11 minute read
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.
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 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,
hard won in Aceh, that nonprofits can cause more harm than good if they reinforce colonial attitudes and racism. Instead of replicating that approach, Webb and her Indonesian colleagues were able to discern the root cause of logging in their radical listening sessions with communities adjacent to Gunung Palung National Park, and a surprising nexus between logging and health care began to emerge. Loggers reported that cutting wood in the national park was not a voluntary activity, but a last resort often prompted by expensive medical care that couldn’t be accessed in other ways. “On a broader scale, I knew this was largely because resources had been taken from these communities through a long history of colonization,” writes Webb.
To address this lack of resources, Webb and ASRI began providing accessible, highquality health care to disincentivize logging, employing a popular noncash payment system that has allowed community members to pay for their care through any number of accessible options: contributing seedlings for reforestation, helping out in the clinic garden, or even making handicrafts for ASRI to sell to help pay for medications.
Webb’s book focuses largely on this outreach work, which, indeed, has resulted in a reduction in logging in Gunung Palung National Park and better health outcomes for the communities around it.
But Webb herself becomes evidence of the link between environmental and human health when she describes being stung by a box jellyfish while swimming at sunset in 2011. The sting, a brutal medical emergency, sends her body into involuntary contractions, nearly kills her, and causes long-term autoimmune dysregulation that forces her to slow her tendency toward overwork and ultimately fly to Minnesota for care at the Mayo Clinic. “Funnily enough,” she writes, “I was even a good case example of how damaged ecosystems can hurt people’s health, since jellyfish have been steadily increasing with the warming oceans and the loss of predators like turtles.”
The message is clear: human beings will not survive if climate change progresses to the point that our planet becomes unlivable. Our fates really are interconnected. It may be hard to feel hope under these circumstances, but in Webb’s work to preserve the “lungs of the earth” through rejecting colonial patterns in favor of deep listening, it is possible to see where her hope comes from, tenuous though it may be.
“My fragile hope was buoyed when the results of ASRI’s five-year impact survey came in and showed that it was actually possible for humans and the natural ecosystem to simultaneously thrive,” she notes. “We did not have to see these two things in conflict with each other. In fact, if both don’t thrive, neither can in the long run.”
Kinari Webb ’95 founded Health In Harmony, a nonprofit dedicated to the idea that human and environmental health are inextricably intwined.
The Last Embassy:
The Dutch Mission of 1795 and the Forgotten History of Western Encounters with China
Tonio Andrade ’91 tells the story of the Dutch mission of 1795, bringing to light a dramatic but littleknown episode that transforms our understanding of the history of China and the West. Drawing on archival material, he paints a panoramic and multifaceted portrait of an age marked by intrigues and war. Illustrated with sketches and paintings by Chinese and European artists, his book suggests that the Qing court, often mischaracterized as arrogant and narrow-minded, was in fact open, flexible, curious, and cosmopolitan. (Princeton, 2021)
Daughters
In her new poetry collection Brittney Corrigan ’94 reimagines characters from mythology, folklore, fairy tales, and pop culture from the perspective of their daughters—daughters we don’t expect individuals like Bigfoot, the Mad Hatter, and Medusa to have. Taking on such topics as aging, rebellion, loss, domestic violence, homelessness, and gender identity, the voices of daughters aim to turn the reader’s conceptions of the characters on their ends and throw light upon what it means for a girl to come out from under her parents as a woman of her own making. (Airlie Press, 2021)
True Stories: Tales from the Generation of a New World Culture
Garrick Beck ’71 traces the evolution of a New World Culture from the Beatnik 1950s through the passions and protests and psychedelics of the 1960s and onward into environmental and cross-cultural arts and political movements which today are thriving around the world. These stories take the reader to party with author Jack Kerouac, protest with Dorothy Day, and drop acid with Merry Prankster Ken Kesey. The history recounted here uncovers the origins of the Oregon Country Fair, the Rainbow Gatherings, and the infamous Vortex Festival. (IUniverse Press, 2017)
Impuls Deutsch 1 and 2
Friedemann Weidauer ’82 has published first- and a second- year college textbook for German. The books are based on the concept of a flipped classroom in which class time is used for interactive activities, and students study and practice at home. They are also meant to shift the focus to topics that might actually interest students, such as climate change, diversity, recycling, postcolonial issues (such as trade), GMOs, student protest movements, and sustainability. (Klett, 2019/2021)
The Power of Pattern:
Patterning in the Early Years
A new book by Helen Thouless ’95 (et al.) follows a group of teachers and their classes of three- to five-year-olds as they explore different types of pattern. The team developed activities which engaged children in creative thinking and mathematical reasoning in a range of enjoyable contexts, both indoors and out. Included are learning trajectories, suggestions for practical activities, an example of a pattern lesson, and much more. (Association of Teachers of Mathematics, 2021)
Davos Man: How The Billionaires Devoured the World.
