Environmental Displacement and Human Resilience: New Explanations Using Data from Central India

这一奖项授予科罗拉多州立大学的杰弗里·斯诺德格拉斯博士和萨米·扎赫兰博士，支持关于搬迁、环境变化、文化和人类健康之间相互联系的新研究。研究人员开发了压力、健康和幸福感的定性和定量测量的创新组合，以评估环境冲击的影响，特别是居民流离失所的影响。流离失所--无论是由于发展项目、自然灾害、冲突还是环境保护计划--影响着世界各地越来越多的人。研究结果将帮助当地林农和资源经理、医疗保健专业人员、发展机构雇员、社区成员、学生和学者更准确地概念化、衡量和规划环境变化的人类成本。研究人员将通过对离开印度中部库诺野生动物保护区森林家园的Sahariya人进行重点研究，收集他们解释这些关系所需的数据。结合生物和文化措施，研究人员将比较居住在保护区核心附近的Sahariya人和来自几乎相同村庄的Sahariya人之间的压力和健康状况。Sahariya人一直保持着进入森林的途径，以及随之而来的经济和文化资源。由于一个旨在帮助重建亚洲狮子种群的野生动物保护项目，Sahariya人从保护区的核心地区流离失所。这项工作的一个创新特点是使用了新开发的压力荷尔蒙(皮质醇和催产素)的微创措施，可以通过收集唾液样本在现场实施。对于Shariya一案，文化措施将侧重于传统的以宗教为基础的民族医疗制度，他们假设这种制度可能会保护村民免受压力，从而为他们提供健康弹性的来源。这些数据将补充人种学观察、访谈和可量化的调查，使人们能够更全面地了解健康和健康是如何通过传统文化习俗得到支持的。这项研究旨在产生新的协作性自然资源管理和保护倡议，因为它们基于对人类健康和健康的广泛概念，应该有助于改善各地流离失所者的重新安置结果。

This award to Dr. Jeffrey Snodgrass and Dr. Sammy Zahran (both of Colorado State University) supports new research on the interconnections between relocation, environmental change, culture, and human health. The researchers have developed an innovative combination of qualitative and quantitative measures of stress, health, and well-being to assess the impact of environmental shocks, particularly residential displacement. Displacement -- whether due to development projects, natural disasters, conflict, or environmental protection programs -- affects increasing numbers of people throughout the world. Findings from the research will help local foresters and resource managers, healthcare professionals, development agency employees, community members, students, and scholars alike to more accurately conceptualize, measure, and plan for the human costs of environmental change. The researchers will gather the data they need to explain these relationship through a focused study of the Sahariya peoples who have been displaced from their forest homes in the Kuno Wildlife Sanctuary in central India. Integrating biological and cultural measures, the researchers will compare stress and wellness among Sahariyas residing near the core of the sanctuary, who have maintained access to forests and their attendant economic and cultural resources, with Sahariya from nearly identical village settings, who have been displaced from the core because of a wildlife protection project designed to help rebuild an Asiatic population of lions. An innovative feature of the work is the use of newly developed minimally-invasive measures of stress hormones (cortisol and oxytocin) that can be implemented in the field by the collection of salivary samples. For the Shariya case, the cultural measures will focus on the traditional religion-based ethnomedical system, which they hypothesize may protect villagers from stress and thus provide them with a source of health resiliency. These data will complement ethnographic observations, interviews, and quantifiable surveys, enabling a fuller understanding of how health and wellness are supported through traditional cultural practicies.This research is designed to produce new collaborative natural resource management and conservation initiatives, which, because they are based on broad conceptions of human health and wellness, should help improve relocation outcomes for displaced people anywhere.