Page 7 - Local Voices, Local Choices Excerpt

The birth of Tacare 5 How a chimpanzee study led to Tacare
In the late 1980s I flew over the tiny 14 square mile (about 36 square kilo- meter) Gombe National Park and the surrounding area in a small plane. I was deeply shocked. When I began the research in 1960, the area was part of the forest belt that stretched across equatorial Africa to the west coast. But now I looked down on a small oasis of green forest—the park—sur- rounded by bare, treeless hills.
It was clear that, thanks to high population growth, there were more people than the land could support. And their numbers were swollen by refugees from the conflicts in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The people were too poor to buy food elsewhere; their land was over-farmed and largely infertile. Women had to walk further and further from their villages in search of wood for fuel, adding hours of labor to their already difficult days cooking for their large families. Look- ing for new land to clear for their crops, people had turned to ever steeper and more unsuitable hillsides. With the trees gone, soil was washed away during the rainy season, causing bad erosion and frequent landslides. The streams that originate from the Rift Escarpment watershed and empty into Lake Tanganyika had become increasingly silted.
All of this meant that the chimpanzees were more or less trapped within the tiny national park, cut off from other groups. There could be no exchange of females between groups—which prevents inbreeding— and with only some 100 individuals remaining, the long-term viability of the Gombe population was at risk. Yet how could we even hope to pro- tect them while the people living around the borders were struggling to survive, envious of the lush, forested area from which they were excluded? That’s when it hit me that unless we could help the people find ways of making a living without destroying their environment, we could not hope to protect chimpanzees, their forests, or anything else. And so the idea for Tacare began.
The first discussions were with Garth Bowman, but when he had to return to Europe to school his children, George Strunden took over. He