New York Times’s global economics correspondent, Peter S. Goodman ’89, exposes how billionaires’ systematic plunder of the world—brazenly accelerated during the pandemic— has transformed 21st-century life and dangerously destabilized democracy. Drawing on decades of experience covering the global economy, he profiles five “Davos Men”—members of the billionaire class— chronicling how their shocking exploitation of the global pandemic has hastened a 50-year trend of wealth centralization that impacts nearly every aspect of our modern society. (Custom House, 2022)
Dining with a Cursed Bloodline
From 2018 to 2021,
Andrea Lambert ’98
wrote a column in Entropy magazine’s Food section. Her new book is a series of autobiographical personal essays investigating sumptuous food, the goings on of a tight-knit Reno family, and queer disabled survival during the Trumpocalypse. A widowed witch with schizoaffective disorder, anxiety, and PTSD explores her world through food, from cherry clafoutis to traditional Italian Christmas cookies. (Lost Angelene Books, 2021)
Continuous Discovery Habits
A new book edited by
Melissa (Feineman)
Suzuno ’02 offers practical tips for building successful products that customers love. How do you know that you are making a product or service that your customers want? How do you ensure that you are improving it over time? How do you guarantee that your team is creating value for your customers in a way that creates value for your business? This book offers a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery to help answer each of these questions. You’ll learn to balance action with doubt so that you can get started without being blindsided by what you don’t get right. (Product Talk, 2021)
Functional Linear Algebra
Inspired by the Reed math department’s use of calculus textbooks written specifically for Reed, Hannah Robbins ’02, has published a unique textbook addressing a need for a one-term linear algebra course. It unites the computational and algorithmic aspects of linear algebra with the theoretical ideas of the course, as well as centering the idea of a linear function to ease the transition from calculus to linear algebra. (Yes, the title is a math pun!) (Chapman and Hall, 2021)
In the Morning We Are Glass
Reed Library’s catalogue specialist, Caroline Wilcox Reul, has published a German-to-English translation of a poetry collection by Andra Schwartz, which centers on Lusatia, a region in eastern Germany near the Polish and Czech borders that has undergone drastic changes from coal mining, politics, and demographic shifts. Caroline’s translations have appeared in many literary journals, including the PEN Poetry Series, Lunch Ticket, the Los Angeles Review, and others. In 2018, she was awarded the Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation and Multilingual Texts. (Zephyr Press, 2021)
Lives
CJ Evans ’02, winner of the 2021 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, has a new poetry collection forthcoming in 2022. In Lives, poems contain music matched to matter, so that reading them often involves both swoon and startle: “When it folds open, the rule-less rile / of sky,” CJ writes, “the comets and giants. And also: / books, chamomile, and more kissing.” Panoramic in time and space, Lives knows each of us, our ordinary lives, and our occupancy within history and the universe, our yearning for connection: “And if I turned to you now, my one wet muscle run dry, would you / turn to me? And what else could my heart be for if not to try?” (Sarabande Books, 2022)
