The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2010

by Tim Folger

  Most of Gorongosa Park's mountain water comes from two administrative zones, Canda and Sadjunjira. Canda is the turf of a hereditary chief, known by his Portuguese title of régulo, and, as Carr paid court to him, he found he could negotiate with the régulo of Canda: if Carr's people hired Canda people to work in Canda, the régulo didn't mind them running a reforestation program on his side of the mountain, and if they brought tourists to see him, to pay a small visitor's fee, and to conduct a ceremony of respect for the ancestors, they could take the tourists there, too. In Sadjunjira, on the other hand, the traditional keeper of the mountain was a kind of shaman known as the samatenje, and when Carr paid him a visit everything went wrong.

  Nobody had told the samatenje of Sadjunjira that Carr would be arriving by helicopter, a vehicle known to the mountain people chiefly as an instrument of war, and the noise of the thing as it descended near his compound outraged his entourage. What's more, the helicopter was cherry red, and in the Gorongosi culture red is the color of violence and conflict, so it is strictly forbidden to appear before the samatenje with any trace of red on one's person. Then the helicopter touched down on the wrong side of a stream that demarcated the sacred ground of the samatenje's domain. And as the helicopter's doors opened, a truly astonishing thing happened: a pale, snakelike lizard, of a sort that nobody had seen before, popped out of a hole in the ground right beside it—a ghastly omen. The only thing that could be worse was for someone to touch the creature, and so that's what happened: a herpetologically inclined member of Carr's party, delighted by what he recognized as his first ever sighting of a blind skink, snatched it up to have a closer look. All the samatenje could say was: Get out of here—go!

  "Look," Carr said, when I asked him about that visit. "Everybody is always talking about wanting to save a rainforest. I'm actually trying to do it—trying to see what it takes. And I'm finding out."

  Carr spends as much as half of each year in Mozambique these days and the rest of his time in America, where he lives in baronial luxury. He loves his big homes, but in Gorongosa, at Chitengo, he loves an equal and opposite extreme of sparse accommodation. For his first few years there, he slept mostly in a tent and sometimes in the back of a truck. He didn't even bother with mosquito netting, an adventure that resulted in more than one case of malaria. Since Chitengo was rehabilitated two years ago, Carr has taken to staying in one of the tourist bungalows, but when those beds are fully booked—a situation that pleases him—he crashes on a mattress on an office floor. On one such night, as he headed off to sleep, he said, "You've seen my houses. One of the things I've really gotten out of being here is discovering that this is all I need." I pointed out that he had a million acres of game park, a fleet of trucks, a staff of hundreds, and a hotel and restaurant at his com mand. "Yeah," he said. "But seriously—it's like an eight-year-old boy's dream come true."

  The one luxury Carr does allow himself in Gorongosa is to keep a chartered helicopter (a blue one now) on standby—another eight-year-old's dream, but a supremely practical one, as I understood when Carr took me in it to see the mountain. The Chitengo restaurant was full of tourists that morning, and all of them had been happy with the game drives they'd been on. "We've got a tourism product, we're ready for safaris," Carr told me before takeoff. "I can see that happening now. So I can turn my mind to the next big thing—like expanding the park." Two years ago, just before Carr signed his twenty-year agreement with the government, the mountaintop above 700 meters had been added to the park's buffer zone. Carr was still eager to have it brought fully into the park. But RENAMO remained a force on the mountain, and nobody in Maputo wanted to rile up the old guerrillas by appearing to take their turf out from under them.

