Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
135
During their years
Researchers knew that many bonobos had been slaughtered for the bushmeat
trade, and there was little information as to where the surviving groups were living.
136
But as she explained
Furuichi may have been concerned about the possible effect of outsiders
on his relationships with the people of Wamba, which were important to the continuity of the re-
search. However, given that he has declined to be interviewed, I do not know his reasons.
136
She also realized that
A chapter on Mwanza could be as long as the one on Albert Lokasola.
Mwanza has had a significant career in conservation, and his struggles convey much about the his-
tory of the Congo. BCI has had a number of local partners of this nature, though Mwanza is among
the more important of them. However, the narratives that I have chosen to develop are those that
create a sense of place for the reserves. The area that Mwanza sought to develop in Lac Tumba
became the territory of the World Wildlife Fund under the Congo Basin Forest Partnership. Ac-
cording to both him and BCI, they were displaced and discouraged from working in this area.
136
According to Mwanza and Sally
In Furuichi's response, he referenced only his concerns about
the creation of the Sankuru Nature Reserve, which will be discussed in the chapter, “Defending the
Vocation.”
The description of this scene is based on the recollections of
Sally Jewell Coxe.
Michael Hurley
144
His trips to Haiti and Easter Island
Viewed from the sky, the line between Haiti and the Domin-
ican Republic separated two similar mountain landscapes, though while the DR's was forested,
Haiti's was without trees. The beginning of Haiti's deforestation dated back to the plantations of
the 1700s, the most lucrative in the New World, importing more African slaves than the United
States did in its entire history; but the country's situation further deteriorated after it won inde-
pendence from France in 1804. Its impoverished people, marginalized in the international com-
munity and by the United States, which feared a similar slave rebellion, scavenged every piece of
wood for building and cooking. Without trees, the landscape had become susceptible to erosion
and landslides, each hurricane creating rivers of mud, erasing roads and villages. See Philippe Gir-
ard,
Haiti: The Tumultuous History—from Pearl of the Caribbean to Broken Nation
(New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 25.
Easter Island had a similar story. One of the world's most isolated islands, over two thousand
miles from the coast of Chile, its sixty-three square miles was once fertile, covered with lush
forests. Around 400 AD, Polynesians reached it, and the civilization that grew there expanded to
as many as twenty thousand people. By 1400, they'd used up the trees, the soil had degraded,
and the streams and springs had stopped flowing. Without wood to make fishing boats, approxim-
ately 90 percent of the population died. William P. Cunningham and Mary Ann Cunningham, “The
Saga of Easter Island,” in
Principles of Environmental Science
, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-
147
Effective and sustainable
In their preface to
African Rain Forest Ecology and Conservation
,
William Weber and Amy Vedder state that “current conservation theory has raced far ahead of real-
world, on-the-ground experience” and argue for the importance of “the leap from an aggregated
multidisciplinary information base to a truly integrated interdisciplinary foundation—analogous to
the difference between a mixture and a true compound.” Furthermore, they write that “human be-
liefs, behaviors, politics, and economies are seen as powerful forces shaping the forest ecosystem.”
This topic shows an awareness of the underlying issues that BCI is addressing and affirms that
people at the big conservation NGOs are conscious of their importance. Weber et al., eds,
African
Rain Forest Ecology and Conservation
, xi.
