When acclaimed author Deni Béchard learned of the last living bonobos - matriarchal great apes which are, alongside chimpanzees, our closest relatives - he was astonished. How could we accept the disappearance of this majestic species, along with the rainforest it calls home? Determined not to sit by and do nothing, Béchard began investigating the problems facing the bonobos - industrial and urban encroachment, aggressive resource extraction by foreign comapnies, the civil war and genocide which had wreaked havoc on the Congo intermittently or more than a century, the trade in bush-meat - and in the process discovered one small organization, the Bonobo Conservation Institute, which had done more to save the bonobos than many much larger organizations. In BCI Béchard recognized a unique post-colonial model for conservation initiatives which, if replicated, might provide one of the only hopes for making the world a far better and more equitable place.

Part polemic, part travelogue, part natural history, Bonobo Inc. offers a moving story of how a few committed people can affect great and lasting change, while point out the path which may allow us to emulate them.

DENI ELLIS BÉCHARD is the author of eight previous books of fiction and nonfiction, including Vandal Love, winner of the 2007 Commonwealth Writers Prize, and Into the Sun, winner of the 2016 Midwest Book Award for literary fiction and selected by CBC/Radio-Canada and one of the most important books to be read by Canada's political leadership. His work has received the Nautilus Book Award for Investigative Journalism and has been featured in Best Canadian Essays. He has reported from India, Cuba, Colombia, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Afghanistan, and his writing has been published in dozens of newspapers and magazines, including Salon, the Los Angeles Times, the Paris Review, Pacific Standard, and Foreign Policy.

Deni Béchard's profile page