  The helicopter touched down briefly in Vila Gorongosa to pick up the head of Carr's forestry team, Regina Cruz. Our next stop was on the mountain, in a patch of tall grass beside the forested banks of a river, where we continued on foot, climbing through reeds and high grass into the sudden damp, dark cool of forest until we came out on a broad slab of rock at the base of a 300-foot waterfall called Murombodze Falls. It was months since the last heavy rains had replenished the land, and even so, the falls were spectacular—shelf upon shelf of interweaving cascades roaring into a deep, clear pool. "This is a key tourist point," Carr announced. "There are waterfalls all over this mountain. A hiker could spend three or four days hut-hopping here." As with the park, Carr envisioned such tourism paying for the conservation of the mountain. "The thing I never stop marveling over in Africa is the economic scale," he said. "While on Wall Street a couple-billion-dollar merger goes down and no one really bats an eye, you can make a fifty-thousand-dollar business on this mountain and save an entire ecosystem."

  In fact, Carr was spending $160,000 a year for Cruz to run sixteen nurseries on the mountain—each of which produces, from locally gathered seed, 1,500 saplings a year, which she and her team plant in denuded areas—and the ecosystem was far from saved. Near the foot of the falls, Cruz showed us one of her nurseries, a simple bamboo shed, where her seedlings were barely six inches tall, and right out in front of it we encountered a lively older woman whom Cruz recognized as an avid illegal tree cutter. "She's been warned, but keeps at it," Cruz said, and Carr said, "So bring the police." Cruz said that the previous week the police had come to arrest two illegal cutters, but she would rather see conservation-education programs on the mountain than cops. "We have to teach the people, because they grow up with nature and they do not understand that one day the trees can disappear," she said. "They say to me, 'The trees come from God.' I say, 'OK, so if God put it and you take it we all have to put God's trees back.' They laugh, but maybe they start to understand."

  The question of whether to use persuasion or coercion to save the mountain divides Carr's staff sharply. Franziska Steinbruch, the park's manager of science, told me that she had been studying the deforestation of the Gorongosa water catchment in satellite photographs taken annually since 1972 and that the damage had been increasing exponentially. Her attitude was: the law is the law, no excuses, and the government has to uphold it to defend the rainforest. "If that's not coming as a force from the top, the forest will be gone in two years maximum," she said, and she added, "I'm actually losing hope."

  Carr himself takes a hard line when he talks about the mountain, but, as we returned from the falls to the helicopter, we found a young man waiting for us, whom Cruz identified as another illegal tree cutter. He wore a ragged shirt decorated with images of subway stations in Brooklyn, and he bowed his head coyly as Carr lectured him about leaving the trees alone. Then the young man asked for money to buy salt. Carr's anger evaporated. "It's all about poverty," he said, and he told Cruz, "The next time you hire people to work in your nurseries, you should hire this guy—that's a twofer, one less tree cutter and one more tree planter."

  From the helicopter, it was easy to see what the worry was. Terrain that appeared from a distance, or even from a slight angle, to be a dense tangle of unbroken rainforest looked from directly overhead like moth-eaten fabric, where small and medium-sized clearings opened up to reveal a field of charred tree stumps interspersed with crops or, at least as often, simply abandoned.

  "We need Regina to have a hundred nurseries," Carr had said when we took off. "Because we can do it. We've proved the con cept." But as we buzzed over smoldering fires in fresh cuts, and fields of rocks laid bare by the washing away of topsoil, he said, "Another hundred nurseries—that's not enough." To be sure, large swaths of the forest stood solid and inviolate, but these areas only made the despoliation elsewhere more obvious. The damage ran all the way to the cloud-shrouded summit, a wild place of craggy rock pillars and low, tangled vegetation, and as we crossed from Canda to the Sadjunjira side the trashing of the forest only got worse.

  On several nights at Chitengo, we had watched Ken Burns's recent documentary miniseries on the history of America's national parks. After the screening of one episode, a visiting safari guide said, "It's
interesting seeing those American national parks—how they were set aside in the name of the many for the many. Here it's really the national land being set aside in the name of the people for the very few, to be honest. The masses here aren't going to come see these animals, because really they're afraid of them, and they'd rather have the land to farm." But, the guide said, the land would be useless without the mountain to feed it. So, he said of the park, "why save all this land for a couple of thousand whities if it's just going to disappear? That's why, if you ask Greg, he'll tell you the mountain is the first priority."

