The Best American Science and Nature Writing Part 12

BRIAN BOYD Purpose-Driven Life.

FROM The American Scholar.

[Darwinism] seems simple, because you do not at first realize all that it involves. But when its whole significance dawns on you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you. There is a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly and d.a.m.nable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honor and aspiration.

a"George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah (1912).

EVOLUTIONARY THINKING has lately expanded from the biological to the human world, first into the social sciences and recently into the humanities and the arts. Many people therefore now understand the human, and even human culture, as inextricably biological. But many others in the humanitiesa"in this, at least, like religious believers who reject evolution outrighta"feel that a Darwinian view of life and a biological view of humanity can only deny human purpose and meaning.

Does evolution by natural selection rob life of purpose, as so many have feared? The answer is no. On the contrary, Charles Darwin has made it possible to understand how purpose, like life, builds from small beginnings, from the ground up. In a very real sense, evolution creates purpose.

Evolution generates problems and solutions as it generates life. Rocks may crack and erode, but they do not have problems. Amoebas and apes do. Natural selection creates complex new possibilities, and therefore new problems, as it a.s.sembles self-sustaining organisms piecemeal, cycle after cycle, by generating partial solutions, testing them, and regenerating from the basis of the best solutions available in the current cycle. In time, it can create richer solutions to richer problems.

In On the Origin of Species (1859), Darwin showed how new species could evolve through a process of blind variation and selective retention. He transformed at a stroke our understanding of natural design. Living things manifest complex design but can be produced by a mindless process, one that does no more than pa.s.sively register, in terms of survival and reproduction, the advantages of particular variations. In The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Richard Dawkins explains how nature is like a watchmaker who builds intricate mechanisms without forethought, and he thereby overturns the famous argument of the theologian and naturalist William Paley. Paley opens his Natural Theology: or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature (1802), with these words: In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that, for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there...[The precision and intricacy of its mechanism would have forced us to conclude] that the watch must have had a maker; that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use.

n.o.body could reasonably disagree, Paley adds, yet this is tantamount to what an atheist does, for "every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater and more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation." As Dawkins notes, we now know that the complexities of natural organisms surpa.s.s those of the most intricate watch by far more than science could guess in Paley's time; yet he goes on to show how simple processes of variation and selective retention can, over many cycles, create products with even this degree of design.

Other processes working within natural selection have been found to follow the same principle: the human immune system; the synapses in the young human brain (in the neural Darwinism of Gerald Edelman and others); culture (in the work of David Sloan Wilson and others); and invention (in the work of Donald Campbell and David Hull). Such "Darwinian systems," "Darwin machines," or, in Dawkins's term, "universal Darwinism," allow genuine novelty to be achieved without advance knowledge of what will work best in an unpredictable and open world. The common principle of blind variation and selective retention allows for a deeply indeterministic process that explores patches of possibility s.p.a.ce in multiple directions and pursues any direction provisionally more promising than others. It tracks through the vastness of the possible in ways that surprisingly often lead to rich solutions by compounding immediate advantages and retaining achieved complexity in the next round of variations. Such Darwinian processes might well occur anywhere we find deeply original novelty.

Darwin's explanation of evolution by natural selection shocked, and still shocks, because it appears to deny purpose. We think of purpose as something prior to decision and action: I want to raise my arm and, unless I am paralyzed or restrained, I do. But in fact purpose emerges slowly, in the species and in the individual. My capacity to move my arm in as many ways as I can depends on things like the evolution of forelegs into arms early in the primate line, the evolution millions of years later of a rotating socket in the shoulder of great apes, to enable swinging in trees, and the further freeing up of arm movements after early hominids became fully bipedal. Babies flail their arms uncontrolledly and purposelessly for months before they can direct them in a particular way for a particular purpose.

Paley's example of the watch a.s.sumes a purpose we already understand: the intricate integration of material objects into instruments for telling the time. But humans did not evolve to be capable of constructing multipart mechanisms until within the last 50,000 years or so. Until their manual control reached a high level and their stone toolmaking had had more than 2 million years of refinement, they would have been unable to conceive of such mechanisms or, if confronted with them, unable to recognize anything of their construction or purpose. The idea of telling the time precisely would have been unknown and meaningless to our human ancestors even at the end of the Stone Age.

Purposes can emerge only piecemeal; problems cannot even define themselves until many of the elements are already in place. The position of the sun in its daily sweep can indicate the phases of the day, but nothing more precise. Sundials and the sticks in the ground that preceded them afforded more finely determined divisions of time during daylight and made it possible to imagine coordinating common actions in advance. The first water clocks and sand clocks enabled even tighter coordination. Mechanical clocks and bells to chime the hour or even the quarter-hour took social synchronization still further. Not until European navigation and mapping flourished in the fifteenth century did anyone consider devising a portable clock to ascertain longitude, yet maritime clocks remained highly inaccurate for another three centuries. The first watches, in the early sixteenth century, could register only the hour; and it took more than another century to tell the time down to the minute on a portable mechanism. By Paley's day, the recent invention of the duplex escapement had made it possible to keep time accurately on a pocket watch, but it was only over the course of the nineteenth century that highly accurate timing made possible new degrees of precision measurement, and hence new research options in physics and in psychology. Not until well into the twentieth century did cesium clocks attain the exact.i.tude and reliability of timekeeping needed for quantum physics or s.p.a.ce flight.

In the development of both instruments and ever finer standards for measuring time intervals, new purposes have been discovered, each inconceivable a stage or two previously. Purposes arise not in advance, but as possibilities materialize. Of course, when the purpose becomes established, it can then be implemented in advance of any particular manifestation: I can choose to move my arm in such a way as to put on a sweater, or to time mental responses down to the millisecond in a psychology laboratory as a measure of the complexity of the neural processing involved. But each of these purposes, although it precedes a definite action, has a long history that precedes it in the species, the culture, and the individual, a history of prior trials and errors, before the purpose could be conceived and fully defined, let alone specified in advance.

Life could become established only when matter organized itself in a way complex enough to sustain and reliably reproduce itself. Maintaining such a highly improbable and functional arrangement of matter became life's first purpose. As species continued to evolve, so did the purposes of their organs and behaviors. New behaviors, like new organs, begin uncertainly, with slight modifications of existing structure, but become defined over time, and their function or purpose specifiable in advance: a certain kind of spider will spin a certain kind of web to catch a certain range of insects under certain conditions, and so on.

