by Tim Folger
In the buffer zone, upward of 30 percent of the population is afflicted with AIDS, and most people subsist on less than a dollar a day, with an average life expectancy of between forty and forty-five years. Here Carr has created hundreds of jobs; he has built two schools and two clinics and a handful of computer centers; he has had wells drilled. He sends a nurse out from his base at Chitengo Camp four days a week to provide basic medical care to nearby villages. He has funded a factory in the regional capital, Vila Gorongosa, where local produce is carefully rendered into fancily packaged dried-fruit snacks. He has sponsored scientific research to develop conservation-minded agricultural practices for the buffer zone, and medical teams to conduct epidemiological studies. He has brought in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to distribute mosquito nets for every one of the 250,000 people in and around the buffer zone—the first large-scale attempt to provide universal malaria protection to a population.
In 2007 Carr signed an agreement with the government of Mozambique to oversee the park and to run community and conservation projects in its buffer zone for the next twenty years. He seeks official advice and consent for each move he makes in Gorongosa, but he recognizes that by giving him charge of the park, the government is basically saying that it recognizes conservation as a necessity that it cannot afford. "I'm not faulting them for this," Carr told me, but he felt the attitude was: "Some dude wants to work on that, let him, because the truth of the matter is, educated Mozambicans, for the most part, want to be in the capital city. The most educated Mozambicans, for the most part, are not clamoring to run a national park."
Carr likes to say that his project is strictly apolitical, but Gorongosa District, where RENAMO sympathies linger, has been largely left behind in Mozambique's postwar recovery, and he understands that his value to the government is not simply as a conservationist. "It wants to show RENAMO it's doing a good thing here," he told me. "Absolutely. And the president's been here three times. He dedicated the school. He dedicated the health clinic. He got his own name on that. I mean, the political aspect of this is key, and the economic aspect of it is key." In fact, Carr told me, "I don't think what I do is that different from what the mayor of any small town faces every single day. You're just juggling. OK, we need better schools, we need a better police department—oh, how's the revenue doing? How are the roads? How's everybody?"
So Carr was excited, a few days after I arrived in early October, that Mozambique's minister of the interior was coming to visit the park with an eye to becoming a minority partner in one of the tourist concessions. "We gotta knock his socks off," he told Rob Janisch, a South African who runs a tented camp, Explore Gorongosa, which is the first private safari operation to come into the park under Carr's scheme. Janisch suggested that the minister be taken to a watering hole called Paradise Pond. Go and watch elephants drinking, he said, "because (a) it cools you off, and (b) it just is cool."
But Carr didn't want to take any chances: the minister didn't have much time, and what if there were no elephants? "Last thing we want is he drives around and says, Oh, I guess they don't have animals yet in Gorongosa." After a minute, he said, "OK, he lands at Chitengo, we do all our greetings, we put him in the heli, we give him the lake tour, where he will absolutely see tons of stuff, we land near the crossing, because there's a hippo pod there, and because that's where—that's a camp he wants, what we call Dingue Dingue. So we need to show him that and say, This is yours."
An hour later, Carr was clean-shaven, in a gingham dress shirt, fresh chinos, and black loafers. At the approach of the minister's plane, a Land Cruiser was dispatched to run up and down the Chitengo airstrip, broadcasting the hunting calls of hyenas to scare off strolling baboons, warthogs, and antelope. The minister, a young-looking man, was dressed in the same fashion as Carr, with a Leatherman bush knife in a holster on his belt. As he and Carr flew over the park in the chopper, he exclaimed over the landscape—"These palms and acacias, so beautiful"—and he told Carr, "You have really saved lives here." Carr said it was his honor, and the work had given his life meaning. The minister said it was a greater honor for Mozambique "that you leave all the comforts and come here." Carr told him, "I am extremely comfortable sleeping in the bush." The chopper banked over Lake Urema, where pelicans, fish eagles, and yellow-billed storks cruised over hippos and crocs, then out over the grasslands, where big herds of antelope galloped below. Elephants appeared as if on cue. "Paradise," the minister said, and Carr, sitting behind him, nodded avidly, cracked a big sideways grin, and gave a double thumbs-up.
