we've never been before exactly putting us into contact with animals we've never been in contact with before exactly to find out what viruses the baboons were carrying Smiley Evans pioneered a simple but groundbreaking method to collect saliva samples the stealth banana tied to a string the banana is tossed to the Curious baboons but hidden inside is an oral swab coated in something sweet that the baboons love to chew Smiley Evans and Ugandan Wildlife vet Uka Nelson had prepared the bananas earlier in the day so we have tried strawberry jam we've tried mango juice have you found they like one more than the other the difference is that sometimes they'll chew on that swab for longer periods of time with a different attractant versus another and that's what we really want it's like bubblegum for primates when the sweet is gone the baboons throw the swab away leaving behind plenty of saliva that can be decoded for viruses but family politics can sometimes get in the way meet the Big Daddy of this troop he wasn't about to let anyone else get even a mouthful mom hauled the babies out of the way until finally the coast was clear by then all that was left were soggy left overs Wildlife vet buk Nelson told us it was worth the wait it was rare to see babies Venture this close so you got saliva samples from the babies yesterday yeah that's unusual it's very unusual so what do you get from the babies that you don't get from the adults you never know I might find a particular disease in this age bracket which might not be found in the juvenile or the females sex age all that plays a lot in disease intelligence disease intelligence that also includes training villagers to be on the lookout for any unusual fevers or flu like symptoms scientists can then match human illnesses to the animal viruses theyve found in the same area Smiley Evans told us it was putting pieces of a puzzle together all the samples are tested in the same way for the same pathogens so the goal is that we're sampling at the same time in the same area we can start to connect the dots and understand when there's been transmission of a particular virus one of the most closely monitored species in the impenetrable Forest are its star residents the endangered mountain gorilla nearly half the world's remaining gorillas are here 459 at last count they're always on the move so we set off to find them one Ridge led to another each steeper than the last the forest was so dense there was no sunlight and no gorillas Wildlife vet Bernard zebede assured us we were on the right path are you seeing signs of the gorillas around here yeah I've seen some already our Porters breezed along unfazed we not so much then hours after trekking suddenly there they were we spotted a mother first high in the trees gorging on Twigs soon we were surrounded by all 19 members of an extended family including a massive Silverback and another mother cradling her infant we had put on our masks not to protect ourselves but to protect the gorillas from any infection we might be carrying Amy bond is with Gorilla doctors an international conservation group she told us how they identify each gorilla just like humans where we each have our own unique fingerprint that helps us be identifiable as an individual gorillas have unique nose prints a nose print a nose print and that's what allows us to identify those individuals and so we go through and we make sure we get each individual in the group that we can do a visual assessment looking for signs of illness or injury Bond and Wildlife vet Bernard seed told us that gorillas are susceptible to many of the same pathogens that we are and they can be an early harbinger of disease the gorillas are monitored daily for any warning signs when they're sick it's very similar right runny nose coughing sneezing they're not moving they don't want to eat if a gorilla is lying down seay told us they'll assess if he's resting or if something else is preventing him from moving we spotted one young male on his own but Amy Bond told us he was likely suffering from a problem of a different sort you can also sometimes tell which silver back is dominant by the number of females around him so this poor guy sitting over here he's just out he's just always second choice aside from a case of wounded male pride Guerilla doctors Amy Bond told us this family appeared to be thriving but their future isn't guaranteed and if theirs isn't neither is ours Bond told us as spillover threats grow it's impossible to separate human health from the health of the natural world as you see Davis scientists continue their work the search for pathogen X is a search for what threatens the animals of the impenetrable Forest as much as it threatens us

Channel: 60 Minutes

Views: 1,986,774

Keywords: 60 minutes, cbs news, doomsday preppers, doomsday: 10 ways the world will end, end of the world, investigative journalism, nuclear war, full episodes, mass extinction, climate change

Id: 8aUFSOG9jI4

Length: 52min 32sec (3152 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 06 2024