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

Colorado State University, Fort Collins CO

Investigators

Abstract

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.