Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
As we were about to climb the steps to the CAA jet that would take us to Mbandaka, a police officer
and Dr. Nicolas Mwanza Ndunda, BCI's scientific director, ran from the N'Djili Airport terminal
to give a package and contracts to Sally. Mwanza is a tall, jovial-looking man in his sixties, with a
paunch and a small mustache. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and the sun had us squinting, the heat
off the tarmac so palpable I could feel it in my muscles.
The other passengers hurried past us to claim seats as Sally read the papers, a subcontract for a
grant that would employ staff from the Congolese Ministry of Scientific Research. She signed and
handed them to Mwanza, and the officer began to lift his hand in an imploring gesture. She gave
him the equivalent of five dollars in Congolese francs for letting Mwanza meet us.
After we took our places, not a seat remained in the narrow Fokker jet, the last six rows of which
were loaded with bags and cardboard boxes heavily sealed with brown tape. It was hot inside, the
passengers sweating, though we cooled down once we were in motion.
We left Kinshasa, crossing inland away from the Pool Malebo, heading east over Bandundu
Province. Below us, forested rivers scored savannah plateaus, giving the landscape the look of in-
terlocking puzzle pieces. Équateur was just above, bordering Congo-Brazzaville to the west, the
Central African Republic to the north, and Orientale Province to the east.
Équateur is known for being the most heavily forested province in the DRC, and forty minutes
into our trip, as we neared Mbandaka, I stared out the jet's window at the rainforest curving against
the horizon. A distant plume of smoke rose from the endless rippled green, calling to mind a war
photograph I saw years ago: a burning ship far away on the uniform ocean.
Before this trip, I'd studied the DRC on a map. Its lopsided bulk, in its place at the center
of Africa, looked—just as the hackneyed metaphor says—like a heart. But maps don't do the
Congo justice. The Mercator projection—which transposes the globe onto a cylinder or flat sur-
face—misrepresents the area closer to the poles, expanding it. Relative to North America and
Europe, the Congo is far larger than it appears: at 905,355 square miles, it is 3.37 times the size of
Texas, the eleventh-largest country on earth and the second largest in Africa, after Algeria. As of
2005, nearly 60 percent of it was forestland.
Though little of it was logged under Mobutu because of lack of transportation infrastructure, by
the 1990s, 37 percent of the country's forests that could be exploited commercially were officially
designated as timber concessions. With the war now over, much of the region has become more re-
liably accessible for systematic exploitation, so deforestation, which has been occurring at a rate of
about 1 percent a decade, is likely to speed up.
When trees are cut down and decay, and especially when they are burned, they release CO
2
into
the atmosphere. This carbon then absorbs solar radiation, warming the planet. Already, global defor-
estation emits more carbon dioxide than all of the transportation on earth—automobiles, airplanes,
trains, and boats—combined, and nearly as much as transportation and industry together. Further-
