Where wild food matters
How do you balance the need for biodiversity conservation with human health? For Christopher Golden ’05, that question is at the core of a paper he wrote. It says that in societies where people rely on bush meat for important micronutrients, losing their access to wildlife — either because of unsustainable harvesting or strict conservation enforcement — could harm some children. Published in the Nov. 22 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Golden’s research paper reports on a yearlong study, conducted in the northeast corner of Madagascar, that found that lost access to bush meat would lead directly to a 30 percent relative increase in malnutrition among children 12 years old and younger. “This research highlights a tension between conservation policy and human health and livelihoods, but solutions could be designed to benefit both,” said Golden, a postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard’s Center for the Environment. “I wanted to study...