Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
the equatorial forests that have existed in some form for millions of years, and they teach us more
about the past and ourselves than fossils ever could. Sally Jewell Coxe often describes bonobos
and chimpanzees as exemplifying the yin and yang of human nature, and their models shed light
not only on how we can interact with each other, but on the ways an environment can cause us to
change.
The plane banked and began to lose altitude, and I wondered how I would feel standing in virgin
rainforest and seeing bonobos. As the last great ape that Westerners became aware of, they made us
realize all that we didn't know about ourselves and the forest itself. Increasingly, though, as BCI's
logo of a bonobo standing in a circle suggested, they represented the importance of coalitions to
save that very forest. Today, Africa's rainforests are barely absorbing the carbon emissions of its
cities, and the lesson in planetary history also serves to remind us of how carbon dioxide can trans-
form the earth, and how the forests that we're cutting down are essential for sequestering it.
For years, studies of ice cores from glaciers have revealed that the current level of carbon di-
oxide is the highest the planet has known in the last eight hundred thousand years. New research,
however, suggests that the last time the atmosphere held this much carbon dioxide was fifteen mil-
lion years ago, when, according to the scientist Aradhna Tripati, a professor at the University of
California, Los Angeles, “global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they
are today, the sea level was approximately 75 to 120 feet higher than today, there was no perman-
ent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica and Greenland.” Historically, global
temperatures largely correlate to atmospheric carbon levels, and though temperatures are at their
highest level in four thousand years, they are expected to rise at an unusually rapid rate over the
next century, one too fast to allow most creatures to adapt. Some scientists have suggested that we
are crossing into unknown territory, over a tipping point, where carbon emissions will create a dom-
ino effect, transforming the planet at an exponential rate. And yet our impact is increasing, a day in
Kinshasa enough to make me understand the urgency of human need and hunger. The DRC's pop-
ulation—already the fourth largest in Africa after those of Nigeria, Egypt, and Ethiopia—is set to
double to 140 million within twenty years. A glance from the airplane window sufficed to remind
me of how isolated and unknown our few remaining rainforests are, how they can disappear without
our knowing, and how much of a challenge it will be for humanity to work together to save them.
