F E AT U R E 專 題 故 事
“It was so obviously going to happen: an exact repeat of the Nipah crisis in Kerala, almost 30 years ago in 2018! There, it was the fruit bats that lost their natural habits to rapid urbanisation, ending up in close contact with humans. But back then there wasnʼt the same awareness about how zoonotic diseases are transmitted from animals and even plants. We have no excuse today. What made us think we could rake up the snakes without some sort of comeuppance?” It was this sort of crisis that Abigail believed could be avoided through ecosystem design: this was her chosen
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mission. For the first few years on New Hainan Island, sheʼd been designing a habitat to withstand storm and disease. Martha would tune into HighSight (Abiʼs team satellite monitor) and find her tending mangroves to keep the soil from slipping away into the rising waters. Later, her focus had shifted to restoring endangered and extinct species, using the island as an incubator. Today, New Hainan Island was a global poster-child for ecosystem regeneration. Abigail had increasingly taken more pride in her work. Her decision to stay and bask in it wasnʼt all that surprising.
