Abstract

This dissertation examines the environmental perceptions, values, and practices of various human communities inhabiting the Central African rainforests. It presents case studies of two environmental projects: Loko, a sustainable development project in the Ubangi area of northwestern Congo; and the Reserve de Faune a Okapis, a conservation project in the Ituri Forest of northeastern Congo. Through in-depth interviews, focus groups, and participant observation conducted with local farmers and foragers, project staff, and local academics, I record cultural and practical resources for the promotion of ecological sustainability both locally and globally. ;Such data reveal that Central African cultures consider nature not as dead matter but as a living, social, and spiritual entity. Therefore one must relate to it with caution or bear certain consequences both social and cosmological. ;Furthermore, Central Africans' relation to nature cannot be separated from their relation to the human community to which they belong. Right relationship encompasses respect for past, present, and future members of one's human community and for the natural world that sustains both you and them; i.e., social ethics and land ethics are inextricably linked. A deep valuing of social harmony and communalism, a strong ethic of sharing, and obligations to both ancestors and offspring help to restrain individuals' use of natural resources, to limit the amount taken from nature, and to keep the land more intact for future generations. Such individual, social, and natural interconnectedness helps to strengthen a sustainable relationship to the environment. ;Finally, Central African cultures remind us that people remain within and serve as an integral part of the natural realm; they and nature are never separate entities but parts of one whole. Therefore, such cultures uphold not the solution of a human-voided 'natural' reserve, but rather a human-inhabited natural world in which humans, as part of nature, control their use of natural resources since doing otherwise is to bring ruin on both themselves, their communities, and the environment that sustains them. ;The dissertation concludes by considering the implications such understandings hold for the two case study projects, and for Western environmental theory and ethics