Here are some Landsat imagery of the southern section of the Virunga National Park in 1987, 2001 and then this year. Around the Volcanoes on the east side of the image the boundary of the park is very clear, with their being almost no buffer zone between local populations and the park. Evidence of volcanic eruptions is also visible in the centre of the image on the Northern shores of Lake Kivu.
Using Landsat viewer (if you’re interested in Remote Sensing just have a look around this data, it’s amazing:https://landsatlook.usgs.gov/ you do need an account but it’s quick to set up), I’m able to zoom right in and see what this different actually looks like on a much finer scale:
You can see the very obvious greener border area in straight lines and the markings of what appear to terraced farming/agricultural plots (a visual comparison in 2015 show this land as all forested/grassland at the same time of the year).
Next year my research will focus on quantifying the forest loss in the Virunga National Park region of the eastern DRC over time, and looking to attribute social drivers to that loss, using my work this year which has given me a fantastic grounding in the social institutions, complexities and issues in this region as a springboard. As part of my research this year I have read so many oversimplified versions of conflict in the DRC, or the reasons why people need to make sue of forest resources, and the local people are criminalised for these actions. Technically, the removal of any resources from the protected area is illegal, but as I write my discussion section for my current report I am really enjoying interrogating this criminilisation frame and asking what other choice these people are given, and what other types of action the political/social and environmental infrastructure at the time of events like the Rwandan Refugee Crisis and Rwandan Civil War in 1994 would have made available. It is one thing to criminalise a population in media articles when there is a potential alternative (although still not a good thing!), but another to oversimplify conflict dynamics when there has not and is not an alternative option available for such a dense human population (some of the densest in Africa (Grey & kaplers, 2005)).
- Grey, M., & Kaplers, J. (2005). Ranger based monitoring in the Virunga-Bwindi region of East-Central Africa: A simple data collection tool for park management
I think the onus is on the western audience (i.e us) who readily absorb these frames without question, nor think about the implications these frames could have for local people. Completing this research has forced me to reassess so many of my own biases and has changed how I view the world around me and media articles. There are implications of news media framing in Africa and the DRC that I argue are negative, and I’m looking forward to being able to share those findings!
Media framing is starting to be researched a bit more in literature (and I’m excited to be part of it); here is a really, really great paper:
- Braczokowski et al. (2018). Reach and messages of the world's largest ivory burn
And here’s a quick news article about if you don’t have time to read the whole thing although I thoroughly recommend it! https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180305093039.htm