As creatures began to act in more complex and flexible ways, nature evolved emotions to motivate better decisions. Satisfying these emotionsa"escaping fear, appeasing hunger, fulfilling desire, sustaining love, and so ona"became important purposes in themselves for much of the animal kingdom.

As behaviors standardize, as purposes define themselves, social animals can learn to understand not only the actions of other members of their species but even their desires and intentions before they act. Not only do we learn to infer others' intentions but, in social species that benefit from cooperation, we also evolve to empathize with or emotionally react against others' purposes. (Without this, stories would be impossible.) Yet we should not forget that despite our thinking of purposes as prior to actions, they have emerged over long stretches of evolutionary and individual time. Intentions are efficient routes to objectives clearly defined only after many preliminary stages of variation and selection within animals' evolutionary and individual pasts. Like design, purpose emerges rather than precedes, except in the case of purposes that have developed long enough to become standardized. Only in that sense can purpose be said to precede the particular instance, whether the function of an organ or the intention of an action.

Purposes evolve, and Darwinian processes extend them. Intelligence and creativity are purposes that have emerged over the course of life on Earth. Stephen Jay Gould famously argued that if we could rewind and replay the tape of evolution, humans and human intelligence would not reappear. Quite possibly not; no one disputes that contingency strongly inflects evolution. But as Simon Conway Morris has stressed, certain capacities have evolved again and again, because of the singular advantages they offer: senses, locomotion, minds, emotions, sociality, intelligence, creativity, cooperation, to name those that concern us most. Let's consider two of these, intelligence and creativity.

Intelligence allows us to respond flexibly to circ.u.mstances, to solve problems not only according to successful old routines (prior purposes, if you like) but in novel and more or less context-sensitive ways. Because it can sometimes find new solutions, intelligence is highly advantageousa"yet not at all easy for evolution to evolve. Although minds have been necessary for all motile creatures, more advanced intelligence has emerged in relatively few lineages, although quite diverse ones: invertebrates like octopi and cuttlefish; vertebrates like crows and parrots among birds and cetaceans and primates among mammals.

Intelligence has large benefits, but it also incurs costs. Out of the pressure to develop social intelligence, humans have grown in self-awareness, so that we can imagine ourselves as others see us in compet.i.tive and cooperative scenarios. That ability offers real benefits in antic.i.p.ating others' actions and reactions, but among its costs is the fact that we can also envisage our own death and absence from the ongoing world. For humans this has raised the question of our purpose in the face of our ultimate lifelessness, one we have answered most frequently by concluding that we continue in some form after death. To judge by grave rituals dating back at least 70,000 years, and the evidence of the fear of death and the hope of immortality in the records of early civilizations, preoccupation with death has loomed large ever since the appearance of a distinctly human culture.

Creativity is the capacity to develop significant and valuable novelty. This seems the most difficult capacity of all for evolution to evolve, and for good reason. Significant and valuable by what criteria?

Human creativity matters for human beings. But creativity hardly matters for evolution. Single-celled organisms reproduce themselves readily, and life can go ona"did go on, for billions of years on Eartha"with barely more complexity. Life persists through reproduction, through transmitting acc.u.mulated complexity to subsequent generations. If inherited design were radically changed each time an organism reproduced, the hard-won gains of natural selection would rapidly be lost. Life can evolve new possibilities only slowly, through variations small enough not to threaten existing evolved functions, accreting functional novelty generation by generation from minor and undirected variation. But although evolution has thereby sp.a.w.ned many new species and even major new forms of life, it does not need or aim for creativity.

Yet organisms vary, even if only through imperfections in reproduction, and conditions change. Over enough time conditions will always alter, including compet.i.tion with other organisms in the environment. Since any organism can become a source of energy for others, each has to find ways of exploiting others more efficiently and to avoid being exploited by others, including predators, parasites, and pathogens. In species with a wide range of variations, some individuals will be able to exploit changing opportunities or to avoid changing threats more effectively than others. Variation in itselfa"considerable enough to gain advantage, but not so large as to imperil existing designa"therefore offers a measure of security against unpredictable circ.u.mstances. For this reason, s.e.x has evolved many times as a way of recombining genes unpredictably but reliably, and hence of generating a range of initially viable variations from which conditions will select. Some species even toggle between reproducing s.e.xually or as.e.xually according to the degree of environmental instability. s.e.xual recombination therefore ensures a wide and unpredictable range of genetic variation that can cope better with unpredictable circ.u.mstances.

Just as natural selection has evolved s.e.x as a means for amplifying genetic variation, it has evolved art in humans as a means for amplifying behavioral variation. Art has been designed by evolution for creativity.

The human immune system and the infant human brain naturally overproduce options to cope with as many unpredictable situations as they can. They then pare back whatever is not activated by experience and regenerate from whatever has been stimulated by experience. These second-order Darwinian processes allow an additional level of flexibility beyond first-order genetic variation, a still more sensitive adjustment to even shorter-term unpredictability.

Art is a subsidiary Darwin machine that generates not natural but "unnatural" variations or options. By "unnatural" I mean only that art involves highly deliberate human choices, both individual and cultural, even if these are themselves ultimately the products of nature.

Creativity as a principle, as a Darwinian process, solves no particular prespecifiable problem; but it offers an additional way of generating new possibilities that may prove to solve problems, even significant ones, provided there is a consistent pressure toward a solutiona"whether over generations, as in natural selection, or over weeks or months or years, as when a storyteller, say, drafts and revises a story, or in only minutes or seconds in the spreading neural activation in a poet or a scientist seeking a new image or idea, in a mind prepared over many years by many trials.

Art did not evolve in order to foster creativity. Evolution has no foresight. It cannot evolve what has only future advantages, but can evolve only what offers benefit now. Yet art now does foster creativity. So how did it evolve and why?

New evolutionary solutions themselves often sp.a.w.n new problems. When our brains allowed us to become superpredators, to dominate our environments and earn the food we needed in much less time than our waking hours, we did not solve the "problem" of spare time, as did other top predators, such as lions, tigers, or bears, by sleeping the extra hours away to conserve energy. Even at rest our large brains consume a high proportion of our energy, and since they offer us most of our advantages against other species and other individuals, we benefit not from resting them as much as possible but from developing them in times of security and leisure. Art as cognitive play, appealing to our appet.i.te for potentially meaningful patterned information, engages our attention in a self-rewarding way and therefore encourages us to strengthen the processing power of our minds in the kinds of information that matter most to us.

