Newsweek's Sharon Begley and Scott Johnson should get the Pulitzer Prize
for last week's Newsweek cover story, "href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20012315/site/newsweek/page/0/ ">Slaughter
in the Jungle." It was the most moving story of the year and clearly
based on truly intrepid reportage. More importantly, I hope it provokes href=" http://www.democracyinaction.com/dia/organizationsCOM/dcourage/campaig
n.jsp?campaign_KEY=1919&t=">action to stop this brutal global
slaughter of wildlife.
Scott Johnson went into the rainforest in the war-torn Congo, home to
much of Africa's remaining 700 mountain gorillas. Miles from the nearest
town, he discovered and recorded the worst massacre of gorillas in more than
25 years.
The rangers found the first corpse less than a hundred yards
away, in a grove of vines and crooked thicket. The mammoth gorilla lay on
her side, a small pink tongue protruding slightly from her lips. She was
pregnant and her breasts were engorged with milk for the baby that now lay
dead inside her womb ... They have not been killed for their meat or their
pelts or their internal organs. In fact, no one is quite sure why they've
been killed.
Be sure to check out Johnson's astonishing href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19999335/displaymode/1107/s/2/">photos
of the gorillas. What makes them so powerful, I think, is that they capture
our commonality with our fellow creatures: in life, the gorillas seem
inspired by the same needs and emotions as we are; in death, their poses and
deep, mournful expressions evoke a crucifixion -- in this case, they are
sacrifices to human greed, violence, and apathy.
Three years ago some 8,000 Rwandans crossed the border into
Virunga looking for pastoral land, and mowed down more than 3,000 acres of
prime gorilla habitat in less than three weeks. Earlier this year Tutsi
forces loyal to a renegade Congolese general also moved into the park, which
houses not only one of the world's most remarkable collections of
biodiversity but gold, coltan, zinc and valuable timber. According to local
human-rights workers and renowned paleontologist href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20003424/site/newsweek/ ">Richard
Leakey, among others, a corrupt mafia of charcoal merchants has recently
begun harvesting Virunga's forests to fuel a $30 million-a-year industry.
It's an obscene trade-off: the destruction of one of the most majestic
animals in the world for a mere $30 million in profits for thugs robbing the
world of this natural wonder; and, more fundamentally, depriving these rare,
sentient -- even loving -- beings of life. As Begley points out in her
accompanying href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20012317/site/newsweek/page/0/ ">story,
however, the fate of the gorillas is an increasingly common one:
That threat has been escalating over the past decade largely
because the opening of forests to logging and mining means that roads
connect once impenetrable places to towns... The problem now is that
hunting, even of supposedly protected animals, is a global,
multimillion-dollar business.Eating bushmeat "is now a status symbol," says Thomas
Brooks of Conservation International. "It's not a subsistence issue. It's
not a poverty issue. It's considered supersexy to eat bushmeat."Smoked monkey carcasses travel from Ghana to New York and London, while
gourmets in Hanoi and Guangzhou feast on turtles and pangolins (scaly
anteaters) from Indonesia. There is a thriving market for bushmeat among
immigrants in Paris, New York, Montreal, Chicago and other points in the
African diaspora, with an estimated 13,000 pounds of bushmeat -- much of it
primates -- arriving every month in seven European and North American cities
alone. "Hunting and trade have already resulted in widespread local
extinctions in Asia and West Africa," says Bennett. "The world's wild places
are falling silent."
The article gave me a sense that we are living in an age when the Western
model of wildlife extermination and settlement -- the same model that nearly
extinguished the bison of the American prairie in the 19th century -- is now
being exported on a global scale. Animals that were thought to be at little
or no risk have been decimated in an orgy of bloodlust, greed, and apathy
from those who didn't care enough to stop these attacks. Hundreds of
thousands of hippopotamuses have been eliminated as hunters kill them for
meat and ivory. Fewer than 3000 pygmy hippos remain; logging roads have
brought the hunters to their once protected homes.
Most frustrating of all is how small the profits are from much of this
destruction. It's not like we're competing against billions of dollars; it's
a $30-million charcoal industry killing the gorillas; $3.6 million a year
for bushmeat from a province in Laos; $6 for a baboon.
Extinction is happening on the cheap, but in that cheapness, there is hope: it wouldn't be
too hard for concerned global citizens to come up with the cash to overnight
radically alter the economic incentives that are now decimating the world's
wildlife. Perhaps most simply, forests (and their living wildlife) could be
given value under international (or national) global warming reduction
regimes. Countries and individuals would get financial credit for the
enormous amounts of carbon dioxide stored by intact pristine forests --
credit that would amount to more than $10,000 per hectare under current
carbon prices on the European carbon trading market.
Of course, as I pointed out in this recent New York Times href="http://www.dcourage.com/a/2007/06/democratic_courage_media_momen_2.php
">op-ed co-written with Bill
Powers: to make that happen, governments will have to allow polluters to
get global warming credit for protecting the earth's forests as carbon sinks
(deforestation currently accounts for more than 20 percent of global
greenhouse-gas emissions -- more than China's total emissions), which would
have the enormous side benefit of protecting the wildlife in them from
encroaching roads and hunters.
These efforts are gaining speed; even the Bush administration is saying it
will put some money towards tropical forest conservation. But with forests
and wildlife disappearing so rapidly, it needs to happen far faster if we're
going to save millions of hectares of forests and the creatures (and
indigenous people) that make them home (and that act as the lungs of the
planet, breathing in carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen).
I hope you're inspired to join me in taking action to actually make this
happen. Click href=" http://www.democracyinaction.com/dia/organizationsCOM/dcourage/campaig
n.jsp?campaign_KEY=1919&t=">here to contact members of Congress and
ask them to finance forest conservation to help protect the earth's
vanishing wildlife.