Virunga. It is actually Africa's oldest and most beautiful National Park. If you were looking for the National Park that started the drive in Africa to preserve at least some of it's natural history then this is it.
It covers a large chunk of the rainforest in the Democratic Republic of Congo and is home to quarter of the remaining population of mountain gorillas. The land of 'King Solomon's Mines', it is the most diverse national park in Africa, thanks to its long history. If Africa has managed to keep part of its land untouched by the ravages of mankind's industrial occupation of the land then this is the place.
However, this long and glorious history may soon be destroyed. The UK oil company Soco is planning to drill within the borders of the park for oil, hence the title of my blog.
Soco claims that it will provide a boast to the local economy and will do minimal damage to the environment. However, anyone who does a little research into even ultra-modern drill techniques will know that the sites of the drilling will be striped of trees, the water quality in the surrounding area will decrease and the noise pollution alone will drive wildlife from the area, assuming that it can make its way across the roads that will be driven into the heart of the forest.
There are also concerns that it will do quite the opposite for the local economy and population as several thousand people rely on the park for their food (they are allowed controlled gathering within its borders) and many more rely on the lake it contains for their water. The lake that will be one of the first points of contamination if the pollution makes it into the water supply.
The oil field will also encourage poaching as it will make what is under the ground more valuable than the wildlife on top of it. Time and experience has show that the best way to prevent poaching is to provide jobs for the local people guarding the creatures and acting as guides for eco-tourists. As Congo's civil unrest finally begins to calm down, the best way to reunite the people is to give them something they can be passionate about apart from money because money all to often goes back to be the realm of the haves and haves not, which restarts the violence. The wildlife and the beauty of the land that they have been given to guard is, to my mind, the best receiver for that passion as it can give something for those that were either side of the divide of the unrest something that they can talk about with each other without risk of blame and anger entering the conversation.
There is also the fact that the scientists who study the global weather patterns have noticed that there is a direct correlation between the destruction by logging of the Congo rainforest and the increase in the frequency and violence of the storms that are racking Europe and the East Coast of America. I'm sure the oil below Virunga will provide the board members and share holders of Soco with some very nice quarterly statements but how much worth will they be when the hurricanes blow your house down on top of you? Or when the American government sues you for damages to the Eastern Sea Board?
Then there's the threat of Ebola to consider. Scientists still have no idea where this hideous disease comes from or how it spreads. All that is know about it is that every now and then someone stumbles out of the depths of the jungle vomiting up their stomach and spreading it to every one that comes into contact with them. So I would say that carving a road into the heart of the rainforest and setting up an industrial site with a large population is the height of folly, unless you don't care about being remembered as the person who gave the green light to the project that unleashed something worse than the bubonic plague.
Finally, if Soco is having to go so far abroad to find a new source of oil, coupled with the drive to introduce Fracking to England's green and pleasant land, does that not give the impression that the current oil fields are all running dry? If that is so then surely, instead of scrambling around destroying the last few pristine places of the world, it's time to start really researching alternatives to oil and gas. Or is mankind going to continue to push aside the problems, saying 'let our children deal with the problems we could have solved'? What happened to Mankind the Great Explorer and Problem Solver?
If you agree that letting Soco destroy somebody else's back yard is a crime then the WWF is running a partition online. Signing up takes less than two minutes (I should know, I've done it).
No comments:
Post a Comment