Because it appeals to our own cognitive preferences, we have built-in incentives to generate art: its effects should be pleasing in themselves. Since the criteria for success are human preferences, since the testing mechanisms are already in our minds as we sing, or tell a story, or dance, or daub, we can readily adjust our actions to produce more satisfying effects: we can easily select from what we do, as we do it, and try out new variations, or stop when interest flags.

In most soci eties art has been collective and active, and even in modern cities, dance and song often still remain so. Where art tends to be more individual than communal, those with talent enough to spark the interest of others have a strong extra incentive to develop their skill for the attention, grat.i.tude, and status it can earn them. Although professional artists may not have appeared until agriculture and permanent settlement allowed resources to acc.u.mulate and labor to specialize, the quality of some of the earliest art suggests that some individuals, long before agriculture, had the luxury of developing singular skills. Creative concentration and feedback during composition could work like a speeded-up version of natural selection, as these artists rapidly generated, discarded, and regenerated new variations.

Even in societies where art has become individualized and professionalized, it remains highly social. Art not only activates our private cognitive preferences but also adjusts and amplifies them through our sociality. From the first, mothers and others engage with infants in multimodal social play involving fine-grained attunement and interaction. We instinctively make learning enjoyable for young children by making it social, by making it play, and by making it art, by appealing to the cognitive preferences that art animates. Throughout life, partic i pation in artistic activities in group settings, whether actively (in performance) or more or less pa.s.sively (as audiences), continues to amplify the emotional charge of art.

Art's social nature not only motivates our partic.i.p.ation, but also provides ready-made models to reduce the costs of invention and increase the benefits of response. Tribal arts like weaving, cla.s.sic forms like the sonnet, or modern arts like filmmaking all depend on the existence of shared norms to provide prompts and challenges. As the film theorist David Bordwell observes: "Norms help unambitious filmmakers attain competence, but they challenge gifted ones to excel. By understanding these norms we can better appreciate skill, daring, and emotional power on those rare occasions when we meet them."

Art can engender variations through other factors present elsewhere in naturea"through randomness, "an intrinsic part of brain function," and "nature's way of exploring unforeseen possibilities" in other domains too, and through copying errorsa"and through distinctively human factors. Art does not need to start from scratch but can recombine elements already developed in the same or a different art or tradition. Just as s.e.x, by recombining genes, and hybridization, by recombining lineages that have had time to separate, can engender novel forms, art too can readily recombine, from the animal-human blends in cave art to the Minotaurs of the ancient Greeks or the modernist Pica.s.so.

In any species, attention diminishes with persistence or reiteration, but humans are especially curious and thus susceptible to boredom. And as the developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello and colleagues have particularly stressed, attention, especially shared or commonly focused attention, has become unprecedentedly important to our species. To attract attention, art explores variation, even in traditional societies, and all the more so in societies where professional art and a highly compet.i.tive market for attention act as incentives to discover either new variations within existing forms or entirely novel combinations.

If art is "unnatural" variation, science is "unnatural" selection. Art appeals to our species preferences and our intuitive understandings, often as they have been modified by local culture. Science rejects our species preferences and our intuitive understandings, even as modified by local culture. It tests ideas not against human preferences but against a resistant world not designed for humans. Its methods of testing, by logic, observation, and experiment, encourage us to reject ideas, even those that seem self-evident and apparently confirmed repeatedly by tradition.

By exposing itself to falsifying evidence, science makes possible the c.u.mulative retention of only the most rigorously selected ideas. This does not prove them all correct, but it improves on the ratio of tested to untested ideas attainable by any other known procedure. After the winnowing process, although there may still be wrong ideas in what we think of as science, there are far fewer than in any other human domain.

Art could evolve as an adaptation because it appealed to our deep-grained species preferences. Science could not. It appeals to one strong species preference, our curiosity, but it otherwise goes against the grain of our intuitive understanding. Until Galileo, people a.s.sumed, with Aristotle, that a heavier object fell more rapidly than a lighter one. Information gathering, invaluable for all kinds of animals and even for plants, has mattered especially for humans, but the knowledge gained has mostly been in the form of heuristics, partly right, but not necessarily so, like our hunches about falling objects or the sun's motion around Earth. And although accurate information is invaluable, indecision is fatal, and no organism can afford the time to search for correct information at a moment when immediate responses are required. It was not possible to devote effort to a time-consuming, diffi cult-to-imagine, and increasingly resource-expensive process of testing ideas until in Renaissance Italy the right conditions happened to converge: a considerable buffer of security and overproduction; opportunities for intense specialization; and the availability of information and conflicting explanations that the printing press made possible.

Science still calls for qualities that are unnatural. Children are information sponges and soak up what they need to understand, like the basics of their world or their language. They need not be taught how to speak or to play. But they do need slow formal instruction to read, write, or calculate, and they need even more training and the help of externalized information (books, diagrams, models) to master the knowledge on which science builds. If they undergo the intensive training required of scientists, they will still need imagination to find new ways of testing or reexplaining received knowledge. Even for those with training, looking for potential refutations of cherished ideas is both emotionally difficult and imaginatively draining. And whereas art appeals to human preferences, science has to account for a world not built to suit human tastes or talents.

Unnatural selection though it is, science allows for the acc.u.mulation of advantageous variations and the rapid "evolution" of complex intellectual and technological design. Art functions very differently, as a form of unnatural variation. Much that it produces is therefore not intrinsically deeply valuable. But some art is deeply valuable and speaks profoundly to many people, over long stretches of time or life and across many cultures. Because art is primarily a process of variationa"although artists and audiences also selecta"there is not the same ratcheted acc.u.mulation of better design that occurs in science. Hence art of thousands of years ago, like that of Homer or Nok sculptors, can be superior in many ways, as ex amples of creativity, to most works generated now, simply because Homer or the Nok craftsmen could appeal to preferences that they understood deeply and that have not changed ma.s.sively since their day.