  Carr rarely expresses discouragement directly; instead, he betrays the feeling by proposing ever more extravagant solutions to the dilemma that's bothering him. By the end of our helicopter survey of the mountain, he had begun talking about planting "enormous avocado orchards" at the foot of the mountain to lure the tree cutters down from their backbreaking assault on the forest. But Cruz didn't see any reason to believe that people wanted to abandon the mountain.

  "They say, 'No—it's the white people coming to take our land,'" she said. "'Where will we go? Where will we live? What will we eat?'"

  "We'll give them jobs," Carr said. "We can give a lot of them jobs."

  Cruz remained unconvinced. She had no difficulty expressing her discouragement. When we landed back in Vila Gorongosa to drop her off, she told Carr, "I'm sorry. I'm very sorry. Really, I never realized that the situation was as bad as that. It's really worse this year."

  "We can fight it," Carr told her.

  'Yeah," she said. "Maybe."

  The mountain was a problem. "It has to be a national park above seven hundred meters," Carr told me. "We have to get to the point where you don't live up there." He said as much on nearly every day of my stay. And nearly every day he flew one or another important visitor over the mountain to make his case. Carr was in the process of trying to sign up the first three safari-lodge operators to run concessions in the park, and he wanted them to understand, as well, the potential value that the mountain could add to Gorongosa tourism. He was encouraged that the minister of the interior had described the harm to the mountain as "an environmental catastrophe." But Carr placed his highest hopes for the mountain in a South African named Dave Law, whose company, Barra Resorts, runs a string of Indian Ocean lodges in Mozambique. Carr wanted Law to build a lodge at Murombodze Falls, and when he took Law to see the spot, he invited a young woman, a Portuguese graduate student who was doing research in the park, to ride along in the helicopter and to visit the swimming hole beneath the spilling water. "A girl in a bikini—who doesn't like that?" he said. Law loved the falls; he loved the whole mountain. Over drinks on the evening after his visit, he spoke of running horseback trips over the summit, of stringing zip lines through the rainforest canopy, of building a spa that looked out from his lodge onto the falls.

  It sounded nice. But while Law and Carr were up on the mountain, I had paid a visit to Eugénio Almeida, the régulo of Canda, and he had told me that although he wanted more tourists to visit the waterfall, he didn't want anybody going there, or even taking pictures of it, without first coming to see him at his compound to pay a fee, have a certificate stamped, and conduct a ceremony in honor of a spirit whom he called the Owner. Never mind that the régulo's compound lay nearly two hours' drive away from the falls: the same went for the rest of the mountain, he said. "No one should go on the mountain without my consent—I, the régulo," he said. He was particularly concerned about anyone tampering with the waterfall. "It is a holy place," he said. "Long ago, no one lived very close to that place. In the evening, the Owner would move around the place. Even here we would hear him walking. He made a lot of noise. And he climbed from the waterfall high up in the mountain. Now many people have built their houses around the waterfall. By settling their houses around the waterfall, these people closed the way the Owner would use. He doesn't have any path to move from the waterfall into the mountain."

  The régulo, a slender man in his sixties, wore an orange polo shirt and shimmering green trousers, and periodically he tapped a bit of snuff from a plastic vial into his palm, then raised it carefully to his nose and snorted it. "Long ago, things weren't like this chaos we experience these days," he said. The régulo wanted his office to be respected. The problem, he said, was that there were too many people trying to lead the community. "Everyone leads and no one listens to the other," he told me. He blamed the war. If there was lawlessness and destruction on the mountain, it was because people had been addled by what he called "the gun effects." I took that to mean shell shock. "These people inhaled a lot of gunpowder from guns and bombs during the war," he said. "This gunpowder affected people's brains and mixed them up. Good sense was replaced by war-related ideas."

