Into the Jungle- A tour of the projects

Which was to tour the STEWARD project activities in the village.  For me it was exceptionally useful to understand what had been done so far, and Kortor, probably because it was closest to the best of the remaining forest, had embraced a lot of the activity.  We wandered down to a large stand of gallery forest and saw how a tree nursery was being developed – various indigenous species being nurtured from seedlings under the canopy.  An area around the village had been demarcated as a community forest – a shared resource managed through the chief for everyone.  While the nurseryman explained the progress, a couple of monkeys watched us from their perches high in the canopy.

Next, we trouped into the community forest itself.  Mainly down in a small stream valley, the vegetation was thick and dense, but in a mature way rather than a scrubby thicket.  The huge buttresses reached up above our heads to support the mammoth tree trunks, the canopy shading out most of the light, but plenty of  vegetation thrived in the space below.  You could hear from the chatter of bird and frogs that there was a lot of fauna here too. We reached an area which had once been cleared but was still part of the community forest and the destination for many of the nursery saplings.  Amongst the natural trees, fruit crops were encouraged and banana and plantain were evident in great numbers.  Out in this more open space we could look back at the huge gallery trees and sense their scale and spread.  It was pointed out to us that you could see denser patches of leaves in the canopy, which were nests pulled together by chimpanzees – barely a kilometre from the centre of the village.  To an outsider this was a draw dropping moment, to come so close to one of the world’s most iconic species, a vanguard for conservation but to the villagers they were a bit of a pest.  It is bad enough having dumb insects and rats coming in to your fields and house to steal your food, but to have as intelligent a creature as a Chimpanzee causing you problems was intolerable.  Another conservation conundrum.

In the nursery

A rich green environment

Forest boundary

Spot the Chimpanzee nests

Trooping through the jungle

Kortor girl

Into the Jungle – First explorations

Although it was dark I could see the ferry terminal was tucked underneath a long concrete bridge and Haba drove across this into the city proper and wound his way steeply uphill for about twenty minutes.  It was not that far a distance but almost every inch of journey was on heavily potholed roads.  These roads were full of taxis and belching buses, and although it was getting past 8pm, most of the roadside stalls were doing brisk business, including the bars.  We eventually did leave the hubbub behind as we climbed through a quieter residential area.  At long last, Haba did a hairpin turn and drove fiercely up a concrete ramp into the forecourt of the Hill Valley Hotel.  Hill Valley – what a name.

Clinging to the side of a steep hill, it was built on about four levels, and each building had three or four storeys. It had a heavily wood panelled reception and it took a while for my formalities to be sorted out, I then went up to the highest part of the hotel and was shown a rather grimy room, again with dark decoration and deeply varnished wooden furniture.  It was getting late but I felt I needed some food so headed downstairs;  a very tall Englishman greeted me as  I walked in to the restaurant; this was Hugo who was to be working with me on the project.

I was still a little sketchy about what was happening.  The project was funded by USAID and was run by the US Forest Service (USFS) International Program.  But it contained a lot of formal partners, including my own contractors, Thomson Reuters, and for this next week or so, some external organisations who were contributing to the project.

Hill Valley Hotel

Hill Valley Hotel

What was the project?  It was called STEWARD or Sustainable and Thriving Environments for West African Development.  The basic premise was that the Guinea Forest was an important biome for biodiversity and potential climate chance mitigation, but also an important resource for local communities and contained some rich mineral veins and logging potential.  The project was to try and find ways to preserve what was left of pristine forest in two main areas, conserve the rest and improve the cultivation and natural resource management by those communities so that the pressure on removing the rest was halted and the forests could be safeguarded as a sustainable resource for generations to come.

This was a tall order; the pressures on the system were great as logging the great gallery trees was eating away fast at the remaining good “jungle”.  However, the whole ecosystem was not really jungle.  Particularly in the northern zone, there was a proper dry season, and away from the rivers the huge tropical trees could not survive.  The predominant natural landscape was a thick woody bushland, petering out over areas where soils were very bad, or where localised seasonal inundations would be too stressful for trees, leaving a grassy lowland (or in the French a bas fond).  In this complex of natural vegetation types, rapidly expanding populations using mainly shifting agriculture had degraded the vegetation.  Fires regularly burned in the dry season too, some of which used to clear scrub but could get out of control.

STEWARD had built up a series of practices with local communities to conserve the land, intensify agriculture through better practices of manuring and compost, replant trees in community forests, arrange people to mobilise to control fire breaking out.  And because these areas were transboundary – that is the northern area straddled the Guinea/Sierra Leone border, and the southern one crossed between Liberia and Guinea, issues of harmonizing laws in all these countries was vital.  There was no point in recommending something on one side of a border only for the other side to continue desecrating the environment.