Religion partakes of elements of both art and science. It could not have begun without our uniquely human understanding of false belief, which develops in individuals during their fourth yeara"our awareness that another person can have a different understanding of a situation from what we know to be the case, and our concomitant awareness that in other circ.u.mstances we may not have all we need to understand this or that situation. Our capacity to understand false belief has amplified our curiosity and spurred us to the quest for the deeper knowledge that has led to both religion and science.

Nor could religion have begun without the capacity for storytelling that grew out of our theory of mind and our first inclinations to art, like chant and bodily decoration. Storytelling launched a thousand tales. Those tales most often retold not only involved agents with exceptional powers but also helped to solve problems of cooperation by suggesting that we are continually watched over by spirits who monitor our deeds and punish or reward them.

Religious stories could also allay the unease that arose in us because of our awareness of false belief. The social intelligence out of which our grasp of false belief arose allowed us to imagine being dead and to foresee the world without us. It brought with it a new anxiety about the possible purposelessness of our lives, although this could be allayed to some extent by stories of spirits without bodies as a guarantor of purpose prior to human life or as a promise of continued existence afterward.

Religion and power commandeered art, not entirely but substantially, for millennia. Not that art as play did not persista"between parent and child, or among children, or among adults letting off steam. But where they could, religion and power appropriated toward their own ends art's ability to appeal to human imaginations.

Only when science began to offer alternative, naturalistic explanations of the world did religion and art start to diverge widely again. When science offered a detailed explanation of natural de sign without the need for a designera"the theory of evolution by natural selectiona" that, more than any other single idea, stripped us of a world made comfortable by a sense of purpose, apparently guaranteed by beings greater than ourselves.

Nevertheless, if we develop Darwin's insight, we can see the emergence of purpose, as of life itself, by small degrees, not from above, but by small increments, from below. The first purpose was the organization of matter in ways complex enough to sustain and replicate itselfa"the establishment, in other words, of life, or in still other terms, of problems and solutions. With life emerged the first purpose, the first problem, to preserve at least the improbable complexity already reached, and to find new ways of resisting damage and loss.

As life proliferated, variety offered new hedges against loss in the face of unpredictable circ.u.mstances, and even new ways of evolving variety, like s.e.x. Still richer purposes emerged with emotions, intelligence, and cooperation, and most recently with creativity itself, pursued naturally, and unnaturally, through human invention, in art, and pursued unnaturally, through challenging what we have inherited, in science.

Art at its best offers us the durability that became life's first purpose, the variety that became its second, the appeal to the intelligence and the cooperative emotions that took so much longer to evolve, and the creativity that keeps adding new possibilities, including religion and science. We do not know a purpose guaranteed from outside life, but we can add as much as we can to the creativity of life. We do not know what other purposes life may eventually generate, but creativity offers us our best chance of reaching them.

PHILIP GOUREVITCH The Monkey and the Fish.

FROM The New Yorker.

BACK IN THE 1980s and '90s, Greg Carr made a couple of hundred million dollars developing and marketing voice-mail and Internet services. Carr came from Idaho, and he lived in Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts, and in 1998, just before he turned forty, he decided that he would become a full-time philanthropist. He didn't just want to give his money away; he also wanted to give himself to his projectsa"body and soul. So, for instance, a few years later, when Carr was out walking in Cambridge with a friend, the theater director and critic Robert Brustein, they pa.s.sed an old building that used to house Grendel's bar, on JFK Street; Brustein said it would be fun to turn that place into a sort of laboratory theater, and Carr fell in love with the idea. He put more than $1 million into converting the place into a proper, ninety-nine-seat theater and began producing plays. "What I would do is spend all summer in Idaho, a lot of it by myself, with stacks of plays, just reading," he said.

Alongside what he called "new, strange" work, Carr read ancient Greek drama, and he became obsessed with Euripides. In contrast to Aeschylus and Sophocles, whom he saw as paragons of the Athenian establishmenta""apologists for the current order"a"Euripides, he said, "is writing these plays about slaves, and women taken captive in war, and noncitizens, and crazy people, all the outsiders. And he's writing these plays abouta"well, what if you were an outsider? What would it be like?" The play that really blew Carr away was The Bacchae, in which the women of Thebes rebel against the city's Apollonian order (suns.h.i.+ne and rationality) and turn to wor s.h.i.+pping Dionysus (night and debauchery). The leader of these women is called Agave, and her son Pentheus is the king of Thebes, and one night, in a Baccha.n.a.lian frenzy, the women set upon him, and Agave tears his head off. "And she's holding this b.l.o.o.d.y head in her hands," Carr told me. "And she kind of looks at him, and she goes, Oh, that's my son. And then she has this moment of recognition, like, Who am I? What have I become? I've been fever-following a G.o.d and, um, I don't know who I am anymore. Maybe I've been following the wrong G.o.d. What path am I on?"

Carr became obsessed with such momentsa"the moment when one fever breaks and gives way to a new fever, the moment of self-regard when one calls oneself into question and reverses course. He commissioned a filmmaker, Jessica Yu, to make a doc.u.mentary about people who experience an "Agave moment"a"a terrorist, for instance, and a bank robber, who suddenly saw themselves engaged in action of a kind that they wanted to believe they stood against. In Carr's own life, there was no severed head, no drama worthy of Euripides, but the chapter that was at odds with the way he thinks of himself was, he said, the years he spent as a "crazed businessman"a"and after he cashed out he had gone through a long period of not knowing what to do. His theatrical venture, the Market Theatre, belonged to that period. After just two seasons, he shut it down. He had fallen in love with a national park in Africa, which is where we met a few months ago, and he told me this story.

Gorongosa National Park is a wilderness at the southern tip of the Great Rift Valley in central Mozambique, and when Carr showed up there five years ago, it had been all but abandoned to ruin. The park is the size of Rhode Island and was established in 1960 by Portugal, which had dominated Mozambique for nearly five hundred years. For a time, it was one of the top safari parks in Africa: choked with big herds of big game, served by commercial airlines, equipped with a headquartersa"Chitengo Campa"that boasted modish accommodations, including a pool, and provided Volkswagen microbuses for exploring the bush. But in 1975 a Marxist liberation movement called FRELIMO drove the Portuguese out of Mozambique, and independence was soon followed by sixteen years of civil war. It was an epoch of appalling national devastation: 1 million Mozambicans killed, 5 million driven from their homes, tens of thousands tortured or maimed, the national infrastructure effectively dismantled, the ground sown with a seeming infinitude of land mines.

