“You can just see nature breathing a sigh of relief.” In Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park, wildlife’s future depends on humans’ livelihoods
On a warm morning at the end of the dry season, early November, a red and black Bell Jet Ranger helicopter raced eastward above the palm savanna of Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park.
African wild dogs were lost entirely from Gorongosa during the war. With some prey populations booming, the park needs its native predators. A pack of 14 wild dogs from South Africa, released in 2018, now helps balance the ecosystem.Pingo landed, and the other two jumped out, clambering through trampled grass toward the sedated elephant. Moments later a ground team arrived with heavier supplies, technical helpers, and an armed ranger.
White-faced whistling ducks take flight above a company of pelicans and storks wading in Gorongosa’s Sungué River, which feeds the park’s Lake Urema. Even in the dry season, the lake and its tributary channels harbor abundant birdlife.This is how it’s done in the Gorongosa Restoration Project, a partnership launched in 2004 between the Mozambican government and the U.S.-based Gregory C. Carr Foundation.
The beginning of the end to this cycle of desperation and loss came in 2004, when the president of Mozambique, Joaquim Chissano, visited Harvard University for a lecture at the invitation of an American named Greg Carr. In 1986 Carr and a friend had created a company called Boston Technology, which presciently offered ways to connect telephone systems with computers. Another successful enterprise followed, and by 1998, not yet 40, Carr found himself on the receiving end of an $800 million deal.
Three years later, Carr signed a long-term agreement with the government. He would bring to the challenge not just his financial resources and management acumen but also a shared vision that Gorongosa could become a “human rights park.” That meant generating tangible benefits for the local people around it—in health care, education, agronomy, economic development—as well as protecting its landscape, its waters, its biological diversity in all forms.
Before departing, we witnessed a small ceremony. A sixth grader named Helena Francisco Tequesse stepped forward and, from a laminated card, read a declaration of 10 rights and 10 duties of children. “Children have the right to be fed and a duty not to waste food,” she read. “Children have the right to live in a healthy environment and a duty to care for the environment.”
Soon afterward, the park’s forestry manager—a Mozambican named Pedro Muagura—made a suggestion at a meeting: Why not grow coffee on mountainside plots that have already been deforested? It could be shade-grown, beneath replanted native trees, giving local people a bit of income as well as restoring the forest. Muagura fought off initial skepticism and is now the warden of the park.
We parked the Jeep and proceeded by foot, crossing a small river on stepping-stones and inspecting a tree-shaded nursery of 260,000 coffee starts, each one growing from a scoop of soil in a potlike plastic sleeve. Farther upslope, we moved amid producing trees, bush-size and healthy, planted in cross-slope rows and shaded by acacias and other trees. The park now employs 180 people on this work, Haarhoff explained, as a demonstration project.