Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
bonobo conservation. She insists on the need to cooperate for a common goal, to be bonobo-like
about conservation, pointing out that there is a huge challenge just saving the bonobos and very
few people available to work on it. And despite the conflict, even Alden Almquist and John Scher-
lis, both of whom have been with BCI since its founding, still have respect for the Harts, offering
similar reasoning.
“I respect anybody,” Alden tells me, “who in the most successful material civilization that the
planet earth has ever seen—ours—can manage to sustain idealism over a lifetime, and they have.
And I apply that to missionaries. I apply that to conservationists. I apply that to health workers.
Teachers. Across the board. If you can live and work in the middle of highly stressful physic-
al circumstances for a lifetime out of dedication to an ideal, you have my respect, and the Harts
do, because they've done that. And it doesn't mean that I agree with them. I disagree with them
strongly on quite a lot of things. They're very weak in their understanding of local culture. . . . I've
been to meetings and in workshops with these people. They're not bad people. They're bad to BCI.
They're unfair to BCI.”
note 2:
A number of the people I interviewed said that the Harts were originally working within
the Sankuru Nature Reserve, but that they moved their programs just to the east of it, allegedly
under pressure from the ICCN and the Ministry of the Environment, though I have not been able to
confirm this. (The reserve is based in the Sankuru administrative region, and any conservationist
working within it would normally be required to go through its administration.) André Tusumba,
Michel Kitoko, and Benoît Kisuke have said that the Harts first worked in the east of Sankuru
without permission from the reserve's administration and then moved just outside of it to the east.
What is certain from the biodiversity maps that the Harts created is that they did work in eastern
Sankuru without permission and recorded high levels of bonobos there.
213
As conservation biologist
Soulé, “Conservation Biology and the 'Real World,'” 1986,
ht-
214
The authors go on to state
World Atlas of Great Apes and Their Conservation
also states, “The
other area of absence falls between the Tshuapa and Lomami Rivers”—a statement that appears to
reflect the belief that Sankuru has no bonobos even though the Harts' survey maps show high con-
centrations in this very area. Lacambra et al., “Bonobo (
Pan paniscus)
,” in Caldecott and Miles,
World Atlas
, 84-85, 93.
214
The East Coast of the United States
Environmentalist Bill McKibben describes the return of
forest to the northeast. In 1850, he notes, only 35 percent of Vermont was covered with woods,
whereas 80 percent of the state is forested today, and animals not seen in generations are making a
comeback. By the 1960s and 1970s, he writes, the pattern of forest and field in Vermont was sim-
ilar to the pattern before 1800, “its appearance much like it must have been prior to the American
Revolution.”
Hope, Human and Wild: True Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth
(Minneapolis:
Milkweed Editions, 2007), 14-15.
214
This would create a buffer
We must remind ourselves that if the people have no reliable source
of livelihood, they will travel the distance to the high biodiversity areas and hunt, even if those
areas are protected as a reserve or a park.
215
“
If you look at the eastern . . .”
note 1:
Michael goes on to say: “It's true that to the west of the
Tshuapa River, the biodiversity decreases. There are still bonobos, okapi, elephants, and a great
deal of primates, among them an unknown species that the CREF researchers noticed. But we
lacked the funds to help them do the necessary tests and research to identify it. Since then the Harts
have announced it as a new species. There's nothing wrong with that, but we should be working
with them. As for the rest of Sankuru, it is an important watershed, and our goal was never to make
small, fenced-in protected areas. Everyone knows what happens to the biodiversity in places like
that. We are aiming for long-term restoration.”
