this first picture is really my first
understanding of exploration and
discovery as early as I can remember my
mother would take me on nature walks
behind our house in the South Shore of
Massachusetts each day we would go in
the back of the woods and at each step
there was discovery I can clearly
remember these days of undergoing under
the leaf litter and finding lady
slippers or flowering Indian peace pipes
or an old fox skull these days of
discovery have stayed with me this sense
that the forest was a place of spiritual
communion has also stayed with me my
mother’s sense of awe at each thing that
we would find that was extraordinary
really was contagious and it instilled
in me this lesson that I carry with me
today that the definition of
extraordinary is just that it’s finding
something ordinary but somehow elevated
in meaning and it started with really
this ephemeral bloom of a lady slipper
in the third grade I was asked to do a
project on an animal and as I flipped
through the encyclopedia of animals I
came across the ring-tailed lemur I
completely fell in love I told my family
that I was moving to Madagascar and they
all laughed at me but it really was then
that I began this lifelong commitment to
a place that was so far from home but so
close to my heart and I did research for
this project I went to our local library
and I came across as National Geographic
issue from 1988 and I can remember
plopping myself down on a beanbag chair
and reading through this issue lemurs on
the edge of survival it created in me
this sense of urgency this sense of
passion a sense of purpose that I needed
to go to Madagascar and protect lemurs
from this very certain fate of
endangerment of extinction a few years
later in this same library I came across
a book called the eye eye and eye
written by Gerald Durrell I read through
this voraciously it became my favorite
book and in many ways it still is Gerald
Durrell became my hero he was a
naturalist that was dedicated
to saving animals in peril and he had a
very special place in his heart for
Madagascar he’s known as saying the
world is as delicate and as complicated
as a spider’s web if you touch one
thread you send shudders running through
all of the other threads and we’re not
just tearing the web we’re we’re really
tearing great holes in it and so I
really began to dedicate myself to
finding a way to go to Madagascar I
wanted to write a letter to Gerald
Durrell and I sent him a letter right
after I read the book and told him how
much that book meant to me a few months
later I got a letter back from his wife
telling me that Gerry had passed and
that really propelled me even more to
really start my career and find a way to
get to Madagascar and as you can tell
from the story I did find my way to
Madagascar and I just met Lee Durrell
his wife last year there
I’ve now spent the past 15 years there
first doing this carnivore behavioral
biology research then starting my own
environmental education initiative and
before my senior year in college I
decided to be intrepid and start off my
own project in the northeast of
Madagascar where Gerry worked and this
is what I found this picture is
incredibly disturbing this picture still
haunts me to this day
and yet I’ve come to understand it this
is a far cry from the image that I had
in my head from reading Gerry’s book and
yet it was so important for me to really
understand what this image meant I did
the first research creating a systematic
survey of hunting in Madagascar that
started 10 years ago we’ve now monitored
this population for the past 10 years
really looking at their reliance on
local wildlife it was the first
systematic survey Madagascar’s paradigm
has always been that the island was on
fire and that slash-and-burn was
destroying the forest and yet there
there was a more hidden threat crippling
what the wildlife populations in
Madagascar there was this undercover
threat of hunting and no one had
explored this before and so I set out to
do that in addition to the wildlife
surveys I initiated a kind of project to
look at a lot of the Lemur populations
and how hunting was occurring and I just
want to send a special thank you to John
Betts who’s hopefully here he’s a
National Geographic photographer who
came out to visit me a few months ago
I’m at a guest
or in the next series of images are all
his so in addition to the hunting
surveys we set up ways of training local
Malagasy training Malagasy university
students to monitor their own wildlife
we did this in both diurnal and
nocturnal surveys we wanted to
understand the ways in which hunting and
I was very unidirectionally focused
looking at how hunting impacted these
wildlife population dynamics and not
just lemurs but the tenrecs these are
like little hedgehogs we set up a marker
capture project to look at population
dynamics we attached radio transmitters
to their back to follow them and
understand their range and to understand
the ways in which their life history was
affected by hunting but all of this
wildlife albeit beautiful exotic
extraordinary was reduced by local
people to one thing food all of it was
food and as I spent year after year in
these communities and as I learned all
of their local languages I came to
