“Gorongosa, which was a jewel of Southern Africa…had great populations of lions, elephants, hippos, buffalo, etcetera. Absolutely decimated. So if you went there in the early part of the last decade, in the early 2000s, you might drive for five or six hours and see one warthog, one baboon, maybe.”

Biologist Sean B. Carroll, of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He spoke March 15th in the Great Hall of the Cooper Union here in New York City about his latest book The Serengeti Rules: The Quest to Discovery How Life Works, and Why It Matters. Gorongosa National Park was ravaged during the Mozambique war for independence from Portugal and then the civil war that followed.

“And a philanthropist, Greg Carr…was looking for a project to really sink his teeth into and to work on human development, became also really interested in conservation, learned about Mozambique…and in 2004 committed a sizeable fortune to helping to restore Gorongosa in partnership with the Mozambique government. And in 2004 surveys showed there were fewer than one thousand large animals in the entire park, and this is a massive place. So that’s all antelope and elephants, all combined, fewer than a thousand of all types combined.

“And I was there last summer as the new survey came in. A decade later: 72,000 large animals. Dramatic change. I’m looking at elephant herds with lots of youngsters. I’m looking at hippos, groups of hippos….

“So the point is this: the habitat was all there. The large animals had been shot, poached, used for food, whatever, but the habitat was still there and still productive. And once these very small remnant populations had that pressure taken off them, they’ve just been booming. And so a place that, I think it’s the one place on Earth I know that’s been the most decimated and has seen the greatest recovery…

“So there’s a lot of stories of good management and of recovery, and recovery on that really rapid time frame. And I think that’s where I find hope. And when I said that Greg Carr committed a sizeable amount of money, I’m just gonna tell you exactly what that is, he spent about the same amount of money inside the park as outside the park, on human development, health care, education, etcetera, for Mozambicans, economic development. But in the park it’s about a $3-million-a-year budget. Three million bucks a year to bring back a vast African wilderness. In the time of my explanation alone, how much did we just blow on like the worst ideas that possibly came out of Washington?

“My optimism is that it can be cheaper than you think, it’s faster than you think—and it’s not a luxury. I’m not just talking about making pretty places prettier. It’s making everything functional. And this, I think, is why I took certain examples in the book about from agriculture and fisheries and things like that, because we need our systems to be productive. There’s 7.4 billion of us, and if we’re not managing them in a productive way, that’s gonna show up in some pretty horrible ways.”

—Steve Mirsky

[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]