Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
“I remember when André Tusumba arrived in my office when I was administrative technical
director and he showed me the documents with the vision he had. He talked about BCI, whom I
already knew because they had worked on Kokolopori. Afterward, we met in my office with André
and BCI to understand the reality on the ground. I thought the idea was excellent, and I proposed
creating a reserve. They asked how we would go about doing so, and I took my two directors and
sent them to the area to determine the limits. . . . They worked with André there. They had two
objectives for this mission. The first was to assure that local communities and tribal chiefs were
truly aware of the idea of creating a reserve, and the second was to find out whether ACOPRIK
was known by local communities. . . . When I had the proof from my colleagues that ACOPRIK
was known in the area, that they had a site, that the tribal chiefs and even the local administration
supported the idea, and that there was support from BCI for the financial aspects, I set about putting
together the document for the creation of the reserve. And suddenly we create the reserve, to the
great surprise of the Harts. The reserve included the zone that the Harts would propose to include in
their future protected area. This created a problem because we had done this before them. . . . They
even tried to produce scientific evidence that showed that this was a reserve only on paper and had
no biodiversity.”
Benoît defended the reserve's value, which he saw as lying in its biodiversity, carbon credits,
and location in the watershed of the Congo River. He explained that André was proposing a green
economy rather than the exploitation of minerals that enrich only people from outside the region,
and that even though the Harts claimed Sankuru to be lacking in biodiversity, part of the same pro-
tected area that they were proposing lay within the reserve. And yet the idea that the whole reserve
was without bonobos took hold.
None of the people I interviewed denied that Sankuru's southwestern forests have lower levels
of wildlife, nor did they dismiss the Harts' skill as conservation biologists, or the value of their
planned protected area. Sally and André acknowledged that based on wildlife inventories alone, the
ICCN might not have included the entire Sankuru area in the reserve. But given the amount of bush-
meat in the markets around the Sankuru forests, the ICCN wanted to act quickly and decisively. As
conservation biologist Michael Soulé writes, “In conservation, dithering and endangering are often
linked,” and “the risks of non-action may be greater than the risks of inappropriate action.” Further-
more, not all reserves or parks have consistently high levels of biodiversity; even the Wildlife Con-
servation Society (WCS) report that recommends funding the Salonga National Park over Sankura
specifies that the park “contains
several areas
with high bonobo densities” (emphasis mine).
The
World Atlas of Great Apes and Their Conservation
confirms this: “Bonobos seem to be absent or at
low density in the central parts of the Salonga National Park.” The authors go on to state that though
the park has few bonobos compared to the region in which Wamba and Kokolopori are situated,
there are significant populations in its northeast, where “government involvement and application
of laws are poor . . . and hunting is a current threat.”
Likewise, in Sankuru, the forests in the southwest have seen more hunting than those in the east
and north. It seems clear in retrospect that the ICCN privileged the importance of the watershed.
They wanted to expand wildlife habitat and protect the remaining animals as well as slow the en-
croachment of humans. If we were to look at the national parks on the East Coast of the United
States when they were first established, we'd see nowhere near the biodiversity there is now. Much
of the Appalachians were farmland, heavily hunted and logged. But one of the principles in creat-
ing a protected area is to rehabilitate the environment so that species can expand into it, to create
