Transcript:
Troy: Niklas Maak is a longtime collaborator of Rem and AMO.

Niklas: It was in 2010 when I went to the Virunga Mountain area, which is where the last mountain gorillas live. Mountain gorillas are still seen as a critically endangered species, and they’re today only to be found in two very small habitats, which one is the Virunga massif, which is straddling the boundaries between Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The number of these gorillas was down in the early ’80s to 250—so almost extinct. And they were endangered by habitat destruction, poaching, and disease, and civil conflicts. Due to massive conservation efforts, the population has recently quadrupled to over 1,000, which is still critically endangered but also an incredible success story.

And I was interested in learning more about that success story and its consequences. It was mainly possible because these gorillas had been habituated by Dian Fossey, the famous primatologist who went there in 1968. She almost single-handedly saved gorillas from extinction. Gorillas are wild animals, and when they see a human, they basically charge or run away. Teams of gorilla experts went into the jungle day after day over many years. And that changed the gorillas’ behavior extremely, to a point where they were not in fear of humans anymore, where they could be observed, even medically treated.

And then it became possible to bring tourists also to gorillas. And it’s still one of the most incredible experiences you can have is to fly there and spend a day among gorillas. There’s a famous film—you can see that also on YouTube—of an incident outside the park, where a young gorilla grooms a human.

As a consequence of the fact that gorillas lose their fear of humans, they start to roam outside the park. They come crop raiding, and they sometimes spend more than half of their time outside the park. So in an attempt to avoid conflict between local farmers and gorillas, and also to reestablish the boundaries between impenetrable forest and farmland, mostly Western NGOs and conservation groups have joined together to buy a part of the land lying between the park and the communities, which is called the buffer zone. And that buffer zone is almost an urbanistic endeavor to separate two formerly clearly distinguishable concepts that are increasingly amalgamated by reality, which is wilderness and countryside.

The buffer zone became a space of mutation for, let’s say, an interspecies negotiation. Or you could call it an unintentional model for a possible future of both wilderness and countryside, and human and nonhuman cohabitation.

In that respect, I think the park, the buffer zone, has turned more radically than any city changed. It has turned from some neglected or forgotten territory to a zone of encounter, of experimentation, of also massive instability, acceleration, mutation, adaption, and creation of new conditions.