realize that I needed to look through
the forest in their eyes and it all
became clear to me these people weren’t
criminals although they were most of the
hunting in Madagascar is illegal but
these men were family men they were
providers they were protecting their
family’s welfare so what I set out to do
is to start a research team and locally
we called ourselves ma Haiti which means
strength in the Malagasy language it
also is an acronym that stands for
Madagascar’s health and environmental
research and in 2008 our team did a
systematic survey of how wildlife was
connected to human nutrition we found
that of the local communities lost
access to wildlife their rates of anemia
would actually increase by 30 percent
these results were astounding it really
taught us that if local people messed
with their natural environment they were
actually self depleting their own
nutritional resource it was this direct
linkage between environmental change in
human wellbeing it also taught me that
if you mess with Mother Nature
she might stop taking care of all of her
children and so for the past 15 months
what ended last month we decided to
study this phenomenon in earnest through
support from the Rockefeller Foundation
we enrolled 700
people into our study and on a daily
basis over these 15 months we measured
everything that they were eating in
their diet and every four months we
measured we took a blood sample we took
fecal samples fingernail samples so that
we could understand the ways in which
all of these things that are coming from
the forest we’re providing nutritional
benefits to them from the fecal samples
looking at the ways in which intestinal
parasites affected nutrition how dietary
intake and pharmaceutical use affected
their microbiome I wanted to stop having
tunnel vision stop looking at only the
ways in which humans were infected
affecting the environment but also the
ways in which the environment circled
back and could benefit humans to reframe
the conversation of conservation not
only were we looking at nutrition and
food security we were also looking at a
different dimension of human and
Wildlife interaction the ways in which
hunting wildlife presented a disease
risk so 75% of emerging infectious
diseases are zoonotic meaning they’re
transferred from animals to humans
everything like SARS avian influenza
Ebola HIV all these major pandemics are
actually started an animal hosts and
transferred to humans but the most
interesting thing that I learned was
really from local people the image
behind me is a local rendition of the
Cullen noodle she is a part of their
local spiritual animist pantheon she’s
always envisioned in the same way as a
dwarf with long hair and long
fingernails and backwards-facing feet
with her heel pointing forward and her
toes pointing backwards so that when she
walks no one can track and find her but
she does appear in people’s dreams and
what she tells them in those dreams is
which animals to have a taboo for and so
she can in many ways be seen as a
conservation spirit because she’s
telling certain people what what to not
eat what wildlife species should be
protected and yet what she really is as
a health spirit because in those dreams
she’s giving messages like don’t eat
this particular type of wildlife because
your skin will change color you’ll bleed
from your eyes you’ll bleed from your
ears or you’ll die and all of these
symptoms are indicative of zoonotic
disease transfer and so I got very
interested to see whether or not there
was actually a relationship between this
traditional epidemiological knowledge
and what was actually there is a present
disease risk and what I found through
surveying 1200 households over the past
10 years was that the number one most
commonly taboo wildlife species was the
hedgehog tenrec more than 50% of the
population had a taboo for the hedgehog
tenrec and although these stories have
been passed on for generations what we
found was that just last year there was
a discovery that the bubonic plague is
present in the hedgehog tenrec and that
they have this kind of immunity to the
bubonic plague and so it consistently
spills over into human populations and
wildlife populations and rodent
populations and presents a disease risk
and if you’ve been following the news in
October of last year
Madagascar experienced the largest
epidemic outbreak of bubonic plague
since the Middle Ages
and so I just think there’s a tremendous
amount that we can learn through local
knowledge so what happens now
we know for two reasons that wildlife
consumption is bad it presents this
terrible risk to endemic wildlife
populations it presents a tremendous
infectious disease risk to local humans
and yet it provides this critical source
of nutrition to local people so where do
we go
we’ve decided to implement a sustainable
chicken husbandry project and this is
good idea for for several different
reasons number one is that I’ve done a
taste preferences study looking at 23
different species of wildlife and 10
species of domesticated meats and across
the board chicken is their number one
taste preference so not everything
tastes like chicken
the second is that using this pervasive
and complex taboo system across the
