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Undisciplined: Healthy Forests, Healthy People

Health in Harmony

Stopping the decimation of rainforests is unquestionably important to slowing climate change. But simply protecting forests often excludes and disenfranchises local communities. This week we’re talking about a different way of addressing this problem — a pairing of ecology with healthcare.

We're joined by three members of the research team that have studied ten years' of data to determine the impacts healthcare has on logging in Borneo.

Kinari Webb is the founder of Health in Harmony. Isabel Jones is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley and the lead author of the study. Sanna Sokolow is a disease ecologist, veterinarian, and associate fellow at Stanford’s Center for Innovation in Global Health.

Matthew LaPlante has reported on ritual infanticide in Northern Africa, insurgent warfare in the Middle East, the legacy of genocide in Southeast Asia, and gang violence in Central America. But a few years back, something donned on him: Maybe the news doesn't have to be brutally depressing all the time. Today, he balances his continuing work on more heartbreaking subjects by writing books about the intersection of science, human health and society, including the New York Times best-selling Lifespan with geneticist David Sinclair and the Nautilus Award-winning Longevity Plan with cardiologist John Day. His first solo book, Superlative, looks at what scientists are learning by studying organisms that have evolved in record-setting ways, and his is currently at work on another book about embracing the inevitability of human-caused climate change with an optimistic outlook on the future.