| Popis: |
Have you been to a football game lately? Think of the last time you were in an arena that seated fifty or even a hundred thousand people. That many people can make a lot of noise, but of course only represent a tiny piece of humanity today. If we could convince all the bonobos in the world to attend such a game, you could not come close to filling even the smallest professional football stadium. Our closest living relative is slipping off the precipice; their extinction in our own lifetime is a real possibility. The best estimates of the current bonobo population in the wild are somewhere between 5,000–50,000 individuals; all live in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the only country in which they are found indigenously (Teleki and Baldwin 1979, Kano 1984, Van Krunkelsven 2001). While it might seem an administrative blessing to have bonobos concentrated in one single large country, this rare species still shares all the problems of population fragmentation, habitat loss, and victimization due to the bushmeat trade practice by their African cousins. In addition, by being concentrated in one country, this species’ survival is dependent upon the state of one single nation – for better or worse. The ubiquitous threats to African apes seem particularly acute in the case of the bonobo as a result of DRC’s ill fortune during the past decade. However, the DRC has begun recovering from a decade of wars and now has the chance to jump from an impoverished victim of an oft forgotten war between seven nations, to a regional power as it struggles to redevelop its shattered economy through what to many must seem like an infinite supply of natural resources (Clark 2002). What will the |
