Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Days, in the village, it seemed as if there was no other world. Sunlight flooded the open space,
filling it like a bowl, the rainforest a wall all around. Even when I stepped into the forest's shadow,
I could see that this part of it had been largely tamed, made an extension of the village, trails cut
through the heavy undergrowth to the river. I didn't have to go far, though, to see how much higher
the trees were, strung with vines, the ground cover impenetrable.
When I began this project, it was during a time when my life felt too small, my career mediated
almost entirely through an LCD screen and the computer so integrated into my existence that my
unrest seemed to flash, in my periphery, like an error light. I realized how little time I spent in nature
whereas I'd been in it constantly as a child, first in British Columbia, exploring forests and streams,
and then in Virginia, where the forests were denser, loaded with vines, poison ivy, and deciduous
trees. Years later, pursuing ambitions, working or researching in various cities, I began to have the
same dream, of a forest, its trunks dark and wide. Nothing happened in this dream, except that I
breathed more easily.
I am not a forest dweller, and having moved often since early childhood, I struggled to imagine
the Bongandu's familiarity with the land. How did it feel to grow up in a world where the social
order was structured around the forest? My paternal grandfather spent his entire life on the coast
where the Saint Lawrence River becomes the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, in rural Québec. He could
foretell the next day's weather by studying the water and sky. He knew when each fish migration
would begin and how to read the health of the sea from what he found in his nets. In eastern Canada,
when foreign factory boats decimated the cod stocks, the social order nearly collapsed. People mi-
grated to cities for work, complex fishing cultures became isolated communities surviving on wel-
fare and alcoholism was rampant. It helped me to look at the forests similarly. In Kokolopori, the
traditional communal hunts that brought the villages together had become rare due to the lack of
wildlife, and a sense of confusion persisted. Women could earn more money raising livestock than
men could hunting. What happened to a culture's hierarchy, its stories and codes, when what it was
based on vanished? And what would it be like to think that the ocean itself could disappear, as the
people here knew that the forest might someday?
Many of those who write about the bushmeat trade acknowledge traditional subsistence hunting,
that it is normal for rainforest people to supply their families with protein in this way. The problems
arise when logging companies cut highways through the rainforests, their workers needing steady
rations and their trucks carrying this meat to urban markets where, due to the demand for it, people
pay more than they do for farmed meat like beef. Traditional hunting practices and reverence for
the forest once limited how many animals could be killed, but modern weapons in the hands of a
growing population and the demands of cities and towns have made the bushmeat market one of the
primary economies of the rainforest. River barges passing through the forest are heaped with bush-
meat, and traveling merchants buy it from villagers in canoes so they can resell it in commercial