Greg Carr had never been involved in conservation work before he came to Gorongosa. He was not an ecologist, or a zoologist, or even much of an outdoorsman. Nor was he an old Africa hand, much less an economist. His only knowledge of the tourism business was as a customer, and he spoke no Portuguese. For that matter, he had never had a conscious interest in making money before he got around to it. "I was taught at an early age to look for deeper meaning in life," he said.
He was the seventh of seven children, the son of a practicing Mormon and a practicing physician. "The Golden Rule and the Beatitudes and Matthew—great stuff," he said. "And then you'd have Dad pitching in with a little rationalism." He never felt compelled to choose between faith and reason, since both had such obvious appeal and such obvious limitations. In politics, too, he considered himself a centrist. The way he put it was: "Conservatives want to make a good person, and liberals want to make a good society. Which of those two do you not want to do?" In college he thought he might major in biological anthropology—Darwinism, paleontology, primatology—even while he saved up, as a freshman at Utah State University in Logan, to spend the next two years in Japan as a Mormon missionary.
Carr allows that he made some converts, but as he tells it, what really excited him in Japan was learning about Zen Buddhism. "I was very much a questioner," he said. And his interests were fluid. When he returned from Japan, he read poetry and majored in history and had no idea what to do with his life. He applied to graduate school, leaving his options open: Asian studies at Stanford, the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, international relations at Yale, or public policy at Princeton. He got in everywhere. The Kennedy School brochure had some stirring lines from JFK about making a better world, so he went there. In his second year at Harvard, he applied to and was accepted in the Ph.D. program in linguistics—"because I wanted to know, Why do we speak? What is a human?"
That was how his mind worked, with an earnest bent toward the forever debatable. So Carr was as surprised as anyone else during the winter of that year—1985–86—when he developed a sudden and all-consuming conviction that he should be making and selling digital voice-mail systems to telephone companies. "It's a funny thing," he told me. "I just had this idea. I was in my dorm, and I was kind of just looking at my phone, and I was thinking about how little it did, really."
Carr had never studied computer science or telecommunications, let alone business or marketing, but he met an engineer named Scott Jones at MIT, and they started a company called Boston Technology. They maxed out their credit cards buying gadgetry, set up shop in Carr's room, and by summer had a prototype of their product up and running. Carr was twenty-six, Jones twenty-five, and three years later they were tycoons.
In 1992 Carr brought in a CEO and became chairman of the board. He had enough money to support forever the life of boyish wonder that had made him the money to begin with—and he still had to figure out what to do with that life. Only now that meant figuring out what to do with the money. He audited classes at Harvard; for three years in a row, he attended a summer course on Homer, Dante, and Joyce's Ulysses taught by a professor called Theoharis Theoharis. He read omnivorously and restlessly; he watched movies; he moved into a grand apartment atop the Charles Hotel in Cambridge—room service suited him—and he suffered from insomnia. He spent most of his time with a friend he met in one of Theoharis's classes, Larry Hardesty, who had moved up to Boston from New
Haven as the keyboard player for a rock band that took its name, the Young Man Carbuncular, from a line in The Waste Land. Carr and Hardesty started a film production company, Bowerbird Productions, that never produced a film but tried for a time to work with the former navy secretary (now senator) Jim Webb on an adaptation of his Vietnam novel Fields of Fire. More successfully, Carr served a stint as publisher (with Hardesty as the managing editor) of a magazine of ideas, the Boston Book Review.
It seemed clear to Hardesty that Carr was gratified by his wealth as a measure of achievement, but, he said, "I think he was trying to find something to devote his energy to that would be more satisfying on more levels than success in business had been." Still, in 1996 Carr went back into business as the chairman of the pioneering global Internet service provider Prodigy. Then, after just two years, he sold his share of the company to the Mexican media mogul Carlos Slim and quit all his other for-profit ventures. That was when he decided to commit himself to a life of philanthropy. In 1998 he gave Harvard $18 million to establish the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School. In 2000 he cofounded the Museum of Idaho, in Idaho Falls, and created the Market Theatre Company, and the next year he bought the former compound of the Aryan Nations in northern Idaho, which had been confiscated from the Nazi group by court order, and donated the land to a local college as a peace park.
