The Thinkers
This monthly series will highlight people from Western Pennsylvania who are on the forefront of new ideas in their fields.

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Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette Dr. Robbie Ali -- "The best thing you can do for the health of a high school student in East Liberty is to get them to go to college. Name: Robbie Ali Position: Director, Center for Healthy Environment and Communities; visiting professor, University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. Residence: Shadyside Education: Bachelor's in biology, Cornell University, 1981; master's in public health and M.D., Columbia University, 1988; master's in public policy and management, University of Pittsburgh, 2002. Previous positions: Emergency medical and family physician in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania, 1989 to now; research fellow, environmental and occupational medicine, Harvard University, 2003. Volunteer work: Public health projects in Haiti, Madagascar, Taiwan, India, Australia, Papua New Guinea, Jamaica, China, Rwanda and Indonesia, 1986-2005; founder and coordinator, school health team, Peabody High School. 2004-now. Publications: More than 30 papers, book chapters and articles in various journals and other publications. The Series Click here to view other installments in this continuing series.

Most teenagers display pictures of their family or friends on their desks.

Robbie Ali had a picture of the orangutan at the Pittsburgh Zoo.

So it's not surprising that 30 years later, he has become involved in two projects in Indonesia that are trying to save the endangered primates from extinction.

And that is only one of his interests. Dr. Ali is a physician who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. He is a vegetarian who's been involved in urban gardening projects. He runs a mentoring program at Peabody High School in East Liberty. And he has spent parts of the last two decades volunteering in medical clinics and environmental organizations around the globe.

His work overseas has taught him one central lesson: You can't preach to people about saving the environment if they lack the basic necessities of life.

In the rain forests of Borneo and Sumatra, he said, "if you go in and start talking about saving orangutans, they're going to look at you like you're crazy. You have to go in there and give them what they need, which is health care."

Working with The Nature Conservancy and other groups, Dr. Ali has helped form the Orangutan Rainforest Health Initiative, dedicated to training village health leaders among the Punan people who live in the forests.

The only way the Punan will resist the incursions of logging companies that are threatening the orangutan habitats, Dr. Ali said, is if their own leaders tell them to do so.

"The decisions about what happens with that land rest with the leaders of that district," and the best way to influence them is to help them on such vital issues as fighting child mortality and infectious disease, he said.

He takes the same people-centered approach to environmentalism at Peabody High School.

"If you go into Peabody High School and say you guys need to think about air pollution or diesel fumes or lead in the environment ... you can't ask them to think about that unless you're their good friend."

That's why building those friendships through mentoring is the main purpose of the Peabody program, which this year will involve more than 100 Pitt student volunteers, he said.

His focus on Peabody is tied to his own experiences growing up in one of the few poor neighborhoods in Shadyside.

In eighth grade, he said, he was in trouble a lot, smoking marijuana and missing 50 days of school. But then, as he began his freshman year at Peabody, friends of his mother's noticed the way he studied subjects that interested him on his own, and offered to let him live with them in the Carlynton School District.

From then on, he never missed a day of high school and went on to get a biology degree at Cornell University and an M.D. at Columbia University.

"That was a key experience in my life," he said, "and so I have a very strong empathy for people that age and a feeling that if people are given the right break, it can really make a difference in their lives."

The Peabody program began small two years ago, but has now grown to include four focuses: linking Pitt pre-med students to Peabody pupils in the Health Careers Academy; a "pay it forward" program in which Pitt mentors help Peabody students become mentors to elementary school pupils; a program to help students with the nuts and bolts of applying to college; and a "freshman to freshman" program designed to let a Pitt mentor and Peabody student work with each other through all four years of school.

Dr. Ali doesn't minimize the challenges facing the mentoring program. The many low-income students at Peabody face a host of academic, social and health problems.

And as much as he wants them to eat healthy food and learn to appreciate the environment, he knows that first, he and his mentors must tackle other issues.

"The best thing you can do for the health of a high school student in East Liberty," he said, "is to get them to go to college. Because all of their health risks are behavioral, whether it's violence, or drugs, or pregnancy, or alcohol, or accidents or diet.

"So if they can think about how to take care of themselves in ways that set them up to be healthy for life," the program will have achieved its aims.

When he was floundering in school at the same age, one of the things he clung to was his interest in the exotic animals of Madagascar.

In 1988, when he was a senior in medical school, he finally got a chance to go there.

It was an eye-opener. He visited a camp run by Duke University researchers studying lemurs which had "nicely built houses and solar panels to provide power."

Directly across the river, he said, lived native people who had no road, no electricity, no medical care and no clean water.

As he continued his volunteer work in ensuing years in Haiti, Jamaica, India, Australia, Papua New Guinea and China, Dr. Ali came to the realization that many of the wilderness areas that were worth preserving were also home to people mired in the deepest poverty.

He began to look for ways to help the environment while also meeting their needs.

One project that combined both goals led him to Rwanda in 2001, where he helped provide health care to the native trackers who monitored the endangered mountain gorillas in that part of Africa.

By keeping the trackers from becoming ill, he could prevent them from sickening the slowly recovering gorilla population with such diseases as tuberculosis or upper respiratory infections.

The risk facing the 20,000 orangutans left in Borneo and Sumatra comes from a different kind of human threat. There, loggers are destroying the rainforest at a frantic pace, despite efforts by the government to stop them.

"It's like a gold rush for wood," Dr. Ali said. "People realize there's cash in those trees and they're cutting them down as fast as they can."

The orangutans spend most of their lives in the canopy of those trees, and even before the loggers arrived, their survival had been at risk because the apes reproduce an average of only once every eight years.

If he and other environmentalists go into Indonesia and try to attack the logging directly, they might fail at the outset, Dr. Ali said, because the loggers build roads and provide jobs.

Preservationists stand a better chance by improving native people's health care while also resisting overcutting of the forests, he said.

In Borneo, he recalled, "logging companies said to the chief, 'Shut these Nature Conservancy guys down, because they're interfering with our logging.' But the district chief said 'No, they're helping us with health care.' "

Even if the quest to save the orangutans proves futile, Dr. Ali will draw some solace from having helped cut down on the horrific 30 percent child mortality rate among the Punan people.

It helps him to think on a longer time scale.

"I have a vision of the world 1,000 years from now, where it would have fewer people, nature would be better protected and the quality of human life would be better.

"I want to live my life to push things just a little bit in that direction. If the human race is a brain, and my life is one cell in the brain, and if I send out a certain neurochemical signal and enough other cells do the same, then someday, the brain may get this new idea."