Kingdoms in the Air

by Bob Shacochis

  Central Mozambique absorbed the brunt of these atrocities, and Gorongosa itself became a shooting gallery, a shifting headquarters for both armies, the area swarmed by destitute refugees, the footpaths throughout the countryside rigged with land mines, its animals serving as a type of ATM machine to fund and supply the combatants. Protected as a private hunting reserve since 1921 and designated as a national park in 1960, known romantically by tourists as the place where Noah left his ark, Gorongosa’s 1,455 square miles once hosted more predators than South Africa’s Kruger, denser herds of elephants and buffalo than the Serengeti, and thousands upon thousands of plains animals. By the end of the civil war, the body count was ­numbing—the elephants decimated; hippos exterminated; the largest lion population in all of Africa reduced from five hundred to a few dozen; thirty-five hundred zebras gone; two thousand impala gone; rhinos, gone; forty buffalo left from a herd of fourteen thousand; a herd of seven hundred sable antelope reduced to zero; three remaining wildebeests from a herd of fifty-five hundred; 129 waterbuck from a herd of 3,500; the ubiquitous warthogs nowhere in sight. Cheetahs, wild dogs, hyenas, and jackals apparently exterminated. Leopards, no one could say.

  When the civil war blazed into existence in 1976, Beca Jofrisse underwent a metamorphosis from jungle guerrilla fighter to an elite member of the newborn nation’s high command, stationed in Maputo, the cosmopolitan capital. By the early 1990s, Frelimo, disavowing its Marxist ideology, signed a peace agreement with Renamo. The catastrophic decades of hostility and ruination were over. Beca, like the soldiers on both sides, had lost scores of friends in a conflict that had left more than a million Mozambicans dead and millions more wounded or maimed. He retired from the army, pursued an engineering degree, and dedicated himself to the reconstruction of what had been lost.

  As the new century rolled out, the nation’s hatred and mistrust slowly exhausted itself and Mozambique was alive again, though not by any measure discharged from the intensive care ward of the underdeveloped world. But for the first time in memory, the country seemed to be sitting up and smiling. Its near-death experience imbued Mozambicans with a laid-back joie de vivre balanced by a sustaining sense of civility, the correct antidote to fratricidal madness. About the same time that Greg Carr parachuted onto the scene in 2004, Beca realized the war had left behind in him an unrequited love—a passion for nature and the forests of central Mozambique, the beauty of the thousand-year-old baobabs, the surreal haunted groves of yellow fever trees in the provinces where he had fought as a young warrior to liberate his country.

  Lieutenant Colonel Jofrisse’s friends in the Frelimo government encouraged him to consummate this old but dormant romance and sent him to study natural resource protection at the Southern African Wildlife College. Then in April 2008, at a signing ceremony between the president of Mozambique and Greg Carr, formalizing the nonprofit Carr Foundation’s forty million dollar, twenty-year agreement to resurrect the national park, Jofrisse, representing the government of Mozambique, and Carr together became Gorongosa’s pair of overseers, partners in a pas de deux quite unlike any heretofore performed in the continent’s jungles.

  High in a tree in Africa a desperate woman clutches a baby, her feet submerged in floodwaters of biblical proportion. For Greg Carr, like most people watching CNN’s footage of the devastation caused by Cyclone Eline when it slammed into Mozambique in 2000, this wretched image blipped the obscure southern African nation onto the screen of their awareness, however momentarily, and even then, like Carr, many of those viewers would be hard-pressed to articulate a single fact about the country beyond a general pronouncement on its condition: hell on earth.

  Later that same year in New York City, a mutual friend introduced Carr to Mozambique’s ambassador to the United Nations, a congenial diplomat who asked, Why don’t you think about helping us out? It was a question Carr had come to expect from well-intended strangers. What else really would you ask a philanthropist sitting atop a stack of money, in this case 200 million dollars, an amount that for Carr served as the answer to a question few masters of the universe ever bothered to ask: How much wealth is finally enough? Carr deferred, telling the ambassador he would think about Mozambique, but his hands were tied with other projects.

