Virunga: How Conservation and Human Rights Intertwine  

Since my return from Rwanda, and my hopefully-not-once-in-a-lifetime visit with the Mountain Gorillas, I have been meaning to watch the documentary Virunga on Netflix.

I finally made time for it as a study break during my final exams period, and boy, am I glad I did. Because of those same finals, this will be a pretty brief post, but I hope it encourages you to do some more reading about this conflict. The film follows a couple of people who are working to preserve Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). As most are aware, the DRC is an extremely unstable country in Africa, and the fighting has killed and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. The park rangers risk their lives every day to save the people and animals that rely on this ecosystem for their livelihoods. I won’t go too far into the plot of…