62 Scientific American, May 2020
the Baka’s traditional hunting activities are being criminalized,”
the researchers charged.
FEAR, HUNGER AND ALCOHOL
With Almost All of the forest divided into conservation parks and
logging concessions, where Pygmies are persecuted for hunting
and gathering, the BaYaka can no longer thrive or maintain their
forest-based identity. “Oh, it was good, so good! Honey for every-
one! Wild yams ... more than you can carry!” said Emeka’s dis-
abled older brother, Mongemba, in 2013. “Now it’s all finished, all
finished! Now there is just sadness! We have such hunger. Fear,
such fear! The boys are frightened to go in the forest.” Maindja, a
45-year-old grandmother, explained: “If we walk in the forest, we
are taken by eco-guards. That is why we don’t put our bodies in the
forest anymore. Now we just stay in the villages, not the forest
camps. And so the wisdom of the ancestors’ ways goes away.”
Afraid to camp in the forest as they used to and compelled by
economic necessity, many BaYaka hang around logging camps
or farming villages, seeking work as farm hands, odd-jobbers
and home help. Most men feel too frightened to go hunting any-
more. Because the men’s cultural and social value has histori-
cally depended on their bringing meat to
feed their families—which they can no
longer accomplish—their self-es teem has
crashed. Working instead as marginal la-
borers and often paid only in illegally dis-
tilled alcohol, many men have become al-
coholics, with all the psychological, social
and economic problems the addiction
brings. Many BaYaka women suffer from
domestic abuse, and those living around
logging encampments are often sexually
exploited by outsiders.
From the Pygmies’ perspective, their for-
est has been converted into a collection of
floral and faunal assets seized by outsiders
to profit in mysterious ways. The logic of
sustainable development—meeting the
global demand for re sources by opening up
the forest to extractive industries while off-
setting the damage with militarized pro-
tected areas—completely es capes them.
Loggers justify their continued felling as a
form of development, yet its benefits rarely
reach forest people. Conservationists point
to the harm done to endangered species by
logging, roads and market pressures to justify the draconian hunt-
ing restrictions imposed on the hunter-gatherers and the abuses
by eco-guards. But in the experience of Pygmies, elephants, leop-
ards, gorillas and chimpanzees were common in their forest—and
their present-day scarcity stems directly from outsiders’ presence.
They have a point. Fiona Maisels of the University of Stirling in
Scotland and her co-workers estimated in 2013 that elephant pop-
ulations in the Congo Basin have declined to a little more than a
third of what they were at the turn of the millennium. The num-
bers of western lowland gorillas have also decreased sharply. The
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reports that roughly five million met-
ric tons of wild animals are being extracted annually from these
forests, causing local extinctions. And according to the U.N. Envi-
ronment Program, 80 percent of the large mammals in many
national parks of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (which
neighbors the Republic of the Congo) had disappeared by 2010.
The disconnect between hunter-gatherers and conservation-
ists ultimately arises from their conflicting philosophies. For the
BaYaka, abundance is the natural state of things, and it is ensured
by fair sharing among all present. The forest is a sentient being
with whom they maintain social relationships of mutual care and
support through taboo, ritual, song and dance. The plethora of ani-
mals encountered in this region until very recently is testament to
the long-term success of this approach to forest management. In
contrast, conservationists and development experts represent a
global economic system that objectifies nature, encourages its con-
version into commodities and allows elites to dominate decisions
over resource distribution, resulting in species becoming scarce.A NEW PARADIGM
Around the World, however, a novel conservation paradigm is tak-
ing root. Researchers, activists and others from mainstream soci-
ety are recognizing that local communities are the primary protec-
tors of nature and are seeking to help them. Although the mappingconcept that Emeka and others helped me design ultimately could
not save the Pygmy way of life, it is proving more successful in less
institutionally and technologically challenging places—those with
less corruption, more democracy and stronger governance, for
example, or with better access to mobile phone networks.
My experiences in the Congo Basin eventually led to the
ExCiteS research group at University College London. We have
since developed Sapelli, a modifiable smartphone app for collect-
ing information on vital resources, the activities of poachers, and
other variables; Geokey, a data-storage system; Community Maps,
used to view the data with an appropriate background; and a
methodology for co-designing projects with indigenous and other
communities based on the concerns and needs that they identify.1