Gorongosa District, which includes the park, was the scene of much of the heaviest fighting. Both district and park take their names from Mt. Gorongosa, a 6,000-foot rainforested peak that rises fifteen miles west of the park and that served throughout the civil war as the military and political stronghold of RENAMO, the anti-FRELIMO insurgency, which was sponsored by the white supremacist regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Gorongosa was a full-tilt battlefield, a zone of terrifying close-range combat, with tank battles and air raids adding to the maelstrom, as towns and villages were repeatedly overrun by one army, only to be reclaimed by the other, back and forth, year in and year out.

The war was even more unsparing of the wildlife than it was of people, as soldiers from both sides slaughtered game for food and commerce. When the fighting finally ended, the park was left a no man's land. Local trappers desperate for meat, along with organized and heavily armed poaching syndicates, moved into the breach, and the hunt only accelerated, until the fields s.h.i.+mmered with bleaching bones. Between 1972 and 2001, the number of Cape buffalo counted in the park fell from 13,000 to just 15; the wildebeest count fell from 6,400 to 1; hippos went from 3,500 to 44; and instead of 3,300 zebras there were 12. Elephant herds and lion prides, too, were reduced, by 80 to 90 percent. Of hyenas, black and white rhinos, and wild dogs, there were none.

In 2004, Carr said, you could walk or drive all day without seeing any other living thing but some birds. That was when he committed much of his fortune and much of the rest of his working life to resurrecting the park. Now, when we rode out from Chitengo Camp, we routinely saw lions, elephants, any number of species of antelope (oribi, impala, nyala, eland, sable, Lichtenstein's hartebeest, reedbuck, waterbuck, duiker), and sometimes even the rare buffalo. Vervet and green monkeys popped up here and there. Baboons and warthogs were everywhere. In Lake Urema, pods of hippos milled in the shallows, and shoals of giant crocodiles crowded the muddy banks. Once I nearly stepped on a spitting cobra, and later I watched a giant monitor lizard lumbering along the edge of a pond. At night we saw civet cats and water mongoose and listened to the cries of bush babies against the general clamor of bugs and frogs. The bird life was stupendous. Carr, who has never married and has no children, takes a patriarchal pride in every animal he sees in the park. "You give nature half a chance and it's resilient," he said.

Mozambicans generally express surprise on meeting Greg Carr because he likes to dress like a b.u.m and projects none of the grandeur of his wealth. His uniform at Gorongosa is a couple of days' growth of beard, a rumpled short-sleeved s.h.i.+rt or T-s.h.i.+rt, tattered cargo shorts, and Timberland boat shoes with no socks. Carr is happy with the looka"it's comfortable and it's disarming. Although he is not in Gorongosa for profit, he considers giving to be a form of entrepreneurs.h.i.+p, and he retains a fast belief that private enterprise is the surest instrument for positive change in the world. His idea in Gorongosa is to use his philanthropy to create the conditions and set the example that will attract for-profit ecotourism businesses to the park, insuring its economic self-sufficiency, and benefiting the impoverished rural communities that surround it. He has already spent more than $20 million on revitalizing the park and its environs, and he expects to spend at least as much again before Gorongosa will no longer need him, which is his definition of success.

So far, Carr's team of 120 game scouts has dismantled hundreds of thousands of poachers' snares and gin traps in the park and confiscated nearly a hundred poachers' guns. As a result, more animals have survived and multiplied, and those animals have grown less chary of human presence. But the scouts keep finding more traps and making more arrests, and for every poacher they thwart they have to a.s.sume that several more are prospering.

The big animals that the park has lost are not only valuable as tourist attractions but essential to sustaining its ecosystem. If gra.s.s is not eaten in sufficient quant.i.ties, forest encroaches, and the inevitable dry-season fires that flicker across the savannahs and woodlands rage out of control. There were never fewer than half a dozena"and at times there were more than fortya"sizable burns going in the park during the two weeks I spent there in the wicked heat (frequently over 100 degrees at midday) and desiccation of early October. Similarly, in the wetlands, lakes, and rivers that keep the land alive, hippos are needed to churn the muddy bottom and prevent excessive silting; and they are needed, too, to s.h.i.+t in the water to fertilize the rainy-season floods, which begin in December.

So Carr is not just leaving nature to replenish itself. Three years ago, he started bolstering Gorongosa's depleted species with animals donated from parks that can spare them elsewhere in Mozambique and in South Africa. So far he has brought in 180 wildebeest, 139 buffalo, 6 elephants, and 5 hippos, and he figures that he needs at least as many more again of these species before the park has the breeding stock it requires. "We're probably twenty thousand bulk grazers short of what we need to keep the gra.s.s down," he said.

Carr is particularly keen to get more zebras, but his chief conservationist says that the subspecies that is endemic to the park can be had only in Zimbabwe, and in the current political crisis it's impossible to get them from there. "We're going to have to get the president of this country to call Mugabe," Carr told me. "That's next year's challenge." And he'd like some rhinos. And he wants predators: hyenas, leopards, maybe some more lions. And he wants Africa's top safari tourism operations to lease concessionsa"Carr's staff of ecologists, tourism consultants, and engineers have carved Gorongosa into nine huge tractsa"and to develop environmentally correct lodges that will generate $30 million a year of business (10 percent of which will go to the park's budget), in addition to park entry fees. And then there is what Carr calls the "greater Gorongosa ecosystem" to attend toa"the 10-kilometer-wide buffer zone around the park, where the species in most immediate need of attention is humankind.

In the buffer zone, upward of 30 percent of the population is afflicted with AIDS, and most people subsist on less than a dollar a day, with an average life expectancy of between forty and forty-five years. Here Carr has created hundreds of jobs; he has built two schools and two clinics and a handful of computer centers; he has had wells drilled. He sends a nurse out from his base at Chitengo Camp four days a week to provide basic medical care to nearby villages. He has funded a factory in the regional capital, Vila Gorongosa, where local produce is carefully rendered into fancily packaged dried-fruit snacks. He has sponsored scientific research to develop conservation-minded agricultural practices for the buffer zone, and medical teams to conduct epidemiological studies. He has brought in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to distribute mosquito nets for every one of the 250,000 people in and around the buffer zonea"the first large-scale attempt to provide universal malaria protection to a population.

