60 Scientific American, May 2020Pygmies. Having previously researched
how to implement the principles of “free,
prior and informed consent” when vulner-
able peoples face the prospect of develop-
ment projects in their territories, I became
a paid consultant with the Tropical Forest
Trust (currently called Earthworm), a non-
governmental organization that CIB had
hired to help it address the social issues in -
volved in FSC certification. The trust
charged me with setting up a system by
which the Pygmies inhabiting CIB’s con-
cessions could determine whether to per-
mit logging in their territories.
When I discussed the social and eco-
nomic significance of the sapele with CIB’s
managers, they worried about coming into
conflict with the 10,000 or so BaYaka in -
habiting their concessions, which would
rule out an FSC certificate. Tense meetings
be tween the BaYaka and logging staff
followed, with me serving as mediator, but
the cultural divide proved to be insur-
mountable. The hunter-gatherers were ex -
tremely un comfortable in office buildings:
seemingly simple tasks such as opening
doors proved daunting to them, let alone
more specialized ones such as compre-
hending agendas and forms. In their camps,
however, Emeka and others ex plained that
only the emergent sapele trees (those
whose crown emerged above the canopy) reliably hosted the cat-
erpillars. The BaYaka asked that the loggers protect those trees,
as well as natural springs, the tombs of their ancestors, sacred
groves, medicinal trees and a few other significant resources.
I proposed to CIB’s managers that they support the BaYaka
in mapping these sites, and to my relief, they agreed. Ingrid, who
worked in public health, had designed a set of icons to help
Ba Yaka healers read medicine labels for use in a mobile phar-
macy she had set up with them to treat worms, malaria and other
ailments. That gave me an idea. Working with the BaYaka and a
private software company called Helveta, which was developing
tools for tracing supply chains of scarce materials (in this case,
hardwoods), we designed a pictorial interface for the touch
screen of a GPS-equipped handheld computer. One of the Ba Yaka
would go to the resource the tribe wanted to save—say, an emer-
gent sapele—and simply touch the “caterpillar” symbol to mark
its location.
The tagging helped to cut through the language and culture
barriers. When they layered the maps the BaYaka had made over
those of sapeles they had marked for felling, the loggers realized
that they could still cut down enough trees to turn a profit.
Together with the hunter-gatherers and company managers, I
developed a set of procedures (such as taking entire families along
on mapping trips because BaYaka men and women value differ-
ent resources) to determine the terms on which the different
Ba Yaka groups would allow loggers into their forest. In 2006 CIB
became the first major logging company to achieve an enduring
FSC certificate in the Congo Basin, and other companies in this
vast region also later used this model as the basis for their efforts
to protect Pygmy rights to secure FSC certification.LOGGERS, POACHERS, CONSERVATIONISTS
As yeArs pAssed, I watched these efforts unravel. Overworked com-
pany staff began a slow but inexorable process of eroding proce-
dures—bypassing burdensome obligations (taking only a BaYaka
man along on a mapping trip, for example) or ignoring technical
problems with the equipment. Still, the resources the Pygmies
marked were largely protected. Had the hunter-gatherers—or I, as
their mediator with the outside world—foreseen a key collateral12