Greg Carr, keynote speaker at the 2011 Global Donors Conference has been profiled in numerous publications including the Smithsonian. An excerpt from the article is posted below – but you can read the whole thing by clicking here! We look forward to sharing more of the articles with you over the next few months in preparation for his speech on Friday, April 1st.
What Carr has embarked upon is one of the largest individual commitments in the history of conservation in Africa. To restore Gorongosa National Park, he has pledged as much as $40 million over 30 years, an almost unheard-of time frame in a field where most donors—governments and nonprofit organizations alike—make grants for four or five years at most. He also plans one of the largest animal reintroduction efforts on the continent and hopes to answer one of the most debated questions in conservation today: how to boost development without destroying the environment.
His efforts come against a backdrop of worldwide biodiversity loss, which is at its worst in developing regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, where conflict and poverty accelerate natural resource destruction. Last year, the World Conservation Union reported that 40 percent of the species the group assesses are under threat of extinction.
Gorongosa, Carr believes, will change all that.
The park was once one of the most treasured in all of Africa, 1,525 square miles of well-watered terrain with one of the highest concentrations of large mammals on the continent—thousands of wildebeest, zebra and waterbuck, and even denser herds of buffalo and elephant than on the fabled Serengeti Plain. In the 1960s and ’70s, movie stars, astronauts and other celebrities vacationed in Gorongosa; tourists arrived by the busload. Tippi Hedren, who starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, was inspired by Gorongosa’s lions to build her own exotic cat preserve outside Los Angeles. Astronaut Charles Duke told his safari guide that visiting Gorongosa was as thrilling as landing on the moon.
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/mozambique.html#ixzz1CLLXzDFa
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