May 2020, ScientificAmerican.com 57SOURCES: GLOBAL FOREST WATCH (
protected areas, logging concessions, logging roads
);
SURVIVAL INTERNATIONAL (trophy hunting areas); WORLD WILDLIFE FUND (Messok Dja)Map by Mapping Specialistshumans, which originates in 19th-century U.S. policy, regional gov-
ernments banned Pygmy groups from the wildlife reserves.
Since then, I have watched an abundant forest teeming with
elephants, gorillas, chimpanzees, wild boars, monkeys and ante-
lope become a degraded woodland as national and international
markets suck out forest produce. Central African elephant popula-
tions fell by more than 60 percent between 2002 and 2011, and the
decline continues. The formerly active, well-fed and lively BaYaka
are now often malnourished, depressed and alcoholic casual labor-
ers dwelling on the edges of their former territories, terrorized by
so-called eco-guards and subjected to commercial and sexual
exploitation by outsiders. They thrived in the Congo Basin for tens
of millennia only to succumb within a few decades to industrial
civilization’s appetite for natural resources and a colonial approach
to securing them—by expelling the natives from their homelands.
In opposition to such “top-down” conservation, which is often
paired with extractive industries and which regularly fails to meet
its stated objectives, a “bottom-up” approach to defending forests
and wildlife is steadily gaining ground. A 2019 report by the United
Nations’ Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiver-
sity and Ecosystem Services found that indigenous peoples are bet-
ter at maintaining biodiversity on their land than practically every-
one else. Moreover, 80 percent of the planet’s remaining terrestrial
biodiversity coincides with the 65 percent of Earth’s surface that
is under some form of indigenous or local community manage-ment. Recognizing this reality, this new conservation paradigm
seeks to empower local communities to resist the commercial
forces invading their territories.
The BaYaka themselves helped me in one such endeavor. Called
the Extreme Citizen Science (ExCiteS) program, it enables local
peoples to map their resources and the dangers threatening them
and to share their ecological knowledge with outsiders. The tools
and methodologies we designed in the Congo Basin are proving
useful in diverse parts of the world. The community network in
the Prey Lang forest in Cambodia has been so successful in using
the latest version of our mapping tool, the Sapelli app, to protect
the forest that it won the U.N.’s prestigious Equator Prize in 2015,
the Yale International Society for Tropical Foresters Innovation
Prize in 2017 and the Energy Globe Award 2019.AN IDEAL BAYAKA MAN
When my Wife, ingrid, our three-year-old son, Nando, and I appre-
hensively climbed off the dugout onto the sandy bank of the Sangha
River in northwestern Congo in 1994, it was Emeka who greeted
us with a warm smile. A charismatic man in his 30s, he was one of
a group of about 40 Pygmies camped there. Living throughout the
Congo Basin—from Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi in the east to
the Atlantic Ocean in the west—Pygmy hunter-gatherer bands speak
a range of different languages and are believed to number anywhere
between 300,000 and a million. All regard themselves as the orig-Development in the Congo
Since the 1990s international institutions, conservation agencies and local
governments have zoned the Congo Basin into areas for logging or other
activities, along with protected areas for wildlife. Pygmies are allowed to
hunt for subsistence in some areas, but in practice
many are too afraid of attacks by eco-guards to
venture into the forest. Unable to pursue their
original way of life, many hang out near logging
towns such as Pokola in the hope of odd jobs.