The Empty Forest Syndrome

Abstract

In the early evening of July 22, 2007, rangers in Virunga National Park, Democratic Republic of Congo, heard the sound of gunfire ringing down from the highlands. The next morning, they discovered the bodies of three female mountain gorillas lying in rain-soaked, dense montane vegetation. Each of the females had been shot, but the pregnant subadult also had been badly burned—perhaps to offend the rangers. Officials believe the killings were politically motivated and probably carried out by Hutu extremists who, since the end of the Rwandan Civil War, have been decimating the forest habitat to support their illegal charcoal trade. The park’s mountain gorillas teeter on the brink of extinction—only 350 individuals remain in the Virunga Mountains, which includes protected habitat in Virunga National Park, DRC; Mgahinga Park, Uganda; and Volcanoes Park, Rwanda; and another 320 survive in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. The appalling objective of the Hutu extremists is the total extermination of the park’s gorillas and other endangered species, in hopes that the West will lose interest in the region once they are devoid of wildlife—a phenomenon known as “empty-forest syndrome.” The day after the three females were discovered, Newsweek’s Africa Bureau Chief Scott Johnson accompanied devastated park officials as they continued their search for the remaining individuals in the troop. They found the silverback male shot in the head. His body lay with one arm outstretched and the other held close to his chest, suggesting that he had been beating his chest and vocalizing a deep bark to warn his family when his killers executed him. The image of this silverback rising from a resting position to see through the dense foliage, to hear, to smell the danger that he sensed as he began beating his chest, immediately reminded me of the mountain gorilla group at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The exhibit depicts a troop of gorillas in those very same mountains and features a silverback male standing, responding to an intrusion by beating his chest to sound the alarm to a group of three females— one feeding on vegetation, another resting against a tree with a juvenile nearby. The group was the realization of taxidermist Carl E. Akeley’s lifelong ambition to create a seamless depiction of the natural world. When the exhibit opened in 1936, the New York Times Sunday Magazine claimed that the exhibit was so accurate and visceral that one could “almost hear the drip of water from recent rains.” outlo ok