Then a friend introduced him to the Mozambican ambassador to the United Nations, and the ambassador invited Carr to come and help his country. At the same time, Carr began spending a lot of time online, reading compulsively about threats to Earth's biodiversity. He was alarmed by the prospect—widely considered likely among environmental scientists—that as many as a quarter of the species now alive will cease to exist by the end of this century. The problem was generally described as a conflict between humanity and the rest of nature. As usual, Carr didn't see how you could win by taking sides; it made more sense to try to remove the conflict, make people and the ecosystems they lived in serve each other better. Thinking like that, he flew into Mozambique, hired a helicopter, and toured the national parks.
He told me that when he came to Gorongosa he knew he'd found his place. Until then, he said, "I'd cast about a lot—yeah, I think it was a hard time—because I wasn't completely fulfilled by any means, and didn't know what was next. I wanted it to be all-engrossing, challenging, and I didn't want to be the philanthropist that writes a check and comes back next year and says, What did you do with my money?" He said, "I mean, I have to actually be pushing against something." He decided to push against extinction.
In 1968 the Department of Fauna of the Portuguese government hired a young South African ecologist named Ken Tinley to study wildlife conservation in Gorongosa National Park. In establishing the park, the colonial authorities had driven out the African villagers who had lived there for as long as anyone could remember, and they were prepared to displace more people in the name of preserving the wild land. Tinley had been asked by his Portuguese employers to identify the full parameters of the Gorongosa ecosystem with the aim of redrawing the park's boundaries accordingly. He picked up his official Land Rover in the Mozambican capital, Lou-rengo Marques (now Maputo), and with his wife, Lynne, an artist, and their infant son set out for Chitengo. The drive, which can now be done in about eight hours, took them three days, and once they settled into their cottage, they stayed for six years, until the liberation war drove them out. Tinley then spent several years writing up his research in a Ph.D. thesis, which runs to nearly five hundred pages and remains one of the most comprehensive analyses of an African ecosystem ever produced.
Tinley sought, to the degree that the technology of the time allowed, to record every aspect of the park's natural order: the flora and fauna, of course, but also the geology, the hydrology, the wind patterns, and the intricate complexity that made all the elements of Gorongosa—every living thing and every physical prop erty—inextricably part of the larger system. What emerges from his technical scientific prose and no end of charts, maps, drawings, and diagrams is an image of the park as one big organism, and of Tinley as its anatomist.
Mia Couto, Mozambique's preeminent novelist and also one of its leading ecologists, told me that Tinley was "a genius," and that view is pretty universal among people with sufficient scientific knowledge to plow through his thesis. For the rest of us, Lynne Tinley wrote a memoir of the family's life in Gorongosa and of the life of the park, a book called Drawn from the Plains, which distills the essence of her husband's findings with the artful and honest immediacy of the best nature writing. Here, for instance, is how she describes the annual rainy-season scene when Lake Urema overflows and submerges hundreds of square miles of the surrounding grasslands:
Thousands of water birds arrive on the plains during the flooding to take advantage of the rich shallow waters. Egret, ibis, spoonbills, herons and divers nest in the tall Acacia albida (called winterthorns because they bear leaves in winter and shed them in summer) that hang over the water. The ancient, sleazy-looking Marabou stork in his funereal dress waits in the shallows under the trees for fledglings that fall out of the twig platforms above or for fish dropped by the parents during feeding. Crocodile also gather under the nesting trees to pick up the dropped food and to feed on fish attracted to the water enriched by birds' dung.
