SAFARI - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 172

When he offered his help, Carr received rare control from the government over man-
aging the restoration. He oversaw the building-up of the vegetation so that herbivore anim-
als like elephants, hippos and zebras could be imported from neighboring southern Afric-
an countries. He built up the ranger corps so the animals would be protected from poach-
ers. As the park has rebounded, predators like lions and cheetahs have come back.
A rare success story and a mammoth undertaking, the Gorongosa project has been
chronicled on film and in print. National Geographic produced an inspiring film about
Gorongosa entitled Africa's Lost Eden. It opens with lush panoramas of the expansive Lake
Urema at the center of the park, where birds and warthogs, crocodiles and elephants, lions
and antelopes had regained a foothold. Carr doesn't show up until midway through the
program, when elephants arrive from South Africa's Kruger National Park. “Have you had
any sleep,” he asks the caretakers as they gently unload the elephants onto the open savan-
nah where their job is to procreate and eat as much of the grasslands and trees as possible.
An unassuming man who would not stand out in most crowds, Carr grew up in Idaho
near Yellowstone National Park. (He is no relation to Norman Carr of Zambia.) In the
film, Greg Carr says that Yellowstone Park's recovery inspired him in Gorongosa. Yellow-
stone, too, had been hunted out when President Theodore Roosevelt designated it as the
first national park in the United States. After the vegetation recovered, the animals re-
turned, newly protected from humans. (Paul Allen has also said that living in Seattle, sur-
rounded by the wilderness parks of the Pacific Northwest, is a big reason why he is involved
in conservation philanthropy.)
The story of Gorongosa was told in lyrical detail in a twelve-page New Yorker profile by
Philip Gourevitch. In this article Gorongosa has yet to recover from the trauma of war.
Many of the traditional people who live there view Carr as a white man trying to steal their
land. On the highest mountain they are stripping the trees that are essential for capturing
water for the valley, yet they refuse to allow Carr to reforest the area. At the same time, new
groups of hippos and elephants are flourishing and the neighboring villages are benefiting
from the park. Carr's foundation has built health clinics and schools and funded new agri-
cultural projects.
The article asks whether this one man from Idaho could save an entire African ecosys-
tem. The answer was “maybe.”
I met Carr on one of his visits to Washington and asked him whether tourism was a
critical part of the plan. “Yes, a big part,” he said. He is searching for professional tourist
groups to build luxury lodges that respect the environment and offer well-guided tours of
the wildlife, a vision that sounded a lot like the Mfuwe Lodge in Zambia. Carr said that
the license for the lodges would require giving back 10 percent of profits to the park. When
combined with park fees, he said, the money should be sufficient to cover most of the ex-
pense of maintaining Gorongosa.