board no one has a taboo for chicken and
so if we’re looking at a population
intervention that’s applicable to
everyone chicken is really the answer
and wildlife species are less preferred
and also less expensive so if we can
develop ways to make chickens more
productive it could reduce the price and
almost naturally wean people away from
wildlife and into chicken the problem is
that there is Newcastle disease this is
a pathogen that wipes out 80 to 100
percent of the chicken flocks seasonally
so we just received funding from the
Norfolk Family Foundation a few weeks
ago actually and it will import a
vaccine from Malaysia subsidize its
costs will get extension agents that
will be teaching people about
biosecurity measures and husbandry
conditions and hopefully be able to
really tackle this problem on a local
scale so the case study that I’ve
mentioned is not operating in isolation
it’s part of a larger effort called heal
health and ecosystems analysis of
linkages it’s a program that’s based at
WCS I’ve recently become the director as
of January it’s a 25 institution
consortium that partners academic NGO
and governmental organizations together
to tackle this data gap it’s very
intuitive that the environment and
health area is linked and yet the
evidence base is very weak what I see is
a very natural transfer from the
terrestrial system into the marine
system to look at the ways in which
marine conservation through no-take
zones seasonal closures or gear
restrictions can protect biodiversity
but also increase the productivity of
fish stocks this increased productivity
doesn’t stay within the bounds of the
marine protected area but spills over
into adjacent communities and we want to
measure empirically the ways in which
there are nutritional benefits
livelihood benefits health benefits that
arise from marine conservation so we
don’t think of it as an environmental
intervention we can frame conservation
as a public health intervention so in
closing I just want to say that I really
found this extraordinary place in
Madagascar but I also found it in my
backyard and the more and more I
discover about myself the more and more
I see that these experiences were
entirely parallel
as I began to look through local
people’s eyes and see how they really
saw the forest as benefiting their
health we too are receiving a very
certain type of health benefit from the
areas that surround us and so I just
want to say that exploration can really
take us far afield and yet I think the
most important thing that we can do is
take what we find in those explorations
and make sure that we take it home thank
you
you
understanding of exploration and
discovery as early as I can remember my
mother would take me on nature walks
behind our house in the South Shore of
Massachusetts each day we would go in
the back of the woods and at each step
there was discovery I can clearly
remember these days of undergoing under
the leaf litter and finding lady
slippers or flowering Indian peace pipes
or an old fox skull these days of
discovery have stayed with me this sense
that the forest was a place of spiritual
communion has also stayed with me my
mother’s sense of awe at each thing that
we would find that was extraordinary
really was contagious and it instilled
in me this lesson that I carry with me
today that the definition of
extraordinary is just that it’s finding
something ordinary but somehow elevated
in meaning and it started with really
this ephemeral bloom of a lady slipper
in the third grade I was asked to do a
project on an animal and as I flipped
through the encyclopedia of animals I
came across the ring-tailed lemur I
completely fell in love I told my family
that I was moving to Madagascar and they
all laughed at me but it really was then
that I began this lifelong commitment to
a place that was so far from home but so
close to my heart and I did research for
this project I went to our local library
and I came across as National Geographic
issue from 1988 and I can remember
plopping myself down on a beanbag chair
and reading through this issue lemurs on
the edge of survival it created in me
this sense of urgency this sense of
passion a sense of purpose that I needed
to go to Madagascar and protect lemurs
from this very certain fate of
endangerment of extinction a few years
later in this same library I came across
a book called the eye eye and eye
written by Gerald Durrell I read through
this voraciously it became my favorite
book and in many ways it still is Gerald
Durrell became my hero he was a
naturalist that was dedicated
to saving animals in peril and he had a
very special place in his heart for
Madagascar he’s known as saying the
world is as delicate and as complicated
as a spider’s web if you touch one
thread you send shudders running through
all of the other threads and we’re not
just tearing the web we’re we’re really
tearing great holes in it and so I
really began to dedicate myself to
finding a way to go to Madagascar I
wanted to write a letter to Gerald
Durrell and I sent him a letter right
after I read the book and told him how
much that book meant to me a few months
later I got a letter back from his wife
telling me that Gerry had passed and
that really propelled me even more to