In 2007 Carr signed an agreement with the government of Mozambique to oversee the park and to run community and conservation projects in its buffer zone for the next twenty years. He seeks official advice and consent for each move he makes in Gorongosa, but he recognizes that by giving him charge of the park, the government is basically saying that it recognizes conservation as a necessity that it cannot afford. "I'm not faulting them for this," Carr told me, but he felt the att.i.tude was: "Some dude wants to work on that, let him, because the truth of the matter is, educated Mozambicans, for the most part, want to be in the capital city. The most educated Mozambicans, for the most part, are not clamoring to run a national park."

Carr likes to say that his project is strictly apolitical, but Gorongosa District, where RENAMO sympathies linger, has been largely left behind in Mozambique's postwar recovery, and he understands that his value to the government is not simply as a conservationist. "It wants to show RENAMO it's doing a good thing here," he told me. "Absolutely. And the president's been here three times. He dedicated the school. He dedicated the health clinic. He got his own name on that. I mean, the political aspect of this is key, and the economic aspect of it is key." In fact, Carr told me, "I don't think what I do is that different from what the mayor of any small town faces every single day. You're just juggling. OK, we need better schools, we need a better police departmenta"oh, how's the revenue doing? How are the roads? How's everybody?"

So Carr was excited, a few days after I arrived in early October, that Mozambique's minister of the interior was coming to visit the park with an eye to becoming a minority partner in one of the tourist concessions. "We gotta knock his socks off," he told Rob Janisch, a South African who runs a tented camp, Explore Gorongosa, which is the first private safari operation to come into the park under Carr's scheme. Janisch suggested that the minister be taken to a watering hole called Paradise Pond. Go and watch elephants drinking, he said, "because (a) it cools you off, and (b) it just is cool."

But Carr didn't want to take any chances: the minister didn't have much time, and what if there were no elephants? "Last thing we want is he drives around and says, Oh, I guess they don't have animals yet in Gorongosa." After a minute, he said, "OK, he lands at Chitengo, we do all our greetings, we put him in the heli, we give him the lake tour, where he will absolutely see tons of stuff, we land near the crossing, because there's a hippo pod there, and because that's wherea"that's a camp he wants, what we call Dingue Dingue. So we need to show him that and say, This is yours."

An hour later, Carr was clean-shaven, in a gingham dress s.h.i.+rt, fresh chinos, and black loafers. At the approach of the minister's plane, a Land Cruiser was dispatched to run up and down the Chitengo airstrip, broadcasting the hunting calls of hyenas to scare off strolling baboons, warthogs, and antelope. The minister, a young-looking man, was dressed in the same fas.h.i.+on as Carr, with a Leatherman bush knife in a holster on his belt. As he and Carr flew over the park in the chopper, he exclaimed over the landscapea""These palms and acacias, so beautiful"a"and he told Carr, "You have really saved lives here." Carr said it was his honor, and the work had given his life meaning. The minister said it was a greater honor for Mozambique "that you leave all the comforts and come here." Carr told him, "I am extremely comfortable sleeping in the bush." The chopper banked over Lake Urema, where pelicans, fish eagles, and yellow-billed storks cruised over hippos and crocs, then out over the gra.s.slands, where big herds of antelope galloped below. Elephants appeared as if on cue. "Paradise," the minister said, and Carr, sitting behind him, nodded avidly, cracked a big sideways grin, and gave a double thumbs-up.

Greg Carr had never been involved in conservation work before he came to Gorongosa. He was not an ecologist, or a zoologist, or even much of an outdoorsman. Nor was he an old Africa hand, much less an economist. His only knowledge of the tourism business was as a customer, and he spoke no Portuguese. For that matter, he had never had a conscious interest in making money before he got around to it. "I was taught at an early age to look for deeper meaning in life," he said.

He was the seventh of seven children, the son of a practicing Mormon and a practicing physician. "The Golden Rule and the Beat.i.tudes and Matthewa"great stuff," he said. "And then you'd have Dad pitching in with a little rationalism." He never felt compelled to choose between faith and reason, since both had such obvious appeal and such obvious limitations. In politics, too, he considered himself a centrist. The way he put it was: "Conservatives want to make a good person, and liberals want to make a good society. Which of those two do you not want to do?" In college he thought he might major in biological anthropologya"Darwinism, paleontology, primatologya"even while he saved up, as a freshman at Utah State University in Logan, to spend the next two years in j.a.pan as a Mormon missionary.

Carr allows that he made some converts, but as he tells it, what really excited him in j.a.pan was learning about Zen Buddhism. "I was very much a questioner," he said. And his interests were fluid. When he returned from j.a.pan, he read poetry and majored in history and had no idea what to do with his life. He applied to graduate school, leaving his options open: Asian studies at Stanford, the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, international relations at Yale, or public policy at Princeton. He got in everywhere. The Kennedy School brochure had some stirring lines from JFK about making a better world, so he went there. In his second year at Harvard, he applied to and was accepted in the Ph.D. program in linguisticsa""because I wanted to know, Why do we speak? What is a human?"

That was how his mind worked, with an earnest bent toward the forever debatable. So Carr was as surprised as anyone else during the winter of that yeara"1985a"86a"when he developed a sudden and all-consuming conviction that he should be making and selling digital voice-mail systems to telephone companies. "It's a funny thing," he told me. "I just had this idea. I was in my dorm, and I was kind of just looking at my phone, and I was thinking about how little it did, really."

Carr had never studied computer science or telecommunications, let alone business or marketing, but he met an engineer named Scott Jones at MIT, and they started a company called Boston Technology. They maxed out their credit cards buying gadgetry, set up shop in Carr's room, and by summer had a prototype of their product up and running. Carr was twenty-six, Jones twenty-five, and three years later they were tyc.o.o.ns.

In 1992 Carr brought in a CEO and became chairman of the board. He had enough money to support forever the life of boyish wonder that had made him the money to begin witha"and he still had to figure out what to do with that life. Only now that meant figuring out what to do with the money. He audited cla.s.ses at Harvard; for three years in a row, he attended a summer course on Homer, Dante, and Joyce's Ulysses taught by a professor called Theoharis Theoharis. He read omnivorously and restlessly; he watched movies; he moved into a grand apartment atop the Charles Hotel in Cambridgea"room service suited hima"and he suffered from insomnia. He spent most of his time with a friend he met in one of Theoharis's cla.s.ses, Larry Hardesty, who had moved up to Boston from New Haven as the keyboard player for a rock band that took its name, the Young Man Carbuncular, from a line in The Waste Land. Carr and Hardesty started a film production company, Bowerbird Productions, that never produced a film but tried for a time to work with the former navy secretary (now senator) Jim Webb on an adaptation of his Vietnam novel Fields of Fire. More successfully, Carr served a stint as publisher (with Hardesty as the managing editor) of a magazine of ideas, the Boston Book Review.

