Living with Gorillas

Indoor Cooking Fires - A global conservation and human crisis

• It is now recognized that unvented indoor cooking fires are used by a staggering 3 billion people worldwide!
• Smoke from indoor cooking fires is now the largest environmental killer of people in the world.
• Injuries and serious burns, primarily in small children are ubiquitous.
• Rural cook fires are a leading contributor in CO2 release and climate affects associated with black carbon.
• Improved stoves may well be the least expensive way of addressing significant portions of pollution contributing to climate change.
• Fuel wood harvesting is second to expanding agriculture in its role in deforestation and watershed loss and therefore figures in significantly to the deaths associated with unclean water.
• Loss of habitat is the single leading cause of species extinction and resource loss.
• The combined losses due to fuel wood harvest and unproductive rural agriculture have profound impacts in primarily underserved communities and endangered species but trickle down to all of us in their impacts.

One community at a time – ECOLIFE plans to bring integrated solutions to East Africa to address this crisis.

Location facts for Bwindi/Buhoma

• The majority of the people of the area around Bwindi are from the Bakiga, Bafumbira or Batwa cultures in Uganda. Collectively, they are some of the poorest people in the world with a high mortality rate and low life expectancy.
• Uganda has lost nearly 80% of its forest since the 1960’s and this has had a profound impact on the cultures that have depended on it.
• Our work will also have a profound impact on the mountain gorilla – one of the world’s most charismatic vertebrates.
• The Bwindi Impenetrable Forest where we work is home to more than half of the entire remaining population of gorillas.
• The communities of Bwindi and Buhoma where ECOLIFE work abut directly to the Impenetrable Forest with absolutely NO buffer zone between humans and the gorillas.

ECOLIFE's Solutions for these communities

• ECOLIFE proposes to go into these two communities and build a safe, fuel-efficient stove in every single home (approximately 400 homes).  This will improve health and quality of life for every single member of these two communities.
• We will simultaneously expand the existing aquaponics unit we are already operating in Bwindi to make it a more viable and valuable community asset.
• Our team of ECOLIFE staff and volunteers will go and train stove builders in Bwindi and Buhoma and power into this work
• This will be the culmination of three years of community partnerships that include a Ugandan NGO – Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH) and ECOLIFE.  Thanks to our team in Uganda interviews and workshops have been completed and people want the stoves and are ready for this to happen.
• When it is done every home abutting the Bwindi Impenetrable forest from the Ugandan side will have reduced its impact on the forest in terms of fuel use.  A new more efficient form of agriculture (aquaponics) will be introduced - both of these things reducing pressure on the forest.
• Additionally, the improvement of having vented stoves for cooking will have a profound health impact on the community in reduced respiratory ailments and dozens of other diseases including AIDS which take advantage of the their generally poor condition. 
• This directly benefits the gorilla community as well – our close cousins unfortunately are prone to many of our diseases and vice-versa, so now with improved human health and a safe forest the gorillas are a direct beneficiary.

Eye to Eye with Gorillas

Nearly half of the remaining population of mountain gorillas is found in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest of Uganda. Visually there is a clear line between the forest and the rural agriculture of one of the poorest and most densely populated areas in Uganda.  In reality, the line is not so clear.  People and livestock wander into the forest in search of resources like fuel wood and food, while gorilla families are known to raid the crops at the near the edge of the forest.

Our in-country collaborator is a group called Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH) that is working to balance the health of both people and gorillas of the area.  Reducing the interactions between people and great apes reduces the possibilities of disease transmission. CTPH volunteers from within the communities teach about disease transmission and livestock and crop management, as well as family planning and sexual health.

Thanks to CTPH, and generous gifts from the Disney's Friends for Change and Shultz Steel, we are able to bring a host of resources’ to this important community on the border of the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest.

Special Acknowledgements

Thank you to our generous program sponsors