Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Finally, on February 3, 2012, the day after my arrival in Goma, and after two trips to the offices
of the Compagnie Africaine d'Aviation (CAA) to make sure my flight to Kinshasa would be depart-
ing, I took a taxi to the airport. One side of it was heaped with broken chunks of volcanic rock, and
a few junked planes had been shoved off the runway, brown with dust, their noses to the sky.
Beyond security, a man at a desk again recorded the details of my passport. I noticed a single
bullet hole in the top of the window behind him. He interrogated me on my reason for being in the
Congo just as another agent would do when I arrived in Kinshasa, as if the sky above the DRC were
a different country and each return to earth required a new visit to customs.
The plane was on time, and as it took off, I stared out the window: a military helicopter parked
in the distance, khaki cargo planes, a cannon and a tank, both draped with dun tarp, set back in the
trees. A narrow neighborhood of clustered homes with tin roofs passed beneath us, then the city of
Goma with its wide avenues and desolate roundabouts, and the shore of Lake Kivu, the dark volca-
noes of the Virungas to the east. Soon we were above hills, the unbroken thatch of the forest, before
we lifted through a bank of clouds.
For a while, we glided just above them, working our way into a dense, otherworldly terrain.
Dozens of cumulonimbus rose above the white plain, casting long clefts of shadow over it. All
across the glowing horizon, at the luminous blue line between the clouds and the sky, further cu-
mulonimbus soared, red at their edges, flattened by the cold air above, like mesas in a primeval
vision of the American Southwest.
Though I fly often, I've never tired of cloudscapes, and I'd never seen one like this. It seemed
an expression of the Congo basin, 695,000 square miles, approximately 20 percent of the planet's
remaining tropical forest, spanning Gabon, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, the Central African Re-
public, the Democratic Republic of the Congo as well as its similarly named neighbor, the Republic
of Congo. We were crossing over its edge, thousands of feet down, heat and humidity boiling up as
it breathed dense air into the atmosphere.
It's hard to imagine forests like this vanishing, though farmland and plantations have replaced
them in most of the world. What makes the impact of deforestation difficult to grasp is that it's at
once gradual and rapid. Humans have cut down much of the world's forests, including the vast ma-
jority of old growth, and we can no longer fully comprehend how they influenced regional climates,
regulating humidity, preventing drought, and protecting rivers, watersheds more likely to dry up if
exposed to the sun. The vast quantity of carbon released from felled and burned trees escalates cli-
mate change and is absorbed into the oceans, gradually acidifying them.
Even now, massive swaths of forests are vanishing. In Southeast Asia, where the human popu-
lation is booming, forests are being decimated for palm oil plantations, diminishing the orangutan
habitat by 50 percent each decade. In Brazil, forests are being cleared for logging, cattle grazing,
and soy. In the Congo, with the new political stability, logging companies are again seeking conces-
sions. At a time when industrial powers are charting this forest's worth, a conservation plan for it is
urgent.
For more than an hour, the plane flew above the clouds, larger cumulonimbus muscling up, the
sun flaring at their edges, falling quickly now, a blinding disk edging against the white landscape.
And then we passed beyond the clouds, into a clear sky, and in the twilight, we swooped low over
Kinshasa, the nation's capital, the rolling savannah beyond it scattered with homesteads, before
landing at N'Djili Airport.