really start my career and find a way to
get to Madagascar and as you can tell
from the story I did find my way to
Madagascar and I just met Lee Durrell
his wife last year there
I’ve now spent the past 15 years there
first doing this carnivore behavioral
biology research then starting my own
environmental education initiative and
before my senior year in college I
decided to be intrepid and start off my
own project in the northeast of
Madagascar where Gerry worked and this
is what I found this picture is
incredibly disturbing this picture still
haunts me to this day
and yet I’ve come to understand it this
is a far cry from the image that I had
in my head from reading Gerry’s book and
yet it was so important for me to really
understand what this image meant I did
the first research creating a systematic
survey of hunting in Madagascar that
started 10 years ago we’ve now monitored
this population for the past 10 years
really looking at their reliance on
local wildlife it was the first
systematic survey Madagascar’s paradigm
has always been that the island was on
fire and that slash-and-burn was
destroying the forest and yet there
there was a more hidden threat crippling
what the wildlife populations in
Madagascar there was this undercover
threat of hunting and no one had
explored this before and so I set out to
do that in addition to the wildlife
surveys I initiated a kind of project to
look at a lot of the Lemur populations
and how hunting was occurring and I just
want to send a special thank you to John
Betts who’s hopefully here he’s a
National Geographic photographer who
came out to visit me a few months ago
I’m at a guest
or in the next series of images are all
his so in addition to the hunting
surveys we set up ways of training local
Malagasy training Malagasy university
students to monitor their own wildlife
we did this in both diurnal and
nocturnal surveys we wanted to
understand the ways in which hunting and
I was very unidirectionally focused
looking at how hunting impacted these
wildlife population dynamics and not
just lemurs but the tenrecs these are
like little hedgehogs we set up a marker
capture project to look at population
dynamics we attached radio transmitters
to their back to follow them and
understand their range and to understand
the ways in which their life history was
affected by hunting but all of this
wildlife albeit beautiful exotic
extraordinary was reduced by local
people to one thing food all of it was
food and as I spent year after year in
these communities and as I learned all
of their local languages I came to
realize that I needed to look through
the forest in their eyes and it all
became clear to me these people weren’t
criminals although they were most of the
hunting in Madagascar is illegal but
these men were family men they were
providers they were protecting their
family’s welfare so what I set out to do
is to start a research team and locally
we called ourselves ma Haiti which means
strength in the Malagasy language it
also is an acronym that stands for
Madagascar’s health and environmental
research and in 2008 our team did a
systematic survey of how wildlife was
connected to human nutrition we found
that of the local communities lost
access to wildlife their rates of anemia
would actually increase by 30 percent
these results were astounding it really
taught us that if local people messed
with their natural environment they were
actually self depleting their own
nutritional resource it was this direct
linkage between environmental change in
human wellbeing it also taught me that
if you mess with Mother Nature
she might stop taking care of all of her
children and so for the past 15 months
what ended last month we decided to
study this phenomenon in earnest through
support from the Rockefeller Foundation
we enrolled 700
people into our study and on a daily
basis over these 15 months we measured
everything that they were eating in
their diet and every four months we
measured we took a blood sample we took
fecal samples fingernail samples so that
we could understand the ways in which
all of these things that are coming from
the forest we’re providing nutritional
benefits to them from the fecal samples
looking at the ways in which intestinal
parasites affected nutrition how dietary
intake and pharmaceutical use affected
their microbiome I wanted to stop having
tunnel vision stop looking at only the
ways in which humans were infected
affecting the environment but also the
ways in which the environment circled
back and could benefit humans to reframe
the conversation of conservation not
only were we looking at nutrition and
food security we were also looking at a
different dimension of human and
Wildlife interaction the ways in which
hunting wildlife presented a disease
risk so 75% of emerging infectious
diseases are zoonotic meaning they’re
transferred from animals to humans
everything like SARS avian influenza
Ebola HIV all these major pandemics are
actually started an animal hosts and
transferred to humans but the most
interesting thing that I learned was
really from local people the image
behind me is a local rendition of the
Cullen noodle she is a part of their
local spiritual animist pantheon she’s
always envisioned in the same way as a
