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Even now, the Ndoki is almost entirely surrounded by logging concessions. Moreover, had an international convention not banned the sale of ivory in 1989, poachers almost assuredly would have braved the swamps and rivers and invaded the region, which is among the last places in central Africa with substantial numbers of elephants. Finally, a 30-year dry spell and overgrazing to the north have pushed migrant human populations southward through Central African Republic and into northern Congo, ever closer to the edges of the Ndoki.
In response to these pressures, Fay began working in 1989 with the World Bank, the U.S. government, the Japanese scientists and conservation organizations to encourage the Congolese government to establish an Ndoki park. The goal would be to protect the core of the region while allowing some tourism on the more accessible fringes. The involvement of the World Bank, however, aroused the ire of groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund and Greenpeace, which argued that the project might bring on the human intrusions it was designed to prevent.
So I put aside my reservations and arranged to join Fay on an expedition into the Ndoki in late May. He planned to renew his search for two unnamed clearings in the interior of the forest that showed up on aerial maps but that he had failed to locate in a foray two years earlier. He also hoped to test a battery-operated geographical positioning device that he would need during a longer surveying expedition later this summer.
Our trip begins in Ouesso, a frontier town of 13,000 on the Sangha River in northern Congo. There three Americans -- Fay, Karen Lotz, a photographer, and I -- set off in a 14-m (46-ft.) motorized dugout canoe for the nine-hour trip up the Sangha River, past a logging camp to Bomassa, a Pygmy village adjacent to the headquarters being set up for the proposed park.
Outside interest in northern Congo forests dates to the turn of the century; colonial records include an outraged letter by an expatriate who demanded compensation from the French government for the death of his son, who was eaten by cannibals. But intensive logging began only in the mid-1980s. "If the loggers weren't here, we could leave as well," says Fay. He finds it frustrating that logging continues despite studies commissioned by the World / Bank and the Congolese showing that almost all of these operations lose money and cheat the government by welshing on debts to state-owned companies. As if that were not enough, Libyan employees of Socalib, a Libyan-Congolese logging company, were implicated in the 1989 bombing of a passenger jet over Niger. Scores of Congolese people died. "Forestry's been great for this country," remarks Fay sarcastically. "They cut the forests, stiff the Congolese on taxes and debts, and then kill the citizens."