Reediana Books. Music. Film. Send us your work!
EDITED BY KATIE PELLETIER Email reed.magazine@reed.edu
Guardians of the Trees A new memoir from Kinari Webb ’95 makes the case for planetary health BY MEGAN BURBANK
When the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami killed almost 100,000 people in December 2004, Dr. Kinari Webb, then a resident in family medicine, wanted to help. As the only doctor in her residency who spoke Indonesian, Webb asked to go to Aceh, Indonesia, to aid in relief efforts. But once there, she was struck by the disconnect between NGOs on the ground and the communities they were there to help. That disconnect made it difficult to provide meaningful aid, even amid an emergency that required it. The disaster had caused trauma on a massive scale, such that “every single story was, truly, the worst story I had ever heard,” writes Webb in her new book, Guardians of the Trees: A Journey of Hope Through Healing the Planet, a chronicle of her longstanding career in the world of international nonprofits. In Aceh, it seemed that aid organizations just weren’t listening, and the dysfunction was so widespread that Webb recalled feeling surprised in one meeting between NGOs when a volunteer from a small nonprofit expressed concerns he’d heard from local farmers. “He actually talked to the people here and asked them what they needed?” Webb recalled thinking. “That behavior was incredibly rare. The standard belief seemed to be: We know what is best for you. We are the experts.” Webb had seen firsthand that this white savior approach didn’t work: “That is why we had an entire storeroom full of malaria medications for a region with no malaria—and
26 Reed Magazine december 2021
no sanitary napkins for women, even two months after the tsunami.” No one, it seemed, had bothered to do what that lone aid worker had. The result was that people in crisis weren’t getting the tools and support they needed. This experience would go on to inform Webb’s work as a physician and nonprofit leader. In 2005, she founded Health in Harmony, a nonprofit focused on fighting climate change and protecting rainforests in collaboration with local communities, and carried this work out with ASRI, a health care organization and community clinic she cofounded in the West Kalimantan province of Indonesia. With Health in Harmony, Webb deviated from the NGOs she’d worked alongside in Aceh: the organization is based on a practice Webb calls “radical listening,” in which the organization asks communities in threatened rainforest areas what they need to make conservation possible, then actively involves the communities in developing and executing these solutions. Guardians of the Trees documents Webb’s initial journey into this work among communities around Gunung Palung National Park in Indonesia, an area of personal connection for Webb. Long before she became a doctor, while she was a 21-year-old biology major at Reed, Webb was hired as a research assistant at a forest station in West Kalimantan. Back then, she studied orangutans, “one of the literally wildest things I was passionate about” and a source of childhood
fascination. Webb recounts getting the news of her research job over a pay phone at a classical music concert in Portland. Standing on a red carpet in a red velvet dress, “thanks to a free ticket from the Reed Culture office,” she delights in a brief moment of glamorous serendipity before embarking on an adventure into the rainforest involving a “misnamed” boat called the Express, navigating sandbanks in another boat that “barely floated above the waterline,” unwelcome intestinal distress, and sharing coffee with loggers on a sapling platform. But once ensconced in the rainforest, following orangutans and sharing spaghetti with her coworkers, Webb describes feeling bowled over by the incredible biodiversity around her and hyperaware of the interdependence of all life. “Extreme diversity means that everything is rare and that you are constantly seeing things you will probably never see again,” she says, cataloguing “a fluffy white moonrat, the size of a house cat; a sun bear with huge long claws; a ground squirrel standing as tall as my mid-thigh; a tiny bird so brightly colored that it could have been painted by Gauguin; a green pie viper on a branch that I almost put my hand on; and a troop of halfinch iridescent blue ants attacking a foot-long purple millipede.” But Webb’s discovery of this gorgeous, thriving world also came with the knowledge that, like so many wild places, it was threatened—by the very loggers she’d had coffee with. It’s rare to bear witness to a person’s discovery of what their life’s project will be, but that’s what happens in these early sections of Webb’s book. It’s no surprise that in her later career, Webb returned to Borneo to find ways to protect the rainforest she came to love as a student. Of course, she also brought the knowledge,
