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/ARTS WEEKLY/FILM: Balancing Wildlife Conservation with Human Survival

Stephen Leahy

TORONTO, Oct 7 2003 (IPS) - This year’s Toronto International Environmental Film and Video Festival explores how African environmental and conservation issues, such as the bush meat trade, are deeply intertwined with the continent’s cultural and political realities.

"The Ghosts of Lomako" received its world premiere showing at this year’s festival. The Canadian production explores the complex dynamics of war, social custom, international funding and wildlife conservation in the context of a mission to save Bonobo apes from extinction in the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Canada has been making documentary films since the 1920s and its filmmakers have won many prestigious international awards. But until film student Mark Haslam started the Toronto International Environmental Film and Video Festival four years ago, there had never been a Canadian environmental film festival.

The Canadian environmental movement is not very diverse culturally, Haslam told IPS, and one of his goals is to present documentaries by and from indigenous people in Canada and elsewhere. This year, the 53 films and videos from 13 countries include a focus on Africa, as well as on environmental racism, indigenous people and mining, international development and other themes.

"We want the festival to celebrate the diversity of cultures and different ways of living in harmony with the earth from around the world," Haslam said.

But getting airtime on public and private broadcast networks can be a challenge for films that put environmental issues in a broader cultural context. Networks are not very creative and prefer simple wildlife stories or films about a heroic northern scientist doing research in the south without ever talking to any of the local people, Haslam says.

Not surprisingly, it can be very difficult for environmental filmmakers to get financing for their projects. However, Haslam believes the growing success of the Toronto festival among general audiences is a sign that the public has an appetite for documentaries about complex issues.

A full-house audience responded strongly to the 54-minute "Ghost" as it followed primatologist Jef Dupain of Belgium, Swiss conservationist Karl Ammann and Canadian bioethicist Kerry Bowman to the remote Lomako forest in the central Congo basin in November 2002. Dupain had established a research centre there in 1994 to study the endangered Bonobo ape – the last of the great apes to be discovered and the least understood.

Civil war broke out in 1997, and rebels forced Dupain to flee. The film documents his return to discover the fate of the Bonobos since that time.

Now controlled by the rebel Congolese Liberation Movement (CLM), the Lomako forest is the only place where Bonobos are found in the wild.

"It was the first time westerners had been to Lomako since the war," says Kenton Vaughan, the director of "Ghost".

"Although this area had been under rebel control for a couple of years, a CLM general insisted we take two soldiers with us," Vaughan told IPS. "We had no real information on the situation there regarding the people or the Bonobos."

In "Ghost", the people of the Lomako tell of their struggle to survive the war and how difficult their lives are without the aid organisations that used to provide medical, education and other services. With few natural resources in the region, Bonobos and other game are hunted for food and for the commercial bush meat trade.

Some villages did not traditionally hunt Bonobos, and others had earned money helping scientists and conservationists from the North study the animals and the forest. But when no one returned after the fighting stopped, they gave up hope, says Vaughan.

Nothing remains of Dupain’s research center, and a two-week survey reveals that perhaps 75 percent of the resident Bonobos are gone. When Dupain meets with village elders to ask them to protect the endangered apes, they want assurances that they will get hospitals, medicines and other aid. While Dupain and others can get money for conservation, they try and fail to get any humanitarian aid.

"I’d like to bring the big shots of conservation organisations that are trying to stop the bush meat trade here so they can see how complex it is," Karl Ammann says in the film.

"When you see the conditions here, you have to do something," Dupain says at the end of the film. "We have to focus on people first."

Bioethist Kerry Bowman, who attended the screening, said the experience of traveling to the Lomako remains deeply troubling for him nearly one year later.

"We have a moral duty to help but the complexity makes it very, very difficult."

The real question "Ghost" asks is if it is possible to both save an endangered species and find a way for the local people to sustain themselves for the long term, says Vaughan.

Ghost does not answer that question, scrupulously avoiding simple answers to complex issues. "Nature films in general try to make people feel good. I think people are smart enough to want to see what’s happening in the real world, even if it’s bleak," the director said.

Others say Africa’s bush meat problem is blown out of proportion. "The animals will come back if there’s habitat," says Craig Foster, an environmental filmmaker from Cape Town, South Africa.

The most pressing issue is the loss of habitat from logging and conversion of forests to agriculture, Foster said in an interview.

Foster and his brother Damon’s film "Cosmic Africa" is a celebration of African folklore and explores the deep connections humans have with the cosmos.

Documentary films will not solve the conservation problems Africa faces, he admits. "People have strong reactions to our films but that doesn’t make them act any differently."

A connection to nature such as visiting wilderness areas, however, does change people, he says. "Bans don’t work, conservation has to be a way of life."