Dr.
Joel Cracraft (talking about the Museum collecting trip to the
Central African Republic): So 100 years ago, it might have been coffee
and other kinds of cash crops that were actually grown there on a
very, very small basis. But it still brought people in. And now people
come into this area in general because of the ecotourism industry,
diamond mining, forestry and whatever. The number of people moving
in and out depends upon the economic opportunities. But one of the
things that we wanted to do in this exhibit was to show how people
use these resources in their day-to-day living. At this location,
probably well over 80% of everybody's protein comes from the forest.
And by and large, most of their medicinals come from the forest. It's
quite a thrill to walk through the forest with people on hunts. This
woman and her child are carrying nets, and they go out in the field
and they string up the nets and they move through the forest very,
very rapidly. They're looking for duikers, these forest antelope.
We have several species of duikers in the exhibit, and the blue duiker
is the primary food for most of the people in this area. They're very
common.
This area also has "threats" and we wanted to be able to highlight
those threats. One threat comes from the timber industry. At the time
we originally went down there, a British company was doing selective
logging. Remember that the Congo Basin rain forest has largely been
left intact because there's no navigable waterway from the Congo Basin
rain forest to the Atlantic. You have to go down the Congo River,
and you just can't navigate that. And so all the logging is selective,
and then they carry these logs out by trucks, through Cameroon to
Dewala; put them on boats and then send them back to Europe or the
United States.
Also, there's a little bit of subsistence slash-and-burn-type agriculture
along some of the roads. This was originally a logging road, which
is the typical problem in a lot of forest areas. A logging road gets
put in and then people follow the road in and then they start to clear
the land. In here are little corn plants. And that's all they do.
They just plant the corn plants. This is not high-output agriculture.
And below all these trees they clear out, people plant cassava or
manioc, which is their staple food.
Diamond mining is another threat. This is an abandoned mine inside
the national park. We went out on a patrol with the park guards and
came across this abandoned mine. Now, north of the park is a huge
diamond area. And it is outside the park on private land where they
dig these big pits, take out the gravel with shovels, and then just
sift it for diamonds. These diamond areas place immense pressures
on the park. North of the park is a town of many thousands of people.
They're all miners and they have to eat. So there's a lot of poaching
pressure to provide food for these people. There's a constant battle
with the park people to keep all these miners and so forth out of
the north part of the park. It's a major, major threat in the long
run.
Solutions. They stopped, at least temporarily, anyway, the logging.
The diamond mining still goes on north of the park because Central
African Republic is one of the largest diamond producers in the world,
even though most of that wealth does not get down to the local people.
But they have created tourist facilities. These are places where people
can stay. They have a nice cafeteria overlooking the Dzangha River.
There's a lot to see there, and they're hoping through ecotourism
to raise the income in this area. Now, the important thing is that
the threats are not local. The threats are from us and Europeans,
Japanese and so forth. The local people, I guarantee you, don't wear
diamond rings, and they don't put economic pressure on the diamond
cartels to mine. These local people are just looking for jobs. These
local people don't use wonderfully expensive hardwoods to build homes
and so forth. We do. And so all the pressures that are threatening
this forest are not coming from Africans. They're coming from people
in the first world. And that's an important kind of thing to convey
to your students: that a lot of the causation for the loss of biodiversity
starts right here with over-consumption.
Well, we took an expedition of almost 20 people in 1996. Here is one
of our people from the exhibition department making a mold of this
tree. If you go into that rain forest, all the species of trees in
there were visited by at least one or more people of our expedition.
All these big trees—we could take you out into the forest and
actually show you these trees. They were photographed. They were studied.
There were all kinds of paintings done of the colors, and then we
did these bark peels to get the texture. And measurements were made.
And they came back and made scale models of the very big trees and
then they sent those models out and the models were brought up to
life-size. So everything in that forest was manufactured by our excellent
staff in the exhibition department, except for the taxidermied mammals,
the taxidermied birds, and the leaf litter. All the leaves that were
spread out, we brought those back, and then some of the twigs and
trunks of trees and so forth that are on the ground—those were
brought back by us. Naomi is right down here in the front. Naomi was
our science coordinator on the haul, and here she is taking notes
out in the field. We did a lot of interviews and took a lot of videos
of people. And we took a ton of notes—all of it to develop story
lines.
Here's our video crew out filming. We had countless hours of video
that we filmed and interviews that we did to get everybody's perspective—from
the people who, say, worked in the kitchen at the tourist facility,
to those people who ran the conservation project. So I'll let Willard
touch on the expedition a little more. It was big. We went over there
for about five weeks. We had to evacuate out through Cameroon because
they were shooting guns and missiles and everything else off in the
capital city of Bangui. But everybody got out safe and sound, and
we assembled that rain forest in record time. And I think David wants
to say a few words about the anxiety we had over that forest.
