Men's Journal

Entrepreneur Greg Carr restores a wildlife park to its former glory.

By Kitt Doucette

Greg Carr is not your typical environmentalist. He took his master’s in public policy from Harvard to the software industry, where he turned a singular insight into voice mail pioneer Boston Technology, then repeated the feat with ISP Prodigy. By 1998, Carr was worth a quarter billion dollars — and walked away to pursue philanthropy full time, creating everything from museums to human rights organizations.

Then, in 2004, he visited Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park, one of those places that make people dream about Africa, become obsessed with Africa, and want to improve Africa’s fortunes. Like so much of the continent, Gorongosa’s natural beauty is striking, diverse, immense — and equaled in scale only by its tragedy.

Fifty years ago the park represented the best of Africa, a Garden of Eden teeming with wildlife. Royalty and Hollywood flocked there to experience the densest populations of lions, elephants, cape buffalo, and hippos in the world. But as with many of nature’s cathedrals, the map lines drawn around Gorongosa got thicker and meaner. War came: independence from Portugal, then 15 years of civil war. By the time the last shot was fired, more than 900,000 people were dead and Mozambique was one of the poorest countries on Earth.

“The first time I saw Gorongosa, I was in a helicopter flying over the park and just couldn’t believe how magnificent it was,” says Carr. “From 500 feet it looked perfect. It wasn’t until I was on the ground that I realized something was wrong.” What he noticed immediately was how little life there was in the park: Ninety-five percent of the large mammals were gone, and the people there were destitute, most of the roads and buildings reduced to rubble. He knew he wanted to do something, but he also knew he had a steep learning curve ahead of him if he were to succeed.

Using his experience as an entrepreneur, Carr shaped a plan for the park’s future with an approach radical in its scope: In 2008 the Carr Foundation signed a contract with the Mozambican government pledging $40 million — and 20 years of labor — to the rehabilitation of Gorongosa. But even more revolutionary is Carr’s plan for the next two decades, which outlines a for-profit approach to protecting one of the world’s unique ecosystems. Ecotourism, agriculture, and economic development, and not merely more donors, he stresses, are the keys to ending the region’s poverty and making the park viable long-term. In the process, Carr is linking the public and private sectors, turning the park into a corporation that’s owned by local nonprofit community organizations. Carr, who spends a full six months of the year there, hopes his model will be adapted to more of the roughly 800 national parks in Africa, allowing them to become self-sufficient while also giving local populations a stake in their prosperity. In Carr’s lingo he’s “turning natural capital into liquid capital without exploitation.”

Four years since Carr first saw Gorongosa and a year since his foundation started operation, the park is slowly coming back to life. Impala and sables are calving, warthogs and baboons are plentiful, and 400 species of birds have returned. The big game will be slower to recover, but progress has already been made with wildebeest, hippos, and elephants transplanted from Kruger National Park in South Africa. Change has come even quicker to the villages. Clinics, schools, and roads are being built, and tourists are filtering in. In a world full of splash-and-dash charity, where, Carr says, the average commitment is less than five years, 20 years is an eternity. “How long does it take a tree to grow or a child to graduate high school or an elephant to reach mating age?” he asks. “That’s why we’re here for 20 years. I don’t want to just start this project; I want to finish it.”

“It’s never been done like this before,” says Bob Poole, a National Geographic cinematographer who has filmed in Africa for 30 years. “And I find a fair amount of hope in that.”

This article originally appeared in the March 2009 issue of Men’s Journal.