What Can Your Community Offer the World?

Headway is an initiative from The New York Times exploring the world’s challenges through the lens of progress.

Imagine someone showed up on your doorstep one day and told you that the swampy forest not far from your home contained a rare and precious soil, so powerful that the planet’s future hinges on its preservation. The world is relying on you to keep the soil undisturbed, you’re told, or sinister forces will be unleashed, large enough to doom us all.

Soon, more visitors come your way, this time bearing axes. How do you stop them?

This plot out of a sci-fi movie is unfolding in our own cinematic universe, amid a sprinkling of rural villages in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The precious resource the villagers have been asked to protect is the ecological marvel called a peatland, a type of ecosystem that composes only 3 percent of the earth’s landmass, but houses 30 percent of its carbon — more than is stored within all the world’s forests, twice over. Just a few years ago, researchers confirmed that this part of the world is home to the largest network of tropical peatlands on Earth.

I edit Headway, a team at The New York Times that is exploring the world’s challenges through the lens of progress, a lens that has led us to try to understand as much as we can about efforts to preserve and restore peatlands across the world. Peatlands represent a critical fulcrum in our efforts to stem carbon emissions: They alone won’t save us from the decades of accumulated gases warming the atmosphere, but without them, we don’t have a chance.

So the Times reporter Ruth Maclean, the photographer Nanna Heitmann and the Congolese journalist Caleb Kabanda accompanied Ovide Emba, a Congolese researcher, on a trip to one of the world’s most significant peatlands, to give us a glimpse of how they and the people who inhabit them are faring. They brought back a complicated, fascinating story, of a different kind than many I have read about Congo.

Congo has more often been the victim than the beneficiary of the world’s attention. The place is abundant with precious resources, which have only seemed to fuel an engine of greed and violence that has left the vast part of the country’s people impoverished. Crises of various kinds have displaced an estimated 5.6 million people, subjecting them to horrendous cruelty, and have created nearly a million refugees. My colleagues at The Times recently reported on the rush for the region’s cobalt. Extraction and plunder have so shaped the nation’s fortunes that the villagers in our story can scarcely believe what they’ve been told: that the precious resource hidden in their soil is valuable only when it’s left undisturbed in the ground.

This is one of the topsy-turvy twists of fate that our carbon-clogged atmosphere has brought us. Our collective future now depends in part on a people long neglected, guarding an ecological treasure long considered worthless mud. Might our dawning understanding of the peatlands’ importance also lead to a fuller consideration of their people? What do each of our communities owe to communities like this, asked to play an outsize role in the preservation of our species?

“The way Congo has historically been framed is this dark place, this place where there’s perpetual chaos and instability,” Maurice Carney, the executive director of the nonprofit Friends of the Congo, told me in a phone interview. “And really, much like the rest of Africa, as a place that needs charity, as opposed to a place in the process of seeking justice.”

Mr. Carney is not from Congo. Through a mentor, he found himself on a path to more than two decades of advocacy for greater awareness of Congo’s challenges and how they might be addressed. When I asked him what fuller understanding he hoped our audience would bring to a story like this, he told me he hoped that readers would understand the ideas, ambition and resolve that Congo’s people bring to the challenges they face.

Those comments reminded me of a similar thought from a forester named Vinh Lang, who corresponded with Headway after we published a story in December about deforestation in corporate supply chains. I asked him what would constitute progress in the global effort to preserve and restore our forest ecosystems. His ideal, he wrote, was local self-determination, a solution that “would raise and sustain the standard of living of forest-dwelling communities such that they would be the arbiters of their livelihoods and their resources’ destiny.”

Every story the Headway team produces is part of a continuing conversation about progress — how we define it, and how we make it. Thousands of you have responded to the prompts that have accompanied our stories so far, and your correspondence with us has informed the path of our reporting and storytelling. This time, we’d like to hear about the contributions you think your own community could stand to make in addressing our collective challenges. Where are the hidden or underappreciated assets in your community? What could they offer the world?

In the months to come, we’ll continue reporting on efforts to restore and preserve the world’s peatlands. And we appreciate your thoughts and insights as we pursue this mystery we call progress.

The Headway initiative is funded through grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as a fiscal sponsor. The Woodcock Foundation is a funder of Headway’s public square.

Funders have no control over the selection, focus of stories or the editing process and do not review stories before publication. The Times retains full editorial control of the Headway initiative.