  In the mid-’80s, by the age of twenty-seven, Carr had already morphed into an über-capitalist, turning away from a path into academia. A history major at Utah State, he left his hometown in Idaho Falls, Idaho, exchanging the mountains of the west for the ivory towers of Cambridge, enrolling in Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, which he saw as a springboard for earning a PhD in linguistics. While finishing up his master’s degree at the Kennedy School, he began an intensive study of the breakup of AT&T’s monopoly on telecommunications, smelling opportunity in its divestitures.

  He convinced a friend, Scott Jones, a twenty-five-year-old scientist at an MIT lab, to go into business with him, maxing out their credit cards for start-up funds. In 1986, their new company, Boston Technology, democratized voice mail services, marketing the system to the emerging Baby Bells. Four years later, Boston Technology was the top voice mail provider in the nation. By the mid-’90s, Carr was CEO of both Boston Technology and a second technology venture, Prodigy, an Internet service pioneer. Then in 1998, a very rich man with, he says, “a pretty bad case of attention deficit disorder,” he walked away from it all to create the Carr Foundation, its charter targeted on three areas of philanthropic pursuits: human rights, the arts, and conservation.

  Visionaries resist typecasting, though with a pince-nez and roughrider garb Greg Carr could pass, in stoutness of physique as well as spirit, for a younger Teddy Roosevelt. To explain how he thinks or to illuminate his moral universe, he quotes Buddhist philosophers, Nelson Mandela, and David Foster Wallace, and he cites the authors—Darwin, Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson—he considers seminal to his swooning love of nature. Were Carr a more conventional businessman, when he took a powder from his fortune-making enterprises at the age of thirty-eight, the temptation to describe his action as a midlife crisis would have been irresistible, yet for Carr it was a long-awaited chance to shift gears.

  Behind the change was a lifelong conviction that the span of a career should contain separate but interlocking halves, a yin/yang of profit and nonprofit, an exuberance for making money married to a passion for giving it away to support causes dearest to one’s heart. Passively giving back, just checkmarking the do-gooder box, wasn’t the point. The point was unleashing happiness, animating your value system with injections of old-fashioned fun, which is precisely what he thinks rich guys without a sense of largesse are missing out on. Darting an elephant to replace the batteries in its radio collar ranks high on Carr’s list of Fun Things to Do After Breakfast.

  On a deeper level, though, he saw capitalism without a conscience as a socioeconomic steroid, proving itself no more useful to humanity and its huddled masses than other abused ideologies. Rise alone, fall together. The selfish detachment of cowboy capitalism from the welfare of a community created mayhem, a danger not only to itself but to the planet, plundering the resources of an ecology with the same rapacity of soldiers pillaging a national park.

  Ideally, making a busload of money allowed you to cut to the front of the line as an agent of meaningful change, and by 2000, Carr was inundated with projects: turning the former headquarters of the Aryan Nations into a peace park in Sandpoint, Idaho, constructing cultural monuments in Boise. He built the Market Theater in Harvard Square, then donated eighteen million dollars to establish Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. He produced a movie, then started a radio station in Afghanistan. He was conducting a marching band of altruism, on fire with intellectual stimulation yet yearning for something more visceral, adventurous. The recipe had to include “a little vision to it, some mystery, some romance, some difficult problems to solve,” and satisfy his lust for immersion—“Do theater to understand theater and do conservation to understand cons
ervation. Don’t just read a book. Combine ideas and action. Exist in physical reality.”

  Intrigued by the ambassador’s invitation, he began to systematically research conservation projects in the southern African nation and traveled to Mozambique for the first time in 2002. Two years later he returned to climb aboard a helicopter with government officials to tour six potential sites Carr had identified that fit both his personal goals and the political mandate—to weld environmental restoration with human development into a sustainable business model based on tourism and agri-industry, thereby enabling absolutely marginalized communities to have a future. The second stop was Gorongosa, the park in shambles, long forgotten as a destination, a lost cause. Nothing there anymore worth bothering with, Carr heard often, a sentiment that collided with his intolerance for cynicism. But when he first set foot on Gorongosa, “it was, boom, Let’s go!” Returning home to pace around the house and think about it would have been antithetical to the tally-ho style of his decision making.

