Last year in this magazine, I wrote about a unique organization that is trying to help preserve Borneo’s forests by offering villagers better access to healthcare in exchange for protecting trees. At the time, I was desperate to get hard data on whether the strategy really works. Now, at last, that organization, Alam Sehat Lestari (and its U.S. partner Health in Harmony), has released results from their five-year follow-up survey of the 25 villages where they work. No surprise, setting up a quality clinic has done wonders for the locals' health. Common diseases symptoms such as diarrhea, ... Read More
Whose Body Is This?
January 11, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
At the bottom of a freshly opened grave, two young women use brushes and dustpans to sweep the last traces of powdery south Texas soil off the coffin. It’s a little before 8 a.m. on a cloudless May morning, and the punishing sun will soon push the temperature into the 90s. Up on ground level, the excavation’s supervisor, a sprightly forensic archaeologist named Lori Baker, snaps photos of the work. All around them, granite headstones display the names of the dead buried here in the city of Del Rio’s Westlawn Cemetery—Connor, Pennington, Ramirez. Baker has come here from Baylor ... Read More
Save the Trees, We’ll Save Your Life
September 3, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
IN JULY 2011, about a week before I landed in Western Borneo, a local man sent an ominous text message to his boss from deep within the jungle. For more than 10 years, this man had worked as a research assistant at the Cabang Panti Research Station, in the core of Gunung Palung National Park, a mountainous wilderness that contains some of Indonesia’s last lowland rain forest and remains a stronghold for orangutans, gibbons, and other primates. Like many protected areas in the developing world, Gunung Palung’s boundaries were poorly enforced, and the people from the hardscrabble communities ... Read More