It seemed clear to Hardesty that Carr was gratified by his wealth as a measure of achievement, but, he said, "I think he was trying to find something to devote his energy to that would be more satisfying on more levels than success in business had been." Still, in 1996 Carr went back into business as the chairman of the pioneering global Internet service provider Prodigy. Then, after just two years, he sold his share of the company to the Mexican media mogul Carlos Slim and quit all his other for-profit ventures. That was when he decided to commit himself to a life of philanthropy. In 1998 he gave Harvard $18 million to establish the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School. In 2000 he cofounded the Museum of Idaho, in Idaho Falls, and created the Market Theatre Company, and the next year he bought the former compound of the Aryan Nations in northern Idaho, which had been confiscated from the n.a.z.i group by court order, and donated the land to a local college as a peace park.

Then a friend introduced him to the Mozambican amba.s.sador to the United Nations, and the amba.s.sador invited Carr to come and help his country. At the same time, Carr began spending a lot of time online, reading compulsively about threats to Earth's biodiversity. He was alarmed by the prospecta"widely considered likely among environmental scientistsa"that as many as a quarter of the species now alive will cease to exist by the end of this century. The problem was generally described as a conflict between humanity and the rest of nature. As usual, Carr didn't see how you could win by taking sides; it made more sense to try to remove the conflict, make people and the ecosystems they lived in serve each other better. Thinking like that, he flew into Mozambique, hired a helicopter, and toured the national parks.

He told me that when he came to Gorongosa he knew he'd found his place. Until then, he said, "I'd cast about a lota"yeah, I think it was a hard timea"because I wasn't completely fulfilled by any means, and didn't know what was next. I wanted it to be all-engrossing, challenging, and I didn't want to be the philanthropist that writes a check and comes back next year and says, What did you do with my money?" He said, "I mean, I have to actually be pus.h.i.+ng against something." He decided to push against extinction.

In 1968 the Department of Fauna of the Portuguese government hired a young South African ecologist named Ken Tinley to study wildlife conservation in Gorongosa National Park. In establis.h.i.+ng the park, the colonial authorities had driven out the African villagers who had lived there for as long as anyone could remember, and they were prepared to displace more people in the name of preserving the wild land. Tinley had been asked by his Portuguese employers to identify the full parameters of the Gorongosa ecosystem with the aim of redrawing the park's boundaries accordingly. He picked up his official Land Rover in the Mozambican capital, Lou-rengo Marques (now Maputo), and with his wife, Lynne, an artist, and their infant son set out for Chitengo. The drive, which can now be done in about eight hours, took them three days, and once they settled into their cottage, they stayed for six years, until the liberation war drove them out. Tinley then spent several years writing up his research in a Ph.D. thesis, which runs to nearly five hundred pages and remains one of the most comprehensive a.n.a.lyses of an African ecosystem ever produced.

Tinley sought, to the degree that the technology of the time allowed, to record every aspect of the park's natural order: the flora and fauna, of course, but also the geology, the hydrology, the wind patterns, and the intricate complexity that made all the elements of Gorongosaa"every living thing and every physical prop ertya"inextricably part of the larger system. What emerges from his technical scientific prose and no end of charts, maps, drawings, and diagrams is an image of the park as one big organism, and of Tinley as its anatomist.

Mia Couto, Mozambique's preeminent novelist and also one of its leading ecologists, told me that Tinley was "a genius," and that view is pretty universal among people with sufficient scientific knowledge to plow through his thesis. For the rest of us, Lynne Tinley wrote a memoir of the family's life in Gorongosa and of the life of the park, a book called Drawn from the Plains, which distills the essence of her husband's findings with the artful and honest immediacy of the best nature writing. Here, for instance, is how she describes the annual rainy-season scene when Lake Urema overflows and submerges hundreds of square miles of the surrounding gra.s.slands: Thousands of water birds arrive on the plains during the flooding to take advantage of the rich shallow waters. Egret, ibis, spoonbills, herons and divers nest in the tall Acacia albida (called winterthorns because they bear leaves in winter and shed them in summer) that hang over the water. The ancient, sleazy-looking Marabou stork in his funereal dress waits in the shallows under the trees for fledglings that fall out of the twig platforms above or for fish dropped by the parents during feeding. Crocodile also gather under the nesting trees to pick up the dropped food and to feed on fish attracted to the water enriched by birds' dung.

Lake Urema's yearly flooding was the engine that sustained the teeming animal life of Gorongosa, and even before he arrived in the park Ken Tinley had surmised from maps that the distant, cloud-shrouded ma.s.sif of Mt. Gorongosa was, in turn, the engine of those floods. His research on the mountain confirmed this hypothesis: the mountain was the main water catchment for the park, the source of roughly half the water that flows into it. The primordial forests on the mountain slopes received two and a half times as much rainfall each year as the valley floor and pa.s.sed it down through a network of streams and rivers to the lake, providing water essential to human communities on the way. It was obvious to Tinley that the mountain belonged in the park, and as he studied the opposite side of the park, he concluded that the ancient game-migration routes and wetlands that ran east from the park to the mangrove swamps lining the mouth of the Zambezi River delta where it opens into the Indian Ocean were the final piece to complete the Gorongosa system. In his thesis, which he finished in 1977, Tinley laid out a scheme for such an expansion of the park, indicating, as his wife summarizes it, "how the whole area could be planned, in the simplest possible manner, for tourist viewing, for research and education, for wilderness areas, and for the cropping of game as a source of protein for the surrounding tribal peoples."

By then, of course, Gorongosa was a civil-war battleground and the mountain was RENAMO's. But Tinley's dream of a park that ran "from mountain to mangroves" held fast in the lore of the place, and when Greg Carr came along it quickly captured his fancy.

