Seminar 2000

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Conservation Amid Change: Community, Culture, and Values in Congo's Rainforests.

Introduction

Alarmed by the rapid disappearance of tropical forests, the American biologist Daniel Janzen recently warned his colleagues that "if biologists want a tropics in which to biologize, they are going to have to buy it with care, energy, effort, strategy, tactics, time, and cash." In response to this rather blatant exhortation, the Indian ecologist Ramachandra Guha had this to say: "This frankly imperialist manifesto . . . seriously compounds the neglect by the American [environmental] movement of far more pressing environmental problems within the Third World. But perhaps more importantly, and in a more insidious fashion, . . . [t]he wholesale transfer of a movement culturally rooted in American conservation history can only result in the social uprooting of human populations in other parts of the globe."¹

My paper today centers around several key dilemmas hinted at in this exchange that are crucial to address in any attempt to bridge traditional ecological knowledge and ecosystem science: (1) The world's richest biodiversity is often found in areas of great human poverty and socio-economic deterioration; and (2) Environmental conflicts are deeply moored in metaphysics, in the fundamentally different ways that people perceive and value the natural world.

Using the case of the Reserve de Faune à Okapis (RFO), one of the largest rainforest reserves in all of Central Africa located in the Ituri Forest of northeastern Congo, one of the poorest countries in the world, I will touch briefly on each of these dilemmas. One theme of this talk is the practical and ethical quandaries posed by doing conservation work among people who have so little and depend on the forest for so much. A second topic or purpose is to share with you how people living in or adjacent to the reserve perceive and value the forest and how their perceptions contrast with a Western scientific approach to rainforest conservation. I will conclude with some of the implications the traditional ecological knowledge of Central African forest peoples holds for environmental theory and for actual grounded environmental projects in the region.

Background: The Ituri Forest and the RFO

The Ituri Forest, approximately 70,000 km², has no clear boundaries, but refers to the area roughly outlined by the watershed of the Ituri River, one of the Congo's many tributaries. As part of the largest forest refugia remaining from the Pleistocene epoch, it is particularly noted for its high species endemism and diversity.² The Ituri holds over 13 different species of primates as well as an array of large terrestrial mammals including the forest elephant (Loxidonta africana cyclotis), forest buffalo (Syncerus caffer nanus), giant forest hog (Hylochoerus meinertzhageni), and the okapi (Okapia johnstoni), a rainforest giraffe endemic to Congo and most abundant in the central Ituri. Other interesting and little known fauna include the Congo clawless otter (Aonyx [Paraonyx] congica,) and the water chevrotain (Hyemoschus aquaticus). Botanically the Ituri is of interest because of its large extent of mbau forests, a monodominant forest type in which Gilbertiodendron dewevrei (mbau) constitute 90 per cent of the canopy, a feature quite rare in the tropical realm.³

Besides its biological richness, the Ituri is also the home of a rich cultural array of forest-dwelling peoples. Various groups of foraging peoples, collectively known as the Mbuti, are very likely to have been the first people to live in the Ituri. But for much longer than was once thought, they have been living in complex interdependent relationship with various Bantu and Nilotic farming peoples. The relationship is based on a rich configuration of economic, political, social, and religious exchanges that goes beyond the purely material. Besides exchanging meat and other forest products for cultivated starches grown in farmers' gardens, the Mbuti may often play important and necessary roles in various ceremonies the farmers hold. Similarly, various Mbuti ceremonies will incorporate farmers.⁴

Due in part to this high level of biodiversity, the Ituri has from early on also attracted the attention of the Western conservation community. In the early 1950's the Belgians set up an Okapi Capture Station at Epulu for the capture, breeding, and export of okapi to western zoos. In 1987 this work was taken up by the Gilman Investment Company (GIC), a private American conservation firm funded by a paper magnate who as a hobby collects and conserves rare species of animals. Since 1985 the New York Zoological Society (NYZS) has also been involved in a wide spectrum of ecological research and conservation initiatives in the Ituri through its field research organization, The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). Most recently WCS has established the Centre de Formation et Recherche en Conservation Forestière (CEFRECOF) at Epulu, a research center set up to train Congolese students in field ecology and conservation management. From 1987 to 1994, the World Wildlife Fund joined the conservation efforts at Epulu and together with GIC, WCS, and the Institut Congolais pour la Conservation de la Nature (ICCN) worked to have more than 13,000 km² of the Ituri's rainforest officially gazetted in May of 1992 as the Réserve de Faune à Okapis.

The RFO was founded as a human-inhabited multiuse conservation area. Having gotten the area officially gazetted, ICCN, GIC, and WCS, the three groups jointly managing the reserve, are now grappling with what exactly this designation means. All three groups are actively seeking ways to properly manage this vast protected area through programs of exploration, monitoring, social and ecological research, conservation education, enforcement of park policies, and for lack of a better term, community relations.

All of this is taking place within the context of a region, if not an entire country, that is undergoing serious socioeconomic decay. Over the last ten to fifteen years, the Ituri has experienced a sort of social and economic devolution on numerous fronts. Much of the region's roads have become nearly impassable triggering a cascade of other impacts each taking its toll on the region's human communities. Rather than experiencing the population explosion that is so much a stereotype of African countries, significant areas of the Ituri have witnessed an actual population decline as the infrastructure on which people depend ceases to function.

