Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
ity in the Rain Forest: How Conservation Strategies Are Failing in West Africa
(Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1999), 45.
19
Though DRC's security forces
“DR Congo Police 'Killed 24 Civilians' After Elections,” BBC,
December 21, 2011,
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-16297258
;
“DR Congo: 24 Killed Since
Election Results Announced,” Human Rights Watch, December 22, 2011,
hrw.org/news/2011/
12/21/dr-congo-24-killed-election-results-announced
.
The story was told in Reuters (“World Has
Little Stomach to Take on Congo Vote Row,” December 14, 2011,
http://www.reuters.com/article/
20
Humans have cut down much
The forest has numerous values for our civilization. One that
is significant is the presence of chemical compounds that are still unknown to science and
that could be useful in medicine. Guy Cowlishaw and Robin Dunbar,
Primate Conservation
Biology
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 2. See also Felicity Barringer, “Fewer
Rain Forests Mean Less Energy for Developing Nations, Study Finds,”
New York Times
, May
20
In Southeast Asia
“Indonesia still held most of its forests as late as 1950, but over the following
50 years forest cover declined from 1,620,000 km
2
to 980,000 km
2
. The rate of forest loss is still
accelerating, with lowland forests most at risk. At current rates, lowland forests will disappear en-
tirely from Sumatra and Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) within 10-20 years and perhaps even
sooner.” Lera Miles, Julian Caldecott, and Christian Nellemann, “Challenges to Great Ape Surviv-
al” in Caldecott and Miles,
World Atlas of Great Apes and their Conservation
, 222.
“Supposedly 'protected' habitat for orangutans has been declining by 50 percent per decade in
recent times, which suggests that the red-haired Asian ape could be the first of the four modern
apes to go extinct.” Peterson and Ammann,
Eating Apes
, 2.
20
In Brazil, forests are
“Amazon Destruction: Why Is the Rainforest Being Destroyed in Brazil?”
21
In the Congo
The wars may have slowed large-scale logging operations in many parts of the
Congo rainforest even as famished, displaced people decimated the wildlife. It's hard to find a sil-
ver lining to any war, and this one, however slight or debatable, at least raised the urgency of pro-
tecting what forest habitat was left. (Andrew Harding, “How Wars and Poverty Have Saved DR
Congo's Forests,” BBC, December 5, 2011,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-16037543
.
)
However, illegal charcoal operations in the eastern Congo devastated numerous forests. Michela
Wrong writes: “The denuded areas left as they felled woodland for charcoal were so large, they
were visible on satellite photos.”
In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in
Mobutu's Congo
(New York: Harper Perennial, 2002), 245.
23
BCI's goal, he explained
Over a period of ten years, BCI had 13,650 square miles formally pro-
tected, with a number of other areas under development, while the other groups in the bonobo hab-
itat had approximately four thousand square miles designated. BCI's annual budget only recently
exceeded a million dollars and was tiny compared to larger NGOs with budgets that ranged from
approximately $20 million to more than $230 million. Over a period of ten years, BCI gazetted
more than three times the area for a fraction of the funding.
26
The effect of all this
There is no reliable census of Kinshasa. Kinshasa is possibly the most pop-
ulous city in Africa. Cairo and Lagos are also rated among the largest, all of them having urban
areas containing between nine and ten million people, two to four times the size of most major
African cities.
26
One in five adults
Mike Davis,
Planet of Slums
(London: Verso, 2006), 192.
26
In
Planet of Slums,
Mike Davis
Ibid., 191. Davis's information regarding salaried Kinois is ref-
erenced from René Devisch, “Frenzy, Violence and Ethnic Renewal in Kinshasa,”
Public Culture
7 (1995), 603.
