A Different Approach to Preservation

For 19 years, Bloomberg Fellow and 2026 Bloomberg American Health Summit Speaker Daniel Ryan has worked as a wildlife biologist with the National Park Service. He has captured bats for health checks and GPS tagging, radio-tracked endangered species, sampled diseased wildlife, tested water quality, and taught schoolchildren about ecosystems. 

We sat down with Daniel to learn more about his work, his motivation, and his why:

What got you interested in environmental health?

My brothers and I spent most of our childhood exploring and playing in the small creek alongside our family farm. That creek played a major role in my love of nature, predisposing my education and career toward an environmental protection pathway. My parents still live on that small farm, and the creek continues to influence my life because as climate change intensifies, it floods its banks onto our farm and into our barns more frequently and with more destructive power. 

Much of my career has been dedicated to reversing the impacts of humans on the environment, and my work in lead toxicity has helped me reframe my approach to this issue. My outreach with hunters and ranchers made it clear that humans could also be impacted by their own unintentional influences. People are not knowingly or purposefully harming wildlife or exposing themselves; they just don’t have all the information or, more importantly, don’t feel they have the tools or support to change things. While I am trained in finding biological solutions to ecology problems, this was a new lesson for me: that the deeply entwined health of wildlife, humans, and the environment could be mutually improved by coming at the problem from the human side because humans are the most capable of changing variables. Once I realized that interconnectedness was the key to tackling the problems I saw, I knew that was the direction I needed to go. 

Can you give us an example of how this realization has shaped your work?

In 2018, I moved into a position designed to address the root causes of lead toxicity in avian scavengers and reducing inadvertent lead ingestion. We knew from past work that fragmenting lead-core bullets are the overwhelming source of the lead.  In this role, I identified and built relationships with the community most capable of reversing these poisonings through behavioral changes: hunters and ranchers. 

I helped design our outreach programs to champion the multiple benefits of voluntarily exchanging lead-core bullets for equally effective non-lead bullets, which removes the known risk factor of ingesting lead bullet fragments in the meat. I can treat each condor with chelation after lead poisoning, but if we really want to tackle this issue at the source, we needed our education campaigns to focus on human behavior change strategies to encourage this switch and we collaborate with many outside agencies and organizations to achieve this goal. 

I’m immensely proud of the work I do today, especially considering the focus of my education and career until eight years ago had been strictly biological rather than focused on the human dimension. I believe the positive impact my outreach has had on the reduction of lead ingestion is helping to reverse over a century of poisoning a critically endangered species while also allowing hunters to continue feeding their families healthy meat from sustainably harvested wild game.

What made you apply to the Bloomberg Fellowship, and what have you gotten out of it thus far?

At some point I recognized that for many of the projects I've worked on, it was clear that human behavior is often the root cause of the problem. Most of those projects would have benefited from long-term efforts focused on engaging and educating affected stakeholders. Conservation biology today is often akin to trauma triage rather than preventative medicine. 

Biologists do not get much training in communications, psychology, or behavioral change theory, so we often struggle to address planetary health impacts caused by human behavior. Luckily for me, my wife was a Bloomberg fellow in the Food Systems Focus area and I would overhear her classwork and think -- “this is exactly what I wish I had learned as an undergrad!”

I realized that if I wanted to make positive changes for the long-term health of wildlife, humans, and their shared environment, I needed to fill these education gaps. I decided to take my chances and apply to the program myself. 

While I am only about one third of the way through my units, the program has already helped in developing the skills I need in communication techniques, psychological theories, and problem-solving frameworks. In addition, the connection with a peer group of dedicated professionals I am learning from and will cooperate with in the future has been incredible.