Like Tinley, Carr is what his former Kennedy School professor Herman (Dutch) Leonard calls a "system thinker." Leonard, who also teaches at the Harvard Business School, had worked with Carr on his voice-mail venture, and he told me, "Greg realized that what Boston Technology was trying to do was to become a component of a much larger system"a"the national telephone networka""and that if the company didn't think about the rest of the system, if it just designed its piece, it was unlikely to be able to find s.p.a.ce in that larger system." In other words, Leonard said, "to him it wasn't just a product, and you go and sell this product. It was an intervention in a pretty big, complicated game. And he was able to simultaneously be focused on the individual tree, if you will, and also keep his eye on the forest and think about the nature of how we operate so that we're going to fit in a natural way in this forest." And speaking of trees and forests, Leonard said, "That's not so different from what he's trying to do in Gorongosa."

Indeed, no sooner had Carr grasped the significance of Mt. Gorongosa than he discovered that the rainforest that covered the mountaina"simultaneously capturing the water that fell from the clouds and, through evaporation, replenis.h.i.+ng ita"was being destroyed, piecemeal but steadily, by local pract.i.tioners of slash-and-burn agriculture. People had been living in that forest forever: a few thousand people who speak a distinct language, chi-Gorongosi, and adhere to a distinct spiritual order, which holds the mountain to be sacred and its forests to be inhabited by the spirits of their ancestors, who look out for them. But during the civil war other people began arriving on the mountain, followers of RENAMO and displaced people seeking refuge. After the war, more people arrived from the lowlands at the base of the mountain and began clearing land to grow cropsa"chopping down old-growth hardwoods, burning them for charcoal, and planting potatoes, or corn, or sometimes marijuana between the stumps. After a few crop cycles, the soila"the accretion of perhaps 10,000 years of compost and sedimentationa"was depleted, or after a few rainy seasons it would simply wash away, and these farmers would clear a new patch of forest. The trees they cut did not grow back.

Carr's scientists told him that the mountain's value as a water catchment was in peril: if the killing of trees could not be stopped, the mountain could be lost in just a few years. "To save the park," Carr said, "we have to save the mountain." But he had no authority over the mountain, which stood well outside the buffer zone. It seemed to him that the best solution was Ken Tinley's proposal: to have the mountain, or at least the vital, forested part of it above 700 meters, designated a satellite of the park. After all, the rainforest and the high alpine meadows up there were unique in southern Africa; it was the only place in the region where one could find a certain birda"the green-headed oriolea"and no doubt countless species of plants. It was a landscape ripe for ecotourism, dotted with clear pools, riven by deep canyons, flanked by waterfalls. Carr and his team worked their government contacts in Maputo, lobbying hard to have the mountaintop added to the park, and at the same time they sought the permission of the traditional leaders of the mountain communities to start conservation programs and lead tours in their jurisdictions.

Most of Gorongosa Park's mountain water comes from two administrative zones, Canda and Sadjunjira. Canda is the turf of a hereditary chief, known by his Portuguese t.i.tle of rgulo, and, as Carr paid court to him, he found he could negotiate with the rgulo of Canda: if Carr's people hired Canda people to work in Canda, the rgulo didn't mind them running a reforestation program on his side of the mountain, and if they brought tourists to see him, to pay a small visitor's fee, and to conduct a ceremony of respect for the ancestors, they could take the tourists there, too. In Sadjunjira, on the other hand, the traditional keeper of the mountain was a kind of shaman known as the samatenje, and when Carr paid him a visit everything went wrong.

n.o.body had told the samatenje of Sadjunjira that Carr would be arriving by helicopter, a vehicle known to the mountain people chiefly as an instrument of war, and the noise of the thing as it descended near his compound outraged his entourage. What's more, the helicopter was cherry red, and in the Gorongosi culture red is the color of violence and conflict, so it is strictly forbidden to appear before the samatenje with any trace of red on one's person. Then the helicopter touched down on the wrong side of a stream that demarcated the sacred ground of the samatenje's domain. And as the helicopter's doors opened, a truly astonis.h.i.+ng thing happened: a pale, snakelike lizard, of a sort that n.o.body had seen before, popped out of a hole in the ground right beside ita"a ghastly omen. The only thing that could be worse was for someone to touch the creature, and so that's what happened: a herpetologically inclined member of Carr's party, delighted by what he recognized as his first ever sighting of a blind skink, s.n.a.t.c.hed it up to have a closer look. All the samatenje could say was: Get out of herea"go!

"Look," Carr said, when I asked him about that visit. "Everybody is always talking about wanting to save a rainforest. I'm actually trying to do ita"trying to see what it takes. And I'm finding out."

Carr spends as much as half of each year in Mozambique these days and the rest of his time in America, where he lives in baronial luxury. He loves his big homes, but in Gorongosa, at Chitengo, he loves an equal and opposite extreme of spa.r.s.e accommodation. For his first few years there, he slept mostly in a tent and sometimes in the back of a truck. He didn't even bother with mosquito netting, an adventure that resulted in more than one case of malaria. Since Chitengo was rehabilitated two years ago, Carr has taken to staying in one of the tourist bungalows, but when those beds are fully bookeda"a situation that pleases hima"he crashes on a mattress on an office floor. On one such night, as he headed off to sleep, he said, "You've seen my houses. One of the things I've really gotten out of being here is discovering that this is all I need." I pointed out that he had a million acres of game park, a fleet of trucks, a staff of hundreds, and a hotel and restaurant at his com mand. "Yeah," he said. "But seriouslya"it's like an eight-year-old boy's dream come true."

The one luxury Carr does allow himself in Gorongosa is to keep a chartered helicopter (a blue one now) on standbya"another eight-year-old's dream, but a supremely practical one, as I understood when Carr took me in it to see the mountain. The Chitengo restaurant was full of tourists that morning, and all of them had been happy with the game drives they'd been on. "We've got a tourism product, we're ready for safaris," Carr told me before takeoff. "I can see that happening now. So I can turn my mind to the next big thinga"like expanding the park." Two years ago, just before Carr signed his twenty-year agreement with the government, the mountaintop above 700 meters had been added to the park's buffer zone. Carr was still eager to have it brought fully into the park. But RENAMO remained a force on the mountain, and n.o.body in Maputo wanted to rile up the old guerrillas by appearing to take their turf out from under them.

The helicopter touched down briefly in Vila Gorongosa to pick up the head of Carr's forestry team, Regina Cruz. Our next stop was on the mountain, in a