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Kerry Bowman is a Canadian bioethicist and environmentalist based in Toronto, Ontario.
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Kerry Bowman is a Canadian bioethicist and environmentalist based in Toronto, Ontario.
Bowman holds an academic appointment with The University of Toronto in Family and Community Medicine and serves with The University of Toronto's School of the Environment. [1] He also works with patients, families and health care teams as a clinical bioethicist.[ citation needed ]
Bowman follows a range of bioethical issues, including end-of-life decision making, ethical questions in emerging technology, such as genomics, gene drive and CRISPR-Cas9, [2] cloning and reproductive ethics. He is also concerned with a variety of animal and environmental ethical questions, particularly emerging zoonotic diseases, tropical forest loss and de-extinction. [3]
Bowman's role as an ethicist informs the work he does as an environmentalist, which focuses primarily on the interface of human cultures with conservation initiatives. He is presently working on major projects in both Eastern Congo and the Western Amazon both involving indigenous and local communities establishing stewardship over their forests. Bowman has done extensive fieldwork with a range of species; including all four great ape species in both Indonesia and Central Africa. [4] He has observed in their natural habitat the Sumatran rhinoceros (Aceh, Sumatra, Indonesia, 1981), the Bactrian camel (Gashun Gobi Desert, western China, 2012), the Javan rhino (Ujung Kulon National Park, Java, Indonesia, 2013), as well as all species of big cats, including the snow leopard (Hemis National Park, Ladakh region, India, 2015).[ citation needed ]
A former member of the board of directors for the Jane Goodall Institute of Canada, [5] Bowman is an ethics consultant to Jane Goodall Institute Global and the founding president of the Forest Health Alliance [6] (formerly called Canadian Great Ape Alliance).[ citation needed ] With the original goal of saving the great apes from extinction through a direct Congolese partnership, this organization operates and oversees projects in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) that are designed to reflect local cultures, as well as economic and political realities. This includes the Great Ape Habitat Connectivity Project, which has been developing a habitat corridor for the eastern lowland gorilla and eastern chimpanzees to promote gene flow and reduce deforestation. [7]
Bowman established the Kahuzi-Biega Environmental School in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in 2003. The initiative was designed to give young students an opportunity to acquire a basic education as well as an understanding of their role in environmental and wildlife conservation. [8] "There's absolutely no way of protecting the environment without working with local people and enriching and protecting human communities", [9] Bowman told reporters at a 2011 press conference.
Bowman was featured in a 2002 Discovery Channel documentary called "Bushmeat," which traced the path of the illicit bushmeat trade from the Congo Basin to an underground meat market in Cameroon and beyond, [10] and in "The Ghosts of Lomako", [11] a 2003 Nature of Things documentary in which Bowman traveled to the Democratic Republic of Congo to study the endangered bonobo ape. He also appeared [12] in "Gorilla Doctors" (2014), a CBC The Nature of Things documentary focusing on the protection of mountain gorillas in Virunga, Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda. He is presently working on two more documentaries.
Bowman is currently working with Office for The Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) [13] on an approach called Anticipatory Action, [14] a set of actions taken to prevent or mitigate potential humanitarian disasters before acute impacts are felt. Through on-site fieldwork in fragile states, he is exploring both the ethics of this as well as many of the social, cultural and qualitative realities associated with such interventions.
Bowman previously served with United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), as author with the fourth Global Environment Outlook (GEO-4) in 2007 [15] and as a contributing author and expert reviewer with GEO-5 in 2012. [16] He was also involved [17] in Global Environment Outlook 6, examining the connection between human health and the environment.
Since 2010, Bowman has joined a number of international delegations to North Korea (DPRK) that focused on environmental improvement and youth environmental education in relation to environmentally improved agricultural and environmental practice. "What is remarkable," Bowman notes, "is that DPRK may be the only country in the world that has adopted organic, sustainable agriculture as a national policy". [18]
Bowman has recently turned his attention to the relationship between the protection of indigenous land [19] and its environmental/climatic benefits, as well as the negative climatic impacts of environmental degradation in the Amazon rainforest. [20] [21] Says Bowman: "The Indigenous peoples of the Amazon and the world are one of our best hopes to protect our forests, secure biodiversity and slow the environmental calamity we are facing." [22] This work has brought him into the range of some of the world's last remaining isolated and uncontacted indigenous communities. Although never seeking to make contact, he is one of the few Canadian researchers to have actually seen uncontacted people, and has spent time with indigenous groups of the western Amazon, [23] including those only just recently contacted by the outside world. [24] His work has included remote regions of Papua New Guinea, as well as into the eastern Congo's Ituri rainforest, where he cohabited among the Mbuti pygmies.
Coltan is a dull black metallic ore from which the elements niobium and tantalum are extracted. The niobium-dominant mineral in coltan is columbite, and the tantalum-dominant mineral is tantalite.
Bushmeat is meat from wildlife species that are hunted for human consumption. Bushmeat represents a primary source of animal protein and a cash-earning commodity for inhabitants of humid tropical forest regions in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Bushmeat is an important food resource in poor, rural communities.
South Kivu is one of 26 provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Its capital is Bukavu.
