Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
thought that the world was full of nature. He also learned about bonobos, and since it was much
easier to do research in Europe, he began sending André information. Michel admitted to himself
that André was on the right path, and in the course of his research, he became so obsessed that he
started attending ecological and conservation conferences in Paris.
“I was shocked that they didn't know why we were eating the animals. They say we shouldn't
eat them. They had never eaten them. But they don't care to understand why we were eating them.
. . . I would go to conferences to tell them to stop condemning us. You have to understand our reas-
ons. For us, the forest is the supermarket. There's not even an agriculture or livestock program in
place, so what are the people going to do?”
He'd gone to the conferences with the innocence of the uninitiated, thinking he wasn't qualified
to be there, only to discover that he was the only one with actual experience of the rainforest. He
told them he had been raised to hunt, and often did so to feed his family. “They had no idea of the
human need. I tried to explain it: 'You have made these people into your enemies. How will you
work with them to make change?'”
When Michel next saw André, he shared his expertise, both from his research and as a former
hunter. He knew how the people from these areas thought, and that ACOPRIK had to improve their
living conditions in order to succeed with conservation.
The next expedition BCI organized with ACOPRIK catapulted the project forward. They
brought scientists from the Institut Congolais pour la Conservation de la Nature (ICCN) into the ter-
ritory and proposed establishing one or two community-based reserves that would link to the projec-
ted Bonobo Peace Forest. But when the ICCN's people saw the rich biodiversity of Sankuru—not
only okapis, bonobos, and rare monkeys, but hippopotami, Congo peacocks, and elephants—their
response was dramatic. They called the bushmeat trade in Sankuru an ecocide, and they moved to-
ward creating a reserve more quickly than they had with Kokolopori, which was already functioning
like a reserve although it had yet to receive that legal status. When discussions about the boundaries
of the projected Sankuru Reserve began, BCI recommended that it be a third of its current size, fo-
cusing on the territory from Lomela to Katako-Kombe, along the Lomami and Tshuapa Rivers. At
the national level, the discussion became enthusiastic, officials seeing both the need to protect this
core watershed of the Congo River and the possibility of using the forests to develop carbon credit
programs that would allow for the sale of credits to companies that chose to decrease their carbon
footprint. There was also the question of governance, and since Sankuru had comprised a single ad-
ministrative region for decades, the ICCN decided to make a community-based reserve on a larger
scale than had previously been attempted, so as to keep the political and administrative boundaries
of Sankuru intact.
The term
ecocide
is hardly extreme in light of the conditions not only in Sankuru but throughout
Central Africa. Though a healthy rainforest can sustain about one person per square kilometer,
many parts of the Congo basin now have a density of five to twenty. These populations are expected
to double every twenty-five years, and already by 2004, Central Africans were consuming an es-
timated five million metric tons of bushmeat a year, or, as Dale Peterson writes, “the equivalent of
some 20 million cows and steers.” In 2000, the bushmeat trade had an estimated profit of almost
one billion USD.
Of the animals slaughtered, apes are severely affected because of their slow reproductive cycles
and their high intelligence. Female bonobos begin to develop their pillowlike genital swellings
when they are seven, and though they leave to look for a new group at eight and are sexually mature