One of the most disheartening impacts of this depopulation has been the devolution of the educational system. As late as 1975, nearly every village along the roads leading out in all four directions from Mambasa, one of the Ituri's major towns of around 10,000 people, had primary schools. Now, heading west, you find a school twenty-five kilometers down the road at Banana. The next one is at Epulu, forty-five kilometers further. To the north there is a primary school twelve kilometers up the road but not until Nduye, sixty kilometers from Mambasa, will you find the next. After leaving the school at Mandima, nine kilometers to the east, you have to travel another fifty kilometers to reach the next school at Lolwa. And the first school you reach heading south from Mambasa is at Maiyowani, forty kilometers toward Beni. Given such spacing, it becomes impossible for the significant numbers of children whose parents choose to remain in the village to ever go to school, to ever learn to read or write and get at least a foot in the door toward being able to cope with the bigger, wider, rapidly changing world that yet affects and penetrates their lives. Not to mention the affects such scholastic devolution, which is happening in other places besides the Ituri, will have for the future of this country -- a whole generation seriously impeded in the skills needed to help Congo manage itself within the complex webs of global political-economy.

A similar devolution is taking place within the health care system. Clinics once spread evenly throughout the region, each stocked with medicines now sit idle with empty shelves or cease to function altogether. The sick of Badengaido, one of the villages in which I conducted my research, must now travel fifty-five kilometers over horrendous roads to the town of Nia-Nia to receive any medical care.

Tied in to this complex devolutionary process (depopulation, fewer schools, diminished heath care) one also finds dramatic decreases in local agricultural production. In his most recent work with the Mbo people in and around the village of Basiri just south and west of Badengaido, anthropologist Michael Roesler has found agricultural production to be as much as sixty per cent less than what he measured in the late 1980s.⁵ Part of this can be traced to depopulation, but many farmers also talk about how deteriorating road conditions have made marketing any produce nearly impossible. Producing purely for subsistence may decrease pressure on the forest, but it also precludes a major means by which villagers obtain the small amounts of cash they need today to buy clothing, kerosene, soap, and salt, as well as to pay for medicines and schooling when and if they are available.

That this area, marked by such dramatic signs of socioeconomic decay, is also the home of one of the largest rainforest reserves in all of Central Africa is more than a coincidence. Throughout the world one finds that regions rich in biodiversity are often poor socio-economically. Frequently they suffer from severe infrastructural deterioration and neglect as well.⁶ This juxtaposition of rich biodiversity and poor people raises thorny practical problems for conservation programs, but the ethical and moral dilemmas it poses are of equal import. At one extreme, it is not difficult to imagine a conservation policy that surreptitiously condones this socioeconomic deterioration since it results in less pressure being placed on the forest. At the other extreme is the expectation that conservation organizations should launch full-scale socioeconomic development programs hand in hand with their conservation work. Neither of these options can be easily justified on both moral and practical grounds. Situated somewhere dialectically between these two extreme positions is a third that asks the more fruitful but also more difficult question: how can authentic ecojustice, entailing doing justice on behalf of both the forest and its human inhabitants, be put into practice on the ground in such 'real-life' terrains as the RFO?

Ecojustice as a Conservation/Development Guideline

What is the meaning of ecojustice? Volumes have been written on this question and I will not attempt a summary. Instead let me briefly mention three key points about the concept that apply to our purposes here. From the perspective of ecojustice:

• It is impossible to separate environmental concerns from concerns for social justice.
• To heal or protect the earth, we must not simply develop ecological consciousness or conserve nature but also work to change the social systems of injustice and domination that are at the root of ecological and social destruction.
• Therefore, conservation work must also be socially just if it is finally to succeed.

In order to arrive at any answers to the question of how ecojustice can be put into practice within the RFO, it is necessary to first gain a fuller understanding of how people living in or adjacent to the reserve perceive and relate to the forest, both currently and historically. It is also important to understand more fully how they view the reserve and the impacts it has had on their lives.

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Footnotes p. 1

1. R. Guha, 'Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique', Environmental Ethics, 11 (Spring 1989), pp. 76. Back

2. D. Wilkie and J.T. Finn, 'A Spatial Model of Land Use and Forest Regeneration in the Ituri Forest of Northeastern Zaire', Ecological Modeling, 41 (1988), pp. 308. Back

3. T.B. Hart, 'Monospecific Dominance in Tropical Rain Forests', Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 5, 1 (1990), pp. 6-11. Back

4. R.B. Peterson, 'To Search for Life: A Study of Spontaneous Immigration, Settlement , and Land Use on Zaire's Ituri Forest Frontier', M.S. Thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison (1991), pp. 9-11. Back

5. M. Roesler, Personal communication. Back

6. See E.O. Wilson (ed), Biodiversity (National Academy Press, Washington, D.C., 1988); and J.A. Sayer, C.S. Harcourt, and N. M. Collins (eds), The Conservation Atlas of Tropical Forests: Africa (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1992). Back

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