Tropical rainforests are rainforests that occur in areas of tropical rainforest climate in which there is no dry season – all months have an average precipitation of at least 60 mm – and may also be referred to as lowland equatorial evergreen rainforest. True rainforests are typically found between 10 degrees north and south of the equator ; they are a sub-set of the tropical forest biome that occurs roughly within the 28-degree latitudes. Within the World Wildlife Fund's biome classification, tropical rainforests are a type of tropical moist broadleaf forest that also includes the more extensive seasonal tropical forests.
The Bili apes, or Bondo mystery apes, were names given in 2003 in sensational reports in the popular media to a purportedly new species of highly aggressive, giant ape supposedly inhabiting the wetlands and savannah around of the village of Bili in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. "The apes nest on the ground like gorillas, but they have a diet and features characteristic of chimpanzees", according to a 2003 National Geographic article.
Uncontacted peoples are groups of indigenous peoples living without sustained contact with neighbouring communities and the world community. Groups who decide to remain uncontacted are referred to as indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation. Legal protections make estimating the total number of uncontacted peoples challenging, but estimates from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in the UN and the non-profit group Survival International point to between 100 and 200 uncontacted peoples numbering up to 10,000 individuals total. A majority of uncontacted peoples live in South America, particularly northern Brazil, where the Brazilian government and National Geographic estimate between 77 and 84 tribes reside.
The eastern lowland gorilla or Grauer's gorilla is a Critically Endangered subspecies of eastern gorilla endemic to the mountainous forests of eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Important populations of this gorilla live in the Kahuzi-Biega and Maiko National Parks and their adjacent forests, the Tayna Gorilla Reserve, the Usala forest and on the Itombwe Massif.
The Congolian rainforests are a broad belt of lowland tropical moist broadleaf forests which extend across the basin of the Congo River and its tributaries in Central Africa.
The Great Apes Survival Partnership (GRASP) is a UNEP and UNESCO-led World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) Type II Partnership, established in 2001, that aims to conserve the non-human great apes and their habitats—primarily forested tropical ecosystems that provide important services to humanity, through pro-poor conservation and sustainable development strategies.
The Albertine Rift montane forests is a tropical moist broadleaf forest ecoregion in east-central Africa. The ecoregion covers the mountains of the northern Albertine Rift, and is home to distinct Afromontane forests with high biodiversity.
Karl Ammann is a Swiss conservationist, wildlife photographer, author and documentary film producer. He initiated a campaign focusing on the African bush meat trade, which gained worldwide attention. As a conservation activist, he has specialized in investigative journalism involving undercover exposés dealing with the illegal wildlife trade. In the process, he has exposed NGOs and international conventions for their lack of effectiveness and the promotion of feel-good tales.
The wildlife of the Democratic Republic of the Congo includes its flora and fauna, comprising a large biodiversity in rainforests, seasonally flooded forests and grasslands.
The central chimpanzee or the tschego is a subspecies of chimpanzee. It can be found in Central Africa, mostly in Gabon, Cameroon, Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The Great Lakes Twa, also known as Batwa, Abatwa or Ge-Sera, are a Bantu ethnic group native to the African Great Lakes region on the border of Central and East Africa. As an indigenous pygmy people, the Twa are generally assumed to be the oldest surviving population of the Great Lakes region. Current populations of Great Lakes Twa people live in the states of Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and the eastern portion of the Democratic Republic of Congo. In 2000 they numbered approximately 80,000 people, making them a significant minority group in these countries. The largest population of Twa is located in Burundi estimated in 2008 at 78,071 people.
Mount Kahuzi is an extinct volcano in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is within the Kahuzi-Biéga National Park, a World Heritage Site.
Deforestation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is an environmental conflict of international importance. Most of the deforestation takes place in the Congo Basin, which has the second largest rainforest in the world after the Amazon. Roughly half the remaining rainforest in the Congo Basin is in the DRC.
The Kahuzi-Biega National Park is a protected area near Bukavu town in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is situated near the western bank of Lake Kivu and the Rwandan border. Established in 1970 by the Belgian photographer and conservationist Adrien Deschryver, the park is named after two dormant volcanoes, Mount Kahuzi and Mount Biega, which are within its limits. With an area of 6,000 square kilometres (2,300 sq mi), Kahuzi-Biega is one of the biggest national parks in the country. Set in both mountainous and lowland terrain, it is one of the last refuges of the rare species of Eastern lowland gorilla, an endangered category under the IUCN Red List. The park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, inscribed in 1980 for its unique biodiversity of rainforest habitat and its eastern lowland gorillas. In 1997, it was listed on the List of World Heritage in Danger because of the political instability of the region, an influx of refugees, and increasing wildlife exploitation.
The Northeastern Congolian lowland forests is a tropical moist broadleaf forest ecoregion that spans the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic.
Environmental issues in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are the consequence of compounding social and economic problems, including lack of access to clean energy, clearing of lands for agriculture and economic development, and armed conflict. Major environmental issues in DRC include deforestation, poaching, which threatens wildlife populations, water pollution and mining.
Fortress conservation is a conservation model based on the belief that biodiversity protection is best achieved by creating protected areas where ecosystems can function in isolation from human disturbance. Its implementation has been criticized for human rights abuses against indigenous inhabitants when creating and maintaining protected areas.
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