Lake Urema's yearly flooding was the engine that sustained the teeming animal life of Gorongosa, and even before he arrived in the park Ken Tinley had surmised from maps that the distant, cloud-shrouded massif of Mt. Gorongosa was, in turn, the engine of those floods. His research on the mountain confirmed this hypothesis: the mountain was the main water catchment for the park, the source of roughly half the water that flows into it. The primordial forests on the mountain slopes received two and a half times as much rainfall each year as the valley floor and passed it down through a network of streams and rivers to the lake, providing water essential to human communities on the way. It was obvious to Tinley that the mountain belonged in the park, and as he studied the opposite side of the park, he concluded that the ancient game-migration routes and wetlands that ran east from the park to the mangrove swamps lining the mouth of the Zambezi River delta where it opens into the Indian Ocean were the final piece to complete the Gorongosa system. In his thesis, which he finished in 1977, Tinley laid out a scheme for such an expansion of the park, indicating, as his wife summarizes it, "how the whole area could be planned, in the simplest possible manner, for tourist viewing, for research and education, for wilderness areas, and for the cropping of game as a source of protein for the surrounding tribal peoples."
By then, of course, Gorongosa was a civil-war battleground and the mountain was RENAMO's. But Tinley's dream of a park that ran "from mountain to mangroves" held fast in the lore of the place, and when Greg Carr came along it quickly captured his fancy.
Like Tinley, Carr is what his former Kennedy School professor Herman (Dutch) Leonard calls a "system thinker." Leonard, who also teaches at the Harvard Business School, had worked with Carr on his voice-mail venture, and he told me, "Greg realized that what Boston Technology was trying to do was to become a component of a much larger system"—the national telephone network—"and that if the company didn't think about the rest of the system, if it just designed its piece, it was unlikely to be able to find space in that larger system." In other words, Leonard said, "to him it wasn't just a product, and you go and sell this product. It was an intervention in a pretty big, complicated game. And he was able to simultaneously be focused on the individual tree, if you will, and also keep his eye on the forest and think about the nature of how we operate so that we're going to fit in a natural way in this forest." And speaking of trees and forests, Leonard said, "That's not so different from what he's trying to do in Gorongosa."
Indeed, no sooner had Carr grasped the significance of Mt. Gorongosa than he discovered that the rainforest that covered the mountain—simultaneously capturing the water that fell from the clouds and, through eva
poration, replenishing it—was being destroyed, piecemeal but steadily, by local practitioners of slash-and-burn agriculture. People had been living in that forest forever: a few thousand people who speak a distinct language, chi-Gorongosi, and adhere to a distinct spiritual order, which holds the mountain to be sacred and its forests to be inhabited by the spirits of their ancestors, who look out for them. But during the civil war other people began arriving on the mountain, followers of RENAMO and displaced people seeking refuge. After the war, more people arrived from the lowlands at the base of the mountain and began clearing land to grow crops—chopping down old-growth hardwoods, burning them for charcoal, and planting potatoes, or corn, or sometimes marijuana between the stumps. After a few crop cycles, the soil—the accretion of perhaps 10,000 years of compost and sedimentation—was depleted, or after a few rainy seasons it would simply wash away, and these farmers would clear a new patch of forest. The trees they cut did not grow back.
Carr's scientists told him that the mountain's value as a water catchment was in peril: if the killing of trees could not be stopped, the mountain could be lost in just a few years. "To save the park," Carr said, "we have to save the mountain." But he had no authority over the mountain, which stood well outside the buffer zone. It seemed to him that the best solution was Ken Tinley's proposal: to have the mountain, or at least the vital, forested part of it above 700 meters, designated a satellite of the park. After all, the rainforest and the high alpine meadows up there were unique in southern Africa; it was the only place in the region where one could find a certain bird—the green-headed oriole—and no doubt countless species of plants. It was a landscape ripe for ecotourism, dotted with clear pools, riven by deep canyons, flanked by waterfalls. Carr and his team worked their government contacts in Maputo, lobbying hard to have the mountaintop added to the park, and at the same time they sought the permission of the traditional leaders of the mountain communities to start conservation programs and lead tours in their jurisdictions.