Christopher Golden: Global Health and the Environment

When I was 9, I was asked to do an animal report in my third grade class. I flipped through the encyclopedia of animals and came across a ring-tailed lemur and that’s where this desire to go to Madagascar all started. Between 9 and 16, I read everything I could get my hands on about Madagascar and lemurs.

When I was 16, I went to Madagascar for the first time. This was to work on an Earthwatch project with a guy named Luke Dollar who was based at Duke University. It was a behavioral ecology program.

I became very interested in using a conservation biology approach rather than a strict ecological research approach in my own work. Starting in 2004, I based my work in the northeastern part of Madagascar in a forest called the Makira. It’s the largest remaining tract of rainforest in Madagascar.

A colleague named David Wilkie, who is based at the Wildlife Conservation Society, helped me initially get set up in this region. He said, “You know what’s interesting, Chris, is that nobody’s ever done a study on hunting in Madagascar before.”

I said, “Well, I know that people are hunting from my own experience.” So, I began looking into how human hunting was impacting wildlife populations and the effects that had on wildlife in the forest. The more time that I spent with these communities and the longer that I lived there, and as my Malagasy became more and more fluent, I started to realize that people weren’t hunting with the objective of harming the environment. The people in this region loved the environment. It was their spiritual center. Their place to access everything they needed. The forest was their grocery store, pharmacy and hardware store. Everything they needed was in that forest.

I wanted to take a more holistic view by connecting hunting to human health. The most obvious way to do that is through nutrition. People in this part of Madagascar are malnourished. These rare sources of meat from the forest serve an incredibly important function by providing critical micronutrients to their diet.

I started doing health studies and empirical research to try to make the connection between wildlife hunting and human health. It was a very small study, but it speaks to a much more globally prevalent problem of massive wildlife population depletion, fishery collapse, biodiversity loss and what those environmental megatrends might mean for food insecurity and malnutrition.

That’s really what it was intended to do. I think it’s a very interesting issue trying to understand why wildlife matters. From a public health standpoint, it really is this conundrum where wildlife provides tremendous nutritional benefit, but there’s also this major risk in terms of zoonotic disease.

This is especially true in Madagascar and the forest where I work. There are 20 different species of primate and loads of different carnivores and bat species, and these are all species that are known to have a strong risk of transmitting zoonotic disease.

For many reasons, though, I think wildlife hunting is not the answer. The vast majority of the hunting in Madagascar is highly unsustainable since almost all of the lemurs, carnivores and bats have very slow reproductive cycles.

Madagascar was only settled around 2,000 to 4,000 years ago. That’s still very, very recent in terms of human evolutionary history.

All of these incredible mammals largely evolved in the absence of human predators and human influence. They’re very naive to human hunting. So much so that all of the megafauna was eradicated from Madagascar following human arrival. Previously there were elephant birds, fosas the size of tigers and lemurs the size of gorillas. All of that is gone now.

If conservation happens in the absence of economic development and public health initiatives, it will often lack the support of local people. And, if conservation restricts access to subsistence resources that humans need for survival, then it becomes a bit of an ethical dilemma. I think the most efficient way to practice conservation is to really couple it with the things that local people need so they’re no longer forced to rely on certain things from the forest.

Definitely. I think that the framework that I’m using in Madagascar can certainly be applied elsewhere. I think that some of the solutions are always going to be very case specific, though. I’m not even sure that they would work in other parts of Madagascar.

For a variety of reasons, what we’re suggesting now in Madagascar is a shift toward sustainable poultry harvesting instead of wildlife hunting. We’re doing this for a variety of different reasons. When I conducted a taste preferences study, we looked at 23 different species of wildlife and eight different species of domesticated stock and across the board, chicken was the number one taste preference. So we had local buy-in to an alternative.

You also have to consider local taboo systems. Many people in Madagascar have different taboos regarding eating certain types of wildlife species or domesticated livestock, but across the board, nobody has a taboo against eating chicken. In terms of a populationwide intervention, chicken is a good answer, but this approach might not work as well in other parts of Africa or the world.

They’re incredibly siloed and I think that the silos are even more pervasive than we realize. Even in the public health community, those who are working on nutrition or disease are often not taught how to talk with people working in environmental health. At all scales, at all levels, we really need to be talking more with each other because so many of these issues are so interdisciplinary and so dynamic by nature. If we’re not learning lessons from people with different perspectives, then we’re really just delaying our ability to find practical results.

Getting an official degree in public health was something that happened serendipitously, but the decision to take coursework and tackle these subjects in an interdisciplinary way was a conscious decision at a very early stage. Even as an undergraduate, I mixed courses in medical anthropology with ecology and environment science. I really saw these connections between health and the environment.

There’s no nomination or application process so it was a complete surprise! I was just flipping through my email and saw a message from Anastasia Cronin at the National Geographic Society, opened it and was totally blown away by the honor.

For me personally, National Geographic played a really important role in my childhood. I initially became really interested in Madagascar because I read a National Geographic story from 1988 called “The Wilds of Madagascar.” That really is what set my heart on going there. So to become part of this really great organization, it’s just something that is more meaningful than I think they realize.

HEAL is a 25-institution research consortium whose primary goal is to identify gaps in the empirical evidence that link environmental change to human health and try to tackle them from a research standpoint.

A lot of our work involves field research, while some of it involves connecting existing databases in novel ways to try to answer questions. Within HEAL we try to tackle four main domains of health, including nutrition, infectious disease, noncommunicable disease and mental health.

Yes and no. It’s incredibly unusual for a conservation organization to really, truly care and pay attention to human health and human livelihoods. With that said, I think Wildlife Conservation Society is very unique in that area. They’ve always had, and been the only conservation organization to have, its own health department.

Today WCS has become know as one of the leaders of the One Health approach.

I’m in the process right now of leading this really interesting effort to try to understand the role of global fishery collapses and food insecurity and malnutrition. We’re bringing together fisheries ecologists, human health specialists, resource and development economists, climate change scientists, etc., to really try to understand the links between how the environment is changing, which leads to changes in fishery abundance, which leads to changes in catch, consumption, nutrition and health burden.

Across the world we’re starting to see an elevated environmental consciousness. That certainly gives me hope.