Over 100 new villages “discovered” in the Democratic Republic of Congo
Posted April 18th, 2008 by Antonia MalchikThere’s something to be said for bringing to light undiscovered places. Saying that goes against my grain. As a wilderness lover, I’m always itching to walk into territory where other people aren’t, and to keep those others from coming for as long as possible. But reading this story from the BBC has me rethinking my priorities. On official maps of the Democratic Republic of Congo, there are areas so thickly forested (or so inaccessible due to ongoing conflicts) that existent villages haven’t been ‘discovered.’
To the traveler’s mind, this automatically sounds like a pretty good thing. But it turns out that forestry and timber contracts are being handed out partly on the basis that there aren’t any living people in the areas under question. A new mapping technique, using GPS and local villagers instead of satellite, has found that an area thought to have only 30 villages actually contains at least 190. The Rainforest Foundation is behind the effort, and points out the importance of establishing prior claims before logging and mining contracts in the resource-rich Democratic Republic of Congo are handed out willy-nilly to foreign corporations.
This story seems to me to be part of a wider worldwide tale, in which travelers and travel writers have brought previously unknown cultures to the world’s attention, and in doing so have helped slow the resource-grabbing (or rape, or theft, or whatever you want to call it) of those areas by faceless conglomerates.
In our world, where there is no real undiscovered country, no real new places to explore, the intrusion of travelers has arguably led to an expansion of consciousness, where people of any geographic location are given a smidgeon more power to determine their own fate and the use of the land they live on.
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April 18th, 2008 at 11:43 pm
I am so glad that we can tell where those villages are and curb the rape of the land. Does this mean that the areas that are not populated will continue to be destroyed? I suppose that I am asking for too much.
April 19th, 2008 at 10:44 am
It probably is asking too much for the world to come to its senses anytime soon. But every little speck of knowledge and awareness helps, right? We’ve got to be optimists or we’d all just have to bury our heads under the covers every morning!