In the footsteps of National Geographic Explorer, Dr. Christopher Golden!

If you have ventured to Stanford, chances are you’re an explorer at heart. If not, who doesn’t want to become one?

Chris was in our shoes once…well, a little earlier. At 13, he read the Aye Aye and I, Gerald Durrell’s winning account of a quest through the forests of Madagascar in search of that otherworldly creature, perhaps the endemic to Madagascar that appears to be most alien to earth. Nose in book, Chris's imagination would have been drawn far overseas at this tender age by passages such as this...

"In the gloom it came along the branches towards me - its round, hypnotic eyes blazing; its spoon-like ears turning to and fro independently like radar dishes; its white whiskers touching and moving like sensors; the thin, attenuated fingers on its black hands tapping delicately on the branches as it moved along, like those of a pianist playing a complicated piece by Chopin.” 

Tantalized by this glimpse of another world in The Aye Aye and I, National Geographic’s '88 article Into the Wilds, and other inspiriting resources, Chris was bound for Madagascar at the “ripe old age of 16.”

Chris signed up to help track that non-felid semblance of a panther, the fosa, through the Ankarafantsikan forests of northwestern Madagascar with one of the field’s foremost big cat conservationists, Dr. Luke Dollar. Luke came to Madagascar to set eyes on the lemurs too, but when he did, he found something else had discovered and devoured his quarry first – the fosa. When Chris set eyes on one of his first lemurs, he also was too late. However, this time, the predator was man. The lemur hung dead from a rope, noosed in a trap, proto-bushmeat. At that moment, Chris recalls a "feeling of profound sadness I had, seeing this dead lemur hanging there." So would we all. Chris, a thoroughly compassionate person, was even "questioning whether this was the right research for me.” But something Chris would have read in the The Aye Aye and I was, “in conservation, the motto should always be ‘never say die’.” Whether or not Chris drew his persistence - like his inspiration - from Gerald Durrell, on he went.

Year after year, Chris returned to Madagascar, for reasons we’ll soon understand when we try to tear ourselves away from this primordial Ark of wonders. He decided to not only investigate the lemurs endangered by hunting, but the hunters endangering the lemurs. No one before him had undertaken the subsistence bushmeat question in Madagascar to its full dimensions. As Chris puts it, “the bushmeat question, from a conservation perspective, is quite simple: hunting wildlife can…perpetuate endangerment.” But the key distinction and advance Chris made in his research was noting the public health implications of bushmeat as well. He argued there are “benefits to bushmeat, such as improving local nutrition” but also tremendous risks from “zoonotic diseases or intestinal parasites.” In recognizing both sides of the coin, so to speak, Chris made that critical leap in a conservationist’s understanding of perceiving not only wildlife’s need for reduced hunting, but humans’ dependence on hunting. “I really do believe in conservation…in protecting biodiversity,” he concludes, “but if I had to make the same decisions they’re [the Malagasy people] are making, whether to save this abstract concept of biodiversity or feed my family, I would absolutely be making the same decisions.”

Today, Chris looks for innovative ways to provide alternatives to bushmeat hunting in Madagascar, and recently, he's also been addressing challenges far beyond this eighth continent, great as it is. Not only has he been named a National Geographic Explorer, he has directed a Wildlife Conservation Society program called Health & Ecosystems: Analysis of Linkages (HEAL) to probe the interconnections between environmental and human health. Most recently, he's been co-directing the newly founded Planetary Health Alliance, a multi-institutional collaborative building an “unprecedented effort to address major public health threats caused by human impacts on the natural world.”

Yes, Madagascar is a microcosm of global environmental challenges at their worst, and, at their best. “Invert, always invert,” as the great mathematician (19^th c.) Carl Jacobi admonished, and Madagascar may hold not only worldwide challenges, but exemplary solutions to them – and a training ground for those who would build them.

Hear Dr. Golden here. Get to know him and/or his work. He’s a remarkably thoughtful, helpful and approachable person.

Chris Golden & Nat Geo

More, straight from the horses' mouths; i.e., sources:

http://ensia.com/interviews/christopher-golden-on-the-front-lines-of-health-and-the-environment/

https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Aye_aye_and_I.html?id=z1dsh3qIKdYC

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/explorers/bios/christopher-golden/

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/planetary-health-alliance-launched-to-address-public-health-threats/

(Emma)