FROM LEFT: Kinari Webb
walks through the old-
growth rainforest she
works to protect. An
orangutan swings through
the tropical canopy. A
vista of Borneo’s Gunung
Palung National Park.geographic spread was limited. Not so in the era of globalization
and population booms. Ecological disturbance—whether from
deforestation, natural disasters, or climate change—often puts
both people and animals on the move. Species that were not typ-
ically in contact with one another may suddenly find themselves
in close proximity and sharing pathogens.
Consider the Black Death, which in the 1300s killed up to
half of Europe. In 1925, Malaysian physician Wu Lien-Teh con-
firmed the source of the infamous disease—fleas in the fur of
Central Asian rodents called tarbagans—which enabled later
generations of scientists to unravel the social and environmental
factors that conspired to spread the deadly illness. The advent of
agriculture in the region offered an ample food supply, spurring
a spike in the rodents’ population; demand for their furs made
the creatures a lucrative target for hunters; and trade along the
Silk Road eventually brought the plague to Europe.
More recent zoonotic spillover events—including AIDS, Eb-
ola, MERS, and SARS—have followed a similar pattern, and
COVID-19’s story comes from the same playbook. Some epide-
miologists suspect that horseshoe bats passed SARS-CoV-2,
the virus that causes the illness, to Sunda pangolins, armadillo-
like creatures poached in Southeast Asian countries and sold
live in markets in the now-infamous Hubei province, before the
disease was ultimately transmitted to us. Brazilian biologist
Gabriel Laporta was among the first to suggest that deforesta-
tion may have driven the bats and pangolins to nest in the same
caves—a novel opportunity for the coronavirus to hop species.
Webb doesn’t know what unknown diseases might be lurking
in the forests of Borneo (Nipah virus, which inspired the movie
Contagion, hails from the region), but she has spent much of her
career developing a unique conservation model that may keep
zoonotic bugs in the shadows, rather than
boarding planes. Her goal is to help local com-
munities avoid risky practices surrounding
logging, such as eating wild animals (often re-
ferred to by Westerners as bushmeat).
This mindset puts Webb squarely within
the emerging field of planetary health, an in-
terdisciplinary movement of scientists who
view the destruction of the environment as
a top public health threat. “We need to think
differently about how we manage our in-
terface with wildlife,” says Samuel Myers,
director of the Planetary Health Alliance, a
consortium of more than 200 universities,
NGOs, research institutes, and government
entities. People, he says, often intrude into
habitats because “they’re trying to feed their
families, so we need to give them an alternative.”
Webb helps form the front line of pandemic pre-
vention. After her aha moment with Tadyn (who
recovered after a little first aid), she dropped pri-
matology and pursued a medical degree at Yale,
eventually returning to Borneo to address rainforest
conservation through a program that integrates sus-
tainable agriculture, reforestation, and health care
into an anti-logging economy. In 2007, she founded
Alam Sehat Lestari or ASRI (loosely translated:
Healthy Nature Everlasting), a nonprofit that oper-
ates clinics in villages flanking Gunung Palung and
Bukit Baka Bukit Raya national parks. (Webb is also
midwifing similar programs in other rainforested
regions around the globe.) With philanthropic back-
ing from entities like the Disney Conservation Fund,
the facilities offer a sliding price scale for their ser-
vices based on an individual’s logging practices, or
lack thereof; the latter qualifies for 70 percent off.
The organization also offers a chainsaw buyback
program and organic farming training, a popular
initiative that has helped buoy incomes, further re-
ducing the temptation to cut down trees.
In ASRI’s first decade of operation, the number of
households that log in the surrounding land dropped
by nearly 90 percent, 52,000 acres of Gunung Palung
forest regrew, and infant mortality fell by two-thirds.
The 122,000 residents in ASRI’s service areas now
have access to a level of care largely unheard of in
such remote locales—all the more essential once
COVID-19 entered the region.POPSCI.COM / WINTER 2020 75LIFE ON THE LINE