  What Carr saw at Gorongosa, with a historian’s perspective, was Yellowstone, the park he had grown up with as his neighbor in eastern Idaho. Yellowstone made it easy for Carr to conceptualize the Goron­gosa project. “When Yellowstone was made a national park in 1872,” says Carr, “the animals had been extirpated. It wasn’t this pristine thing and the government said, ‘Oh, we better protect it.’ No, no, no. It had been hunted out. The bison, the elk, the bears were gone or mostly gone. The point of Yellowstone Park was to recover it, and a hundred years later it’s back. I look at Gorongosa that way. This was the first national park in the Portuguese-speaking world. Both parks are the flagships of their respective nations. Both of them have big charismatic fauna, including carnivores. Both are dangerous places.” The parallels struck him as personal and beckoning.

  For the next two years, he consulted with aid professionals, searched for suitable experts to bring into the project (more difficult than he imagined), and negotiated with the Mozambican government (in Portuguese, a language he did not speak), “just trying to sign a piece of paper and get started.” That contract, a Memorandum of Understanding signed in 2004, essentially stated, said Carr, “Look, this is one day at a time, toss me out whenever you want, and let’s just get to know each other.” He wasn’t buying the park, or leasing it, or taking it over as a concession, but instead agreeing to manage Gorongosa on a provisional basis. It was by any account an unusual arrangement, an auspicious foreigner assuming control over an iconic sovereign asset, and Carr hoped it would provide a template for saving stressed-out national parks throughout the developing world.

  Gorongosa’s business manager, Joao Viseu, calls Carr’s approach “the new philanthropy—not just giving but doing,” a paradigm splitting the difference between two more recognizable patterns—the Paul Farmers of the world, who start with nothing but a calling and gradually accumulate resources because people believe in them, and “the rich guy who has his billion dollars and then says, There you go.”

  At age forty, with piles of money on hand, Carr rode the elevator to the ground floor, the place where everything looked and felt different—where Carr looked and felt different. “I didn’t sit in Washington, D.C., and mail checks. I came here and said I’m going to be here for twenty years, and I’m going to wear these silly cutoff shorts. To make things work in rural Africa you’ve got to be hands-on, and you run a real risk of making things worse if you intervene from a distance.”

  One night at dinner—grilled prawns, gin and tonics—I listened as Greg and Beca, Gorongosa’s two lordly patriarchs, got to know each other better, discussing an issue of vital importance: the forthcoming annual soccer game between management and staff. Carr suggested that, as co-administrators of the park, he and Beca should be the goalkeepers. Or, given their age, the two of them together would make one goalkeeper.

  “Maybe,” said Beca doubtfully. “I’m not good.”

  “Or maybe we should be somewhere else,” said Carr, who had never played soccer, and the two of them leaned into each other like brothers, laughing.

  “But we can,” insisted Beca.

  “Sim, podemos,” Carr agreed. Yes, we can. The game, with Carr and Beca on the field against the youthful staff, would end in a crowd-cheering tie.

  From where we sat in Chitengo’s soaring new open-air rondavel-style restaurant, gazing out into the beast-filled wilds just a minute’s walk away, I found it difficult to imagine the devastation Carr had encountered here three and a half years earlier. When he first drove in with his new multidisciplinary team (scientists, engineers, business managers, economic advisers, tourism developers), there was no water, no electricity, the few walls left standing in the rubble were riddled with bullet holes, bomb casings were lying around. They were embedded within the miserable heat of a hazardous jungle surrounded by crippling poverty and the vestigial tensions of civil war. He hired a labor force from the local communities, former Frelimo soldiers and Renamo rebels who required occasional stern lectures on the rewards of playing nice. Slowly Chitengo’s infrastructure—­tourist chalets, reception center, meeting hall, staff housing, mechanic’s shop—began to rise from the ashes, its reincarnation adorned with Internet satellite dishes. Until he moved into a spacious campaign tent, Carr slept outside in the back of a pickup truck, high enough off the ground to keep safe from snakes and (he hoped) lions, a star gazer’s preference that landed him in the hospital, semi-comatose with the first of three bouts of malaria.