  He told me that Greg Carr was his friend—"We are like brothers"—and that the people of Canda were dependent on the Carr Foundation for jobs. In fact, he said, the thirty-six people whom Regina Cruz employed on her forestry team were the only people in all of Canda, an area of some four hundred square miles, who had regular salaried jobs. The rest lived by the hoe; they were subsistence farmers. "Here, in my area, people suffer a lot," he said. So they were also grateful to Carr for building them a school. But none of that made them ready to accept the upper mountain's being turned into a park.

  In colonial times, the régulo reminded me, many people had lived in the area that is now the park, and when it became the park the Portuguese burned their homes and scattered them. These were the associations that the word "park" carried, he said. In fact, a number of people had resettled in the park during and after the civil war, and Carr was now working on getting them out. He has budgeted $1 million to resettle some seventy families from the shores of Lake Urema, and he said that there would be no coercion, only enticement: better homes, better social services, better economic opportunities. The régulo saw it differently. He thought it was bad enough that locals could no longer hunt for meat in the buffer zone as everyone used to do in the past. "Now you claim all that area to be yours," he told me. By "you" he meant the muzungu—the white man. He explained, "Muzungu means tomorrow he cheats us and then he takes our property."

  The régulo said that park workers had held a meeting at his house "to persuade people to leave the top of the mountain." When the people up the mountain heard that, he said, they came and protested in his yard. Three times they came—two hundred people, then ninety people, then seventy-five people. "All of them refused to leave those areas on top of the mountain where they live," he said. These "complainers," as he called them, had even accused the régulo personally of selling out to the park, and he didn't like that. He told me that Mozambique's land law was clear, and everyone knew that it said people cannot be removed from where they live—they have to agree to move voluntarily. "This was the only disagreement we have ever had with Mr. Greg Carr," he said, and he added, 'We don't want foreigners to control our area. We want to control our land ourselves." He took credit for the recent arrests of illegal tree cutters. "The two men were beaten, then jailed," the régulo told me. After all, he said, "we know that this mountain and its trees attract rain. You see, rain is becoming scarce now, and later no rain will fall at all."

  Carr, however, said it was untrue that anybody from his project had told people on the mountain that they would have to move: that was not his policy, and it never would be. In fact, he said, he had insisted, in his agreement with the government, that "traditional people" be allowed to dwell in the park, and he told me that that would apply to the mountain, too, if it was given park status. He placed the blame for the régulo's troubles on agents provocateurs from RENAMO, who had gone around accusing him of being a rich American muzungu land grabber in order to make some political hay at a time of municipal elections in the Gorongosa District two years ago. I heard the same thing from people in Maputo who had nothing to do with Carr's project, and Carr provided me with a local newspaper clipping describing the smear campaign.

  Carr was much more inter
ested to hear that the régulo had said he wanted to see more tourists on the mountain, and to control deforestation. The logistical details didn't trouble him. "Basically, what you do is, you introduce Dave Law to Eugénio the Chief, and they sort it out," Carr said. "Eugénio wants jobs and he wants tour ism money, and Dave Law wants the same thing." Frequently, when Carr sought to explain his mission, he would recite facts and figures about the global threat to biodiversity and about the glorious past of the Gorongosa ecosystem. But when he talked about the how, rather than the why, he could sound more like a ward heeler. He said, "Economics will solve the problem faster than any public policy." He said, "Every private-sector entrepreneur has this incredible bias toward letting enlightened self-interest pull things forward, and I fully believe that will happen." And he said, "It's all about jobs. It's all about jobs. It's all about jobs."

  Carr's disarming faith in the power of his own good intentions to render confrontation insignificant has served him well in Mozambique. Following his initial catastrophic red-helicopter-and-blind-skink encounter with the samatenje of Sadjunjira, Carr issued the shaman an invitation to visit Chitengo, gave him a grand welcome and free use of the bar, and sent him home a buddy. In fact, he posted a photograph of the two of them together as his head shot on his Facebook page. The samatenje, however, had never come around to cooperating with the Gorongosa team, so I went to see him, too.