Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
natural corridors that allow animals to breed with other groups. The East Coast of the United States
has far more forest today than it did a hundred years ago, and in many places, locals report the re-
appearance of species not documented since the nineteenth century. The Sankuru Nature Reserve
was made to protect not only the areas with high biodiversity, but also those around them, allowing
animals more habitat and reducing human pressure. Lastly, the Ministry of the Environment inten-
ded to initiate carbon credit programs that could foster a local economy based on forest protection.
This would create a buffer zone and a sense of investment for the people.
One other important factor heavily influenced the ICCN's decision to make all of Sankuru into
a reserve. John Waugh, a consultant in conservation strategies and planning with more than twenty-
five years of international experience, explained to me that there are patterns of land ownership and
histories that go with land. “Land units,” he said, “are social units. If, in creating a conservation
area, you take a piece of land from one group and a piece of land from another group, and mash
them together, you are actually forcing two different groups to work together. Even if you produce
the best co-management arrangement possible, you interject a lot of complexity into the arrange-
ment. The communities may represent different clans, or even speak different languages. There's
a strong chance that they have a history of competing interests. If you reorganize these patterns
without understanding the complex relationships between people and the land, you risk totally ig-
noring the social dimensions, and that's a real problem in terms of sustainability of the conservation
enterprise.”
The Harts' plan was to create a park on land composed of different administrative regions and
even provinces, whereas the more feasible project would be for them to make a protected area that
abuts Sankuru and supports its conservation efforts by creating an even larger buffer around its
zones of high biodiversity. “If you look at the eastern portion of Sankuru,” Michael Hurley told me,
“east of the Tshuapa and west of the Lomami, the part where the Harts say the biodiversity is rich,
you still have an area larger than possibly any other bonobo protected area in the DRC, aside from
Salonga.”
In a time when conservation efforts are struggling, it is difficult to understand why the Harts
launched their attacks. Was it scientific jealousy, a question of competition for limited funding, or
the fear that they were being scooped on a huge discovery, this being just another example of the
conflicts in bonobo research that began with Coolidge and Schwarz over a tray of ape skulls? Or
did they genuinely see no potential in any of the land within the Sankuru Nature Reserve? Michael
believed they wanted to save face, given that they had received funding to work where they claimed
no one else was doing research.
But André had a slightly different take: “The people saw the Harts as having a colonialist atti-
tude. When they come, they impose on others—'You come here. We'll pay you this much'—rather
than speak to people. They would take people from other provinces, from Orientale, to the Sankuru
area, to work in those communities. They started marking areas off, making transects, without com-
municating with people. They didn't realize that the people living in Sankuru know these species.
The idea of discovery is only for the foreigners. It is not for the local people.”
Benoît confirmed this view, saying the Harts were “of that class of people who believe that they
should come and teach conservation to the Congolese. They are still of that old class, and when
there is a local organization that tries to work for conservation, and we have to help it to move for-
ward, they don't believe in those politics.”
