Getting ahead of a changing environment

Alex Eben Meyer

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About a decade ago, a team of researchers waded into the steamy swamps of the Congo Basin and, walking long straight lines, sampled the soil every 250 meters. It was an arduous process that led to discovery of the world’s largest tropical peatland, a thick and ancient layer of soil that contains as much carbon as the global economy emits over three years. The act of preservation quickly became a scientific priority.

 “The Congolese government and the Wildlife Conservation Society Congo are investing more heavily in producing scientific data on the peatlands,” says Katherine Meier ’26PhD, a postdoc at the University of Vermont. “They want knowledge about this enigmatic area, and so they’re prioritizing rapid methods like surveys and remote sensing. But this leaves some details out.”

 Meier, with collaborators in Italy and the Republic of Congo, pursued what might be described as slow methods for gathering different, complementary knowledge. While still a graduate student at Yale, she and her colleagues conducted ethnographic research within the Lac Télé Community Reserve, a group of 27 communities that are home to 20,000 people amid the peatland.

 Living in six Lac Télé villages for six to eight weeks, Meier’s group took part in daily life and conducted nearly 200 interviews and a dozen group conversations to illuminate fine-scale interaction between residents and their environment. “This 4,400-square-kilometer area has been used for generations, and we wanted to understand how they use resources along with what might be threatening their livelihoods and well-being,” Meier says.

They found what Meier describes as a mosaic of interactions between the people, their environment, and local water cycles that distinctly influences each village. “The conditions that shape how people go about day-to-day life and what impacts them were totally different from one village to the next.” And though ethnographic methods are resource intensive, they are essential for filling in blanks. “You’re missing critical information and won’t be able to address many policy needs if you don’t conduct field-based research.”