http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071022/parenti

The Fight to Save Congo's Forests

Christian Parenti, Laura Hanna & Hidden Driver

Laura Hanna & Hidden Driver

In this VideoNation report, Christian Parenti looks at the roots of Congo's environmental crisis. At the heart of central Africa's great rainforests lies Kisangani, a small city in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) some 1,300 miles from the mouth of the Congo River. The town began as a Belgian trading post, Stanleyville, and was Conrad's model for Kurtz's inner station in Heart of Darkness. No roads connect Kisangani to the rest of the world; over the past two decades they have all collapsed and been retaken by the jungle. Even river navigation is blocked beyond here, as a massive course of falls stretches for sixty miles upstream. If the vast and isolated forests of the Congo Basin--the second-largest tropical woodlands on the planet--had a capital, it would be this sleepy city of crumbling colonial-era Art Deco buildings and empty boulevards. Down by the river women sell caterpillars to eat, but no one buys them. The sky is low and gray, but it never seems to rain. In the government buildings, yellow-eyed malarial old men sit in empty offices next to moldering stacks of handwritten files. There are no computers, electricity or, in many offices, even glass in the dark wooden window frames.