For years writing fiction, I found it difficult not to feel that I was rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. And yet optimism comes easily for me, if only because I long ago decided it’s a better evolutionary strategy than defeatism. Though I’ve read too much about the environment and listened to too many podcasts from Nature and Scientific American not to feel a little pessimistic, I never saw myself joining the ranks of nature and science writers predicting our imminent extinction. While such work is necessary, it often fails to harness people’s enthusiasm and energy. I’m reminded of this when, over dinner, I tell friends about ocean acidity and fatal PCB levels in newborn dolphins; their eyes glaze over and they reach for the wine.

A few years ago, I decided to write a nonfiction book about environmental concerns, one that might focus concretely on what we can do to make things better. While educating myself in conservationism, I heard about several conservationists trying to protect endangered bonobos in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Bonobos are fascinating creatures. They share approximately 98.6% of our DNA, are matriarchal, don’t go to war or commit infanticide (unlike ourselves and our other cousin the chimpanzee), and even, some primatologists argue, have the capacity for language.

In fact, I’ve now had the pleasure of meeting a few, and they gazed into my eyes with a look of wariness and curiosity that I’ve seen on many a first date (suggesting intelligence, to me at least). Due to the wars in the Congo, they’ve been hunted to near extinction. Even if the bonobos (alongside the chimpanzee) weren’t our closest living relative, I’d advocate for their protection.

However, when I learned about conservation efforts, what most caught my attention was how the bonobo served as a flagship species to protect the Congo’s rainforests. The idea of “flagship species” emerged from conservation biology. This works as follows: By elevating the profile of one endangered species we can protect the biodiversity of their habitat. The importance of tropical rainforests is undeniable.

Current estimates suggest that deforestation releases as much carbon into the atmosphere as the world’s transportation combined, and that tropical rainforests absorb nearly 20 percent of the carbon released each year from fossil fuels. And yet the tropical rainforests are quickly disappearing.

In Southeast Asia, where the population is booming, they are being mowed down for highly lucrative palm oil plantations (read the ingredients for everything in your house and you’ll see how common palm oil is). In Brazil, they are being cleared for logging, cattle grazing, and soy plantations.

In the Congo, which occupies the majority of the Congo River Basin (an area containing approximately 20% percent of the world’s remaining tropical rainforest), war kept many logging companies out. However, with increasing political stability this has changed. Now, if your eyes are glazing over, bear with me.

The conservationists I have been studying with, and whom I will soon be traveling into the rainforest, have managed to help establish, with minimal funding, two immense nature reserves: that of Sankuru (30,569 square km, larger than Massachusetts or Vancouver Island, and “the world’s largest continuous protected area for great apes”) as well as the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve (4,783 square km, an area larger than Rhode Island, or more than nine times the Island of Montreal). Go to google maps and type “Sankuru Nature Reserve, DRC,” and you’ll get a sense of the size (and remember that, due to the Mercator projection, countries near the equator appear much smaller than they really are; the DRC is nearly three and half times the size of Texas). Furthermore, the DRC’s government allocated carbon rights to the reserves, freeing up conservationists to work with international organizations for funding.

After I learned about this, I conducted numerous interviews with Sally Jewell Coxe, the president of the Bonobo Conservation Initiative, and wrote up a sixty-page proposal that I sent to my agent. My agent then told me that she could probably sell it, but not for enough to make it worthwhile. She conveyed to me that people preferred fuzzy animal stories, and asked for a rewrite. A year and half later, over dinner with my editor at Milkweed Editions, I told him about the project. Within the week, I was under contract.

Finally, after numerous delays due to elections in the Congo, safety concerns and funding for conservationists, I will be going to the reserves with them. Over the next few months, I will write about my travels and research in this blog, and will discuss the following subjects:

•Who the conservationists are and what inspired their work.
•Bonobos and why they are essential to the wellbeing of the rainforest.
•The impact of the wars in the Congo on the environment.
•The ways that conservationists must work both locally and globally.
•How, to save a species, you have to build a local economy to protect it.
•Priests, shamans, and Congolese pop stars who defend bonobos.
•Ways that carbon credit models can help the rainforests.
•The best books on the Congo’s history and on conservationism.
•The challenges to researching and writing a book about the Congo.
•What it’s like to travel by dugout, and life on the Congo River 110 years after Heart of Darkness.

If you want to learn more about the conservationists, go to bonobo.org. You can also visit my website, dybechard.com, for information about my work, or Twitter @denibechard, where I give travel updates and review what I’m reading by quoting the lines I find interesting.

Lastly, I will be carrying a satellite GPS tracker that posts my location online. You can stalk me here, and try to find my hotel in Kigali, Rwanda, where I am awaiting the next phase of the journey.

About the Author

Deni Y. Béchard was born in British Columbia to French Canadian and American parents and grew up in both Canada and the United States. He has also traveled in over forty countries.

He is soon to publish Cures for Hunger (2012, Milkweed Editions), a memoir about growing up with his father who was a bank robber. His first novel, Vandal Love, (2006, Doubleday Canada) was published in French and Arabic, and won the 2007 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, both for the best first book in Canada and for the best overall first book in the British Commonwealth. It was also nominated for Le Prix du Grand Public Salon du Livre Montréal/ La Presse, 2008, as well as the French version of Canada Reads (Le Combat des Livres, 2009). On four occasions, he has been a recipient of Canada Council and Québec Arts Council Grants, and he has been a fellow at MacDowell, Jentel, Ledig House, the Anderson Center, Vermont Studio Center, and the Edward Albee Foundation.

He has done freelance reporting from Northern Iraq as well as from Afghanistan, and his articles, blogs, stories and translations have appeared in a number of magazines and newspapers, among them the National Post, Maisonneuve, Le Devoir, the Harvard Review, and the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. He is currently doing research in the Congo rainforest as he works on a book about conservationism, Empty Hands, Open Arms: how saving the Congo’s bonobos can help save the world.