"Kristina Douglass was doing the dishes in her slippers when she received the call from the MacArthur Foundation, giving her the news that she had received a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. "I told them I was in my office," she recalls, "but really I was at the kitchen sink, looking as surprised and stunned as I felt. It was a very surreal moment.""
"Some focus on fishing in the ocean or among the mangroves, others on herding zebu cattle, and still others on harvesting resources from the forest. Douglass says the people living there have grappled with environmental and climate change for generations, including fluctuations in precipitation patterns and sea surface temperatures. In her work, she pores over archaeological artifacts and animal remains to piece together the strategies they've long used to cope with these challenges."
Kristina Douglass received an $800,000 MacArthur Fellowship for research investigating how past human societies and environments co-evolved and adapted to climate variability. She conducts fieldwork in southwest Madagascar, where coral reefs and clear blue waters meet dry desert vegetation. The region supports a mosaic of communities engaged in fishing, mangrove harvesting, zebu herding, and forest resource collection. Those communities have experienced environmental variability for generations, including shifts in precipitation and sea surface temperatures. She analyzes archaeological artifacts and animal remains to reconstruct past adaptive strategies and interprets pottery shards and bone fragments as potential lessons for contemporary resilience.
Read at www.npr.org
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]