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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 going 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.
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.
( audience laughing )
But it really was then that I began this life-long commitment
to a place that was so far from home
but so close to my heart.
I did research for this project.
I went to our local library and I came across
this National Geographic issue from 1988.
I can remember plopping myself down
on a bean bag chair and reading through this issue,
"Lemurs on the edge of survival".
It created in me this sense of urgency,
this sense of passion,
this 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 the same library,
I came across a book called "The Aye-Aye and I"
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.
He had a very special place in his heart for Madagascar.
He is known as saying "The world is as delicate
and as complicated as a spider's web.
If you touch one thread, you send shutters
running through all of the other threads.
We are not just tearing the web, we are really
tearing great holes in it."
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 I told him how much that book meant to me.
A few months later, I got a letter back from his wife
telling me that Jerry had passed.
That really propelled me even more
to really start my career and find a way
to get to Madagascar.
As you can tell from this story,
I did find my way to Madagascar.
I just met Lee Durrell, his wife, last year there.
I have now spent the last 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 Jerry worked.
This is what I found.
This picture is incredibly disturbing.
This picture still haunts me to this day,
and yet I have come to understand it.
This is a far cry from the image that I had in my head
from reading Jerry'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 have 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
yet there was a more hidden threat
crippling the wildlife populations in Madagascar.
It was this undercover threat of hunting.
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.
I just want to send a special "thank you" to Jon Betz,
who is hopefully here.
He is a National Geographic photographer
who came out to visit me a few months ago
in Madagascar and the next series of images are all his.
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 mark and capture project
to look at population dynamics.
We attached radio transmitters to their backs
to follow them and understand their range
and understand the ways in which their life history
was affected by hunting.
All of this wildlife, albeit beautiful, exotic, extraordinary
was reduced by local people to one thing:
food.
All of it was food.
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.
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.
What I set out to do was to start a research team.
Locally, we called ourselves MAHERY
which means strength in the Malagasy language.
It also is an acronym that stands for
Madagascar's Health and Environmental Research.
In 2008, our team did a systematic survey
of how wildlife is connected to human nutrition.
We found that when 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
and human well-being.
It also taught me that if you mess with mother nature,
she might stop taking care of all of her children.
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.
Every four months 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
were 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 affecting the environment
but also the ways in which the environment circled back
and can 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 percent of emerging infectious diseases
are zoonotic, meaning they are transferred
from animals to humans.
Everything like SARS and avian influenza,
Ebola, HIV, all of these major pandemics
are actually started in animal hosts
and transferred to humans.
But the most interesting thing that I learned
is really from local people.
The image behind me is a local rendition
of the Kalanoro.
She is a part of their local spiritual animist pantheon.
She is 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.
What she tells them in those dreams
is which animals to have a taboo for.
She can, in many ways, be seen as a conservation spirit.
She is telling certain people what to not eat,
what wildlife species should be protected.
And yet what she really is
is a health spirit.
In those dreams, she is 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."
All of these symptoms are indicative
of zoonotic disease transfer.
I got very interested to see whether or not
there was actually a relationship between
this traditional epidemiological knowledge
and what was actually there as a present disease risk.
What I found through surveying 1,200 households
over the past 10 years was
that the number one most commonly tabooed
wildlife species was the hedgehog tenrec.
More than 50 percent of the population
had a taboo for the hedgehog tenrec.
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 bubonic plague.
It consistently spills over into human populations
and wildlife populations
and rodent populations
and presents a disease risk.
If you have been following the news,
in October of last year,
Madagascar experienced the largest epidemic outbreak
of bubonic plague since the middle ages.
I just think there is 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 decided to implement
a sustainable chicken husbandry project.
This is a good idea for several different reasons.
Number one is that I have 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.
( audience laughing )
The second is that using this pervasive
and complex taboo system across the board,
no one has a taboo for chicken.
If we are looking at a population intervention
that is applicable to everyone,
chicken is the answer.
Wildlife species are less preferred
and also less expensive.
If we can develop ways to make chickens more productive,
it can 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 flock seasonally.
We just received funding
from the Nordic Family Foundation
a few weeks ago, actually,
and it will import a vaccine from Malaysia,
subsidize its costs.
We will get extension agents that will be teaching people
about bio-security measures and husbandry conditions
and hopefully be able to really tackle the problem
on a local scale.
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 is linked,
and yet the evidence base is very weak.
What I see as 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 docks.
This increased productivity doesn't stay within the bounds
of the marine protected area,
but spills over into adjacent communities.
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.
In closing, I just want to say
that I really found
this extraordinary place in Madagascar,
but I also found it in my back yard.
The more and more I discover about myself,
the more and more I see that these experiences
were entirely parallel.
That 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.
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.
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