Conservation Tourism

The Most Important View, If Climate Change Interests You

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In a vulnerable, defendable part of the Amazon, the hundred-and-ten-foot-high tree house was built to attract wealthy tourists—and potential funders of conservation.Photograph courtesy Tamandua Expeditions

Tree house lodging is not new, but beyond beauty is impact. In that regard the accommodations with the most important view right now might be here:

The Highest Tree House in the Amazon

In 2023, conservationists and carpenters converged on Peru to build luxury accommodations in the rain-forest canopy.

Every day, empty logging trucks rumble into Puerto Lucerna, a small outpost on Peru’s Las Piedras River, which snakes through the lush Amazon rain forest. There, workers load them up with pyramids of freshly cut logs—cedar, quinilla, and, most important, ironwoods, which are prized for their hardness and rich color. Continue reading →

Conservation, Tourism & Introspection

/ Crist Inman / Leave a comment

A Maasai boy herds goats and sheep in the shadow of Ol Doinyo Lengai—known to the Maasai as the Mountain of God—in northern Tanzania. Government plans call for the removal of the Maasai from this region, the latest in a long series of evictions.

Bumper-to-bumper in Serengeti National Park, the first enclave in northern Tanzania to be set aside for conservation and tourism (Nichole Sobecki for The Atlantic)

If your professional focus is at the intersection of tourism and conservation, this article in The Atlantic, by Stephanie McCrummen with photos by Nichole Sobecki, forces introspection. At least it did for me:

‘THIS WILL FINISH US’

How Gulf princes, the safari industry, and conservation groups are displacing the Maasai from the last of their Serengeti homeland

Maasai gather at a livestock market, one stop on Songoyo’s 130-mile circuit from Tanzania to Kenya and back. (Nichole Sobecki for The Atlantic)

It was high safari season in Tanzania, the long rains over, the grasses yellowing and dry. Land Cruisers were speeding toward the Serengeti Plain. Billionaires were flying into private hunting concessions. And at a crowded and dusty livestock market far away from all that, a man named Songoyo had decided not to hang himself, not today, and was instead pinching the skin of a sheep. Continue reading →