7 Billion by National Geographic Page B

fellow cattlemen. He looks up, introduces himself as Eirfazi Wamana, and says he cannot tell me his age nor the number of his children. “We Africans don’t count our off-spring,” he declares, “because you mizungu don’t like us to produce so many children.” Mizungu is slang for whites in this part of the world. Wamana offers a wry smile and says, “You don’t have to beat around the bush. Some lions were killed here, and the rangers came in the middle of the night and arrested me.”
    In late May of 2010, two rangers in Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park saw vultures hovering over a field about a kilometer from Wamana’s village of Hamukungu and discovered the dead bodies of five poisoned lions. Nearby were two cow carcasses that had been sprayed with a bluish chemical. Early intelligence pointed to Wamana, but he was released for lack of evidence. Another suspect fled the area. “They held me for a day,” Wamana says, “but they have not released me from their investigation. I am not running away.”
    Hamukungu village sits at the northern edge of the park, where the predominant tourist attraction is its population of lions, which has dwindled by 40 percent in less than a decade. “The number of villagers has increased,” says Wilson Kagoro, the park’s community conservation warden, “as has the number of cattle. And this has created a big conflict between them and us. They sneak into the park late at night to let their cattle graze. When this happens, the lions feast on the cows.” Given that parkland grazing is illegal, the aggrieved pastoralists are left with no recourse. But that does not mean that they are without countermeasures.
    â€œWe are surviving on God’s mercy,” Wamana says when I ask how so many people manage to survive on so little land. “The creation of this national park has made us so poor! People have to live on the land!” It’s a common complaint among the overcrowded villages that ring the region’s networks of parks and reserves. Queen Elizabeth and many of its neighboring parks in Uganda were established in the 1950s and 60s with the recognition that this region had the highest density of large mammals of any place on Earth—31.4 tonnes per square kilometer in Queen Elizabeth National Park. But social and political upheaval has made it difficult to protect the wildlife. Over decades, poachers and desperate villagers have raided the parks and decimated the populations of elephant, hippos, and lions. By 2006 large mammal biomass was down to 9.5 tonnes in Queen Elizabeth, according to Andrew Plumptre, director of the Albertine Rift Program of the Wildlife Conservation Society.
    The legendary Virunga National Park in the eastern Congo—Africa’s oldest as it was founded in 1925—is the most imperiled by the overpopulated region’s frantic land-grabbing. The countryside, once teeming with charismatic megafauna, is eerily vacant. The park’s lodges are gutted. Since the Rwandan genocide of 1994, all but the eastern sliver of the park, which hosts its famed mountain gorilla population, has been closed to tourists. The park is a war zone.
    Rodrigue Mugaruka is the warden of Virunga’s central sector of Rwindi. He is a former child soldier who participated in the 1997 overthrow of Mobutu Sese Seko, the long-time dictator of the DRC (then called Zaire). In eastern Congo the vacuum created by Mobutu’s exit unleashed fierce competition among proxy armies and various militias for its diamonds, gold, copper, and coltan. Now Mugaruka is doing battle with those militias—called Mai-Mai fighers—who control illegal fishing and charcoal production in ten villages that have cropped up inside the park surrounding Lake Edward. He had recently regained control of the sector from thousands of Congolese soldiers stationed here to monitor the mines. “They’re