Peace, Love, and Understanding
Although war and insecurity have made it difficult to survey their habitat, the Bonobo population has almost certainly declined precipitously in the last thirty years. From 50,000 to fewer than 5,000 of these slightly smaller and mellower chimps may remain in the wild. Head over to the laudable Bonobo Conservation Initiative (BCI) to learn more, and perhaps to adopt a bonobo. Mongabay.com recently posted a detailed report on one of the Bonobo Conservation Initiative’s most encouraging new achievements: the creation of a nearly 2,000-square-mile rainforest protected area, the Kokolopori Bonobo Preserve, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It has been a model of community conservation: “Every step of its creation—from biological surveys to reserve management—has been run by the local Congolese NGO and villages of Kokolopori.” Two years earlier, the BCI had also also instrumental in the establishment of the Sankuru Nature Reserve in the DRC, a bonobo preserve larger than the state of Massachusetts, encompassing 11,803 square miles of tropical rainforest, extremely rich in biodiversity. The threat to the bonobo and the BCI campaign to save it was the subject of a recent episode of NPR’s Diane Rehm Show, which can be heard here.