  An intrepid hiker back home in Idaho, Carr, with an entourage of biologists and local guides, quickly became an obsessive explorer of the park and its environs, gleefully “discovering” thermal springs, waterfalls, caves, unknown species. The animals were not entirely gone, as he had been led to believe, but hiding, what was left of them, still harried by rampant poaching. A revitalized team of rangers, many of them former poachers themselves, began to patrol throughout Gorongosa, its dry season plagued by wildfires set by illegal hunters to drive game into snares or harvest the large rodents that burrowed on the savanna. By 2006, with the completion of a fenced sanctuary, the park had begun to reintroduce large numbers of grazers—wildebeest and buffalo—back into the overgrown grasslands, and supplement the antelope populations with breeds that hadn’t been seen in years. Last year more hippos and elephants were trucked in, but the zebras Carr hoped to import remained unavailable behind Zimbabwe’s nearby border, trapped by political turmoil.

  Tourists trickled back to the park, thirty or so camping out the first year, fewer than a thousand in 2005, eight thousand (a mix of tourists and other visitors) in 2008, compared to twenty thousand in Gorongosa’s golden years in the sixties, when the park’s original restaurant, now rebuilt in soaring rondavel style, often served four hundred meals a day. From day one, Carr understood that the long-term fate of Gorongosa depended on ecotourism, a tricky proposition for an unfamiliar destination so distant from the world’s centers of dwindling affluence. In ten years, the project believes it will be able to easily accommodate one hundred thousand tourists a year, an egalitarian mix of self-drive campers and luxury-addicted adventuristas, and even at four times that capacity Gorongosa would still maintain the same “tourism density level” as Kruger National Park in South Africa without damaging the character of its wilderness. Right now, the top-quality safaris Gorongosa offers use only 75 miles (of a potential 620 miles) of game-drive roads.

  Yet before tourists could be seduced back to Gorongosa, the project’s near- and long-term success depended on its ability to cultivate the support of the 250,000 villagers living in the park’s buffer zone and surrounding district, the overwhelming majority of them subsistence farmers living in a sprawl of mud-and-thatch villages and scattered homesteads, vulnerable to disease and famine, too poor even to generate garbage, which explains the remarkable litter-free cleanliness of the countryside’s roads and footpaths.

  Humans and the environment invariably compete with each o
ther, yet without synchronicity between the two, Carr believed, both were doomed. The Gorongosa project, dedicated to floating both boats simultaneously, put itself at the center of a controversy in conservation science, positioned between a movement called “back to the barriers,” basically turning the natural resource into an off-limits fortress, and a more decentralized and porous community-based management approach toward environmental stewardship.

  Across the planet loss of habitat, an apocalyptic problem approaching critical mass, requires increasingly radical change in human behavior, yet barricading Gorongosa from its swaddle of communities, Carr told me, was both infeasible and perhaps morally arrogant, an artificial separation between integrated ecosystems (an astonishing fifty-four distinct ecosystems) and social patterns that would have minimal effect on the three practices that most endanger the park’s well-being—­slash-and-burn agriculture on the watershed, charcoal production in the buffer zone, and hunting—and offered no incentive to lure people away from these traditional activities. And Carr believed fervently that a dense, rich, and age-old culture, better attuned to contemporary realities, was no more or less worthy of preservation than a rain forest or wildlife population. The key to all of this, of course, was to enable self-sufficiency by galvanizing everyone with a financial stake in conservation.

  The first priority was an educated, healthy workforce. The day after our jungle march, we waded hip-deep across the Pungue River to visit Vinho, the community closest to the park’s headquarters. As we scrambled out of the flow, I mentioned that Gorongosa’s head safari guide, Adolfo Macadono, had told me that a week earlier, a villager had been eaten by a crocodile while fishing at the same spot where we were standing on the bank. “I think about it as getting hit by a car in Harvard Square,” Greg said. “It happens.” Need I say I found no comfort in this analogy. Drying off as we toured Carr’s work in Vinho—a brick-and-mortar school with a Wi-Fi computer lab, a clinic and nurses’ residence, a bore well drawing potable water—Greg told me he had promised to construct a hundred additional schools and twenty-five more clinics throughout the district. By 2009, Gorongosa employed six hundred newly trained locals, an additional five thousand people benefiting from their paychecks.