Intorno al fuoco sempre acceso

(AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

In this March 23, 2010 photo, Ngango Muyoni, her husband Adolia Abeli, and their two children seek warmth by huddling around the family’s permanently burning campfire, moved inside their hut due to an early rainy-season downpour, in the Okapi Wildlife Reserve outside the town of Epulu, Congo. The Mbuti pygmies’ traditional practice of hunting bushmeat has devolved into an all-out commercial endeavor - staged not for subsistence, but to feed growing regional markets. The result: the forests, those that remain, are growing emptier by the day.