Covid’s pandemic prevents us from ignoring the link between physical fitness and environmental degradation. Dr. Kinari Webb, founder of Health in Harmony, Ashoka Fellow, has been running at this intersection for decades. We sit with it as a component of our series on the planet and long-term weather.
Kinari, how did you get started?
I first went to Indonesia when I was an undergraduate student and I read orangutans, and I think I would become a primatologist. But when I performed in the Kalimantan rainforest in western Borneo, I fell in love with the orangutans and the forest, but I also fell in love with other people and was horrified to see what was happening. Borneo, at that time, was only the beginning of this great wave of deforestation, the fastest rate of deforestation known in the world. They cut down large trees that had 22 stories. Giant, giant trees, and it was like a little earthquake when they hit the ground.
It broke my heart. And at first, I hated those guys. How can they do that? But when I got to know them, they told me they had logged in to pay for health care. A medical emergency costs a full year of income, and when you are a subsistence farmer and don’t have much cash or savings, one of the tactics to pay is to cut down the rainforest.
I felt like we just couldn’t have a global place where it happens. I had a hard time understanding that I deserve to do conservation. Do I want physical care? I sought to do both. How can I? It didn’t exist in the world, but I had a feeling that that’s what had to happen. Then I made the decision to move to medical school with the aim of returning to Indonesia and taking some kind of combined program.
What did you do when you got back to Indonesia?
The only thing I knew for sure was that I wouldn’t know what the answers were. Local communities would do that. This is what drove me when I went to help after the tsunami in Indonesia to do medical aid work, and I was horrified by the way all NGOs were working. They paid no attention at all. They knew what the answers were and they didn’t care if it didn’t fit the need.
To create Health In Harmony in the United States, then I moved to Indonesia and partnered with an Indonesian organization. We have introduced an Indonesian non-profit organization called Alam Sehat Lestari, or ASRI in summary. Both are based on the precept that, in fact, communities are the experts.
First I traveled all over Indonesia, looking for the right position for the program, and discovered that this intersection between human desires and especially the desires for physical attention and the destruction of the environment, is almost universal. I ended up opting for a place where I read orangutans called Gunung Palung National Park, and then we did what I call radical listening.
What is radical listening?
This is the ultimate precept of our work, followed by so few organizations. It’s listening to the network with love and general respect. It’s like reciprocity. It’s this concept that they are the experts. They know exactly what the answers are and are the custodians of the valuable resources that are valuable to the world.
When they return, they may want the appreciation of the global community, which, in my view, is also an anti-colonial return of resources to communities that are very deficient due to a long history of colonization.
What did they do to you?
Each network came to the same conclusion independently: that it needed access to affordable, high-quality fitness care and needed education in sustainable agriculture and organic agriculture. Now this moment one absolutely surprised me. I thought, “Why don’t you communicate with your grandparents?” What do you mean, you don’t know? And they said, “No, no. The classic way of agriculture here is grazing and burning agriculture and it no longer works because there is not enough forest and there are too many people. The only way we know how to plant in a position is to buy expensive chemical fertilizers, because that’s what the government has taught us, we don’t have the means to buy them, and we even have to kill ourselves to take out cash for the plantations.
And then we hire all the doctors and young medical providers in Indonesia, but we train them. The doctors themselves are incredibly brilliant and desperately want to learn, but they have had a poor education, so we were able to bring in many volunteer doctors from around the world who would pay their own expenses and then come and teach young people. Doctors. We set them up for a popular foreigner very quickly.
Besides radical listening, what guides your work?
We don’t have to paint on several facets of the formula to replace it, but we want to make the connections visible.
For example, you can pay for your fitness care at our clinic with non-cash payment features, because we never need anyone to have to log in to pay for your fitness care. This makes it very visual that a fit environment is vital to fit humans. People can pay for their physical care with seedlings or with classic handicrafts that are harvested sustainably in the forest, or they can pay with manure that we use for organic farming. They can also pay for work on our biological farm only at the clinic and see very directly that healthy foods feed patients. We also provide reductions to communities for their physical care based on network registration status. If there is no logging, they get a 70% reduction, so they only have to pay with fewer seedlings. This makes the “thank you” of the global network also very visual.
So what’s changed?
After 10 years, we have had a 90% drop in forest households. We had 67% of minimizing infant mortality. We stabilized the loss of forest number one and pushed back 52,000 acres of forest. Stanford recently tested the difference in carbon price in the number one forest between our national park and other national parks in Indonesia. It’s priced at US$65 million. Therefore, it is not a small gift that these communities give to the world. And, of course, he’s just counting the carbon, right? This does not come with all the biodiversity or hydrological benefits of the forest.
We’re interested to see if this style works elsewhere, and if that’s the case, how can we scale it? So we started in some other Borneo National Park. We now also run in Madagascar and this year we started in Brazil.
Most foreigners assume that the massively exploiting jungle communities do not care about the jungle, but this is not true. We did a fundamental survey and more than 90% of other people searched the forest. They wanted him to be there for generations.
Then why is this happening?
Well, if a member of your family circle were to die if you didn’t get medical attention, what would you do? Even if you enjoyed the forest. Each of us would make the same choice. It’s not about convincing other people that they want a healthy ecosystem. They know it. It’s only when you have no choice, do whatever it takes to take care of your family circle.
So how do you facilitate these possible options? Is that regulation? Economic incentives? One more thing?
I think if we depend on top-down answers or think it’s the only way to do it, we’d better give up now. It’s useless. The answer is: pay attention to local communities on responses in their context.
And the other thing we want to be aware of is that if we lose the rainforests of this Earth, the component ends for the human species, as absolutely the component. Deforestation releases as much carbon each year as the entire shipping sector around the world. And the world’s forests absorb 0.33 of the carbon we emit every year.
How can we quickly multiply upstream projects?
Because we’re 10 years old. Right?
Yes.
Do you think Covid has helped others see this link between human fitness and global fitness?
Turns out other people are equally concerned, if not more, about the weather. The message we really want to convey is that Covid is a symptom of a planet in poor health. Our planet is not well and other epidemics like this are very likely to occur. There are so many symptoms of a planet in poor health, and the cure is planetary health. It is to really begin to think about human and environmental well-being as if they were linked in detail. There’s no way to separate them. I think, unfortunately, this is something Covid teaches other people exquisitely.
Dr. Kinari Webb is the founder of Health in Harmony, which she founded in 2005 to address human and global fitness in rainforest communities. He graduated with distinction from Yale University School of Medicine. Kinari also co-founded Alam Sehat Lestari (ASRI) with Hotlin Ompusunggu and Antonia Gorog. Kinari lately divides his time between Indonesia, foreign trials and the San Francisco Bay Area. He became a member of Ashoka in 2013.
Next now: Ashoka mobilizes the strength of his network in climate action. Next Now / Planet – Climate connects unlikely allies around long-term shared visions that take others and the planet into a new balance. This Ashoka series highlights the wisdom and concepts of the leaders who guide the field. Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6 and Part 7 of our series.