dwarf with long hair and long
fingernails and backwards-facing feet
with her heel pointing forward and her
toes pointing backwards so that when she
walks no one can track and find her but
she does appear in people’s dreams and
what she tells them in those dreams is
which animals to have a taboo for and so
she can in many ways be seen as a
conservation spirit because she’s
telling certain people what what to not
eat what wildlife species should be
protected and yet what she really is as
a health spirit because in those dreams
she’s giving messages like don’t eat
this particular type of wildlife because
your skin will change color you’ll bleed
from your eyes you’ll bleed from your
ears or you’ll die and all of these
symptoms are indicative of zoonotic
disease transfer and so I got very
interested to see whether or not there
was actually a relationship between this
traditional epidemiological knowledge
and what was actually there is a present
disease risk and what I found through
surveying 1200 households over the past
10 years was that the number one most
commonly taboo wildlife species was the
hedgehog tenrec more than 50% of the
population had a taboo for the hedgehog
tenrec and although these stories have
been passed on for generations what we
found was that just last year there was
a discovery that the bubonic plague is
present in the hedgehog tenrec and that
they have this kind of immunity to the
bubonic plague and so it consistently
spills over into human populations and
wildlife populations and rodent
populations and presents a disease risk
and if you’ve been following the news in
October of last year
Madagascar experienced the largest
epidemic outbreak of bubonic plague
since the Middle Ages
and so I just think there’s a tremendous
amount that we can learn through local
knowledge so what happens now
we know for two reasons that wildlife
consumption is bad it presents this
terrible risk to endemic wildlife
populations it presents a tremendous
infectious disease risk to local humans
and yet it provides this critical source
of nutrition to local people so where do
we go
we’ve decided to implement a sustainable
chicken husbandry project and this is
good idea for for several different
reasons number one is that I’ve done a
taste preferences study looking at 23
different species of wildlife and 10
species of domesticated meats and across
the board chicken is their number one
taste preference so not everything
tastes like chicken
the second is that using this pervasive
and complex taboo system across the
board no one has a taboo for chicken and
so if we’re looking at a population
intervention that’s applicable to
everyone chicken is really the answer
and wildlife species are less preferred
and also less expensive so if we can
develop ways to make chickens more
productive it could reduce the price and
almost naturally wean people away from
wildlife and into chicken the problem is
that there is Newcastle disease this is
a pathogen that wipes out 80 to 100
percent of the chicken flocks seasonally
so we just received funding from the
Norfolk Family Foundation a few weeks
ago actually and it will import a
vaccine from Malaysia subsidize its
costs will get extension agents that
will be teaching people about
biosecurity measures and husbandry
conditions and hopefully be able to
really tackle this problem on a local
scale so the case study that I’ve
mentioned is not operating in isolation
it’s part of a larger effort called heal
health and ecosystems analysis of
linkages it’s a program that’s based at
WCS I’ve recently become the director as
of January it’s a 25 institution
consortium that partners academic NGO
and governmental organizations together
to tackle this data gap it’s very
intuitive that the environment and
health area is linked and yet the
evidence base is very weak what I see is
a very natural transfer from the
terrestrial system into the marine
system to look at the ways in which
marine conservation through no-take
zones seasonal closures or gear
restrictions can protect biodiversity
but also increase the productivity of
fish stocks this increased productivity
doesn’t stay within the bounds of the
marine protected area but spills over
into adjacent communities and we want to
measure empirically the ways in which
there are nutritional benefits
livelihood benefits health benefits that
arise from marine conservation so we
don’t think of it as an environmental
intervention we can frame conservation
as a public health intervention so in
closing I just want to say that I really
found this extraordinary place in
Madagascar but I also found it in my
backyard and the more and more I
discover about myself the more and more
I see that these experiences were
entirely parallel
as I began to look through local
people’s eyes and see how they really
saw the forest as benefiting their
health we too are receiving a very
certain type of health benefit from the
areas that surround us and so I just
want to say that exploration can really
take us far afield and yet I think the
most important thing that we can do is
take what we find in those explorations
and make sure that we take it home thank
you
you
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