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Oct. 22, 2003. 01:00 AM
When humans are endangered, so are the apes
VINAY MENON
A baby is lying on his back: eyes wide, arms flailing, toothy grin. He seems laugh with anticipation as his belly is tickled.
That's the image that stayed with me after watching The Ghosts Of Lomako, a poignant and thought-provoking documentary that launches a new season of CBC's venerable The Nature Of Things With David Suzuki (7 p.m. tonight).
More on the baby in a minute.
The Ghosts Of Lomako follows Belgian primatologist Jef Dupain as he returns to his research camp in Upper Congo. He is joined by conservationist Karl Ammann and Canadian bioethicist Kerry Bowman.
The backstory: In 1998, Dupain fled the Democratic Republic of Congo (then Zaire) because of escalating violence and a brutal civil war.
When rebel forces stormed and looted Dupain's camp in the Lomako forest, he reluctantly abandoned four years of research on the bonobo, a great ape and endangered species.
Flash forward to November, 2002: With cameras filming, Dupain returns to Lomako to see what became of the bonobos. As he says: "If you want to do something, you have to do something, even if the conditions are extremely difficult."
From a conservation perspective, the conditions could not be more difficult. The Congolese remain in a state of collective trauma; the civil war, estimated to have already claimed more than 3 million lives, continues to destabilize the region.
In the midst of this profound human suffering, the continent's great apes, affected by illness and encroachment, are now being commercially hunted for "bushmeat" as entire ecosystems are destroyed.
Displaced colonies of primates are scrambling to find safe habitats as areas of the rainforest, once remote and untouched, are broached by foreign logging companies.
Logging companies build roads. These roads are used by hunters. And, suddenly, there's an export mechanism in place to satisfy the growing demand for bushmeat that already threatens biodiversity throughout the Congo Basin.
In the documentary, there's a scene in which locals flock to a market to sell flora and fauna. Crocodiles, exotic birds, monkeys — as Ammann notes, "everything (with) some protein is being eaten."
It's easy for us to frown upon this, even shake our heads with moral contempt, but the concept of "endangered species" has no resonance when somebody is equally endangered.
The Ghosts Of Lomako attempts to navigate this paradox: How do Western conservationists rescue animals from brink of extinction when indigenous people are also on the verge of obliteration?
The end of tonight's film, which was written, directed, and produced by Kenton Vaughan and executive produced by Gordon Henderson of Toronto's 90th Parallel Productions, should give you a sense of the unstable conditions.
To say there are vast cultural differences between "us and them" is not, as some would argue, an inherently racist exercise: It's fact. (If my world view was defined by religious fatalism and spiritual animism, I probably wouldn't dote on my two Burmese cats and frequently drop $150 at PetSmart.)
Which brings us back to the baby. It was actually a young bonobo. And, in the film, it's playing in the lap of Bowman, a bioethicist at University of Toronto and founder of The Canadian Great Ape Alliance.
Watching that bonobo, it's hard not to be floored by the similarities — expressions, mannerisms, behaviours — to that of a human child. Of course, this makes perfect sense when you realize we share about 98 per cent of the same DNA.
"We are as closely related to bonobos as any creature on earth," Bowman told me yesterday. "They are our kin. To fully understand what it means to be human, we need to look backwards. They are a window into our evolutionary past."
What does this say about them? What does it say about us? In another scene, an adult bonobo cools off in a muddy river, eyes drifting up into the heavens.
"We know they experience life in a very similar way to us," says Bowman. "And this raises deep ethical questions. How we can sit by and let them be massacred?"
