Ecotourism and the Mountain Gorilla Miracle

This article was originally published on 12/12/2018.

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A little over a month ago, various wildlife protection organizations and media outlets announced the most significant achievement of the conservation community in the past decade: the Mountain Gorilla population of central Africa has grown to slightly over 1,000 members, downgrading the species from “critically endangered” and on the brink of extinction to “endangered” and growing at a healthy pace.

Photo Credit: The Unvarnished Blogger

Biologically close cousins of humanity, these majestic creatures are an awe-inspiring marvel of the natural world, who depend upon the rainforest wilderness of Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo because they do not survive in captivity.

While this victory is worth celebrating, organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund ignore the major reason why the Mountain Gorilla population has staved off the multiplicity of challenges to its survival: economic development due to ecotourism.

According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, ecotourism is considered any “environmentally responsible travel and visitation to relatively undisturbed natural areas in order to enjoy and appreciate nature…that promotes conservation, has lower visitor impact, and provides beneficially active socioeconomic involvement of local populations.”

Ecotourism, however, has many more complicated and positive effects than this simple definition would make it seem.

Economic environments are similar to fragile, delicate ecosystems in which all elements individually affect the community as a whole. If the lowest organism on the food chain flourishes, then the whole ecosystem will grow more plentiful as a result.

Ecotourists are the base of the food chain for many developing economies blessed with natural wonders.

Ecotourists who come to experience the beauty and gifts of a specific area do more for a community than pay an entrance fee to a national park or buy a permit (which for Gorilla Trekking in Rwanda is a pretty penny of $1,500).

Visitors require places to stay, food to eat, things to do, and items to buy. Ecotourism, therefore, spurs a vibrant hotel industry, necessitates quality restaurants and dining facilities, and inspires local artisanry.

Photo Credit: The Unvarnished Blogger

This not only provides employment for those directly in an area with specific resources, such as Gorillas, but also channels resources into other elements of the economy: construction projects to build accommodations and roadways for transportation; supply chains for food and goods to get to the tourist communities; energy to support this expansion and maintenance; and the list continues. This does not even include the tourism proper, which keeps the ecotourists fat and happy to spend money today and encourage their countrymen to visit in future.

In short, Ecotourism has the capacity to touch every sector of a country’s economy.

And the positive proof is in the primates.

According to data from the World Bank and estimates of the Mountain Gorilla population, there is an unmistakable positive correlation between the growth in GDP per Capita in the three countries home to the species and the growth of the Gorilla population.

Why is this significant? As the experience of Gorilla Trekking becomes more popular and therefore more lucrative, both the local community and the nation as a whole have a greater incentive to protect the natural resource. Ecotourism, therefore, is one way to prevent the tragedy of the commons which plagues natural resources not owned by private individuals: if there is a strong enough community and personal incentive to protect a shared resource, then the community will cooperate to protect it.

Critics of ecotourism claim that international influence corrupts not only the cultural values of a community but also their traditional economic ways of life.

With the Democratic Republic of Congo being the 3^rd poorest country in the world, followed by Rwanda at 21^st and Uganda at 29^th, any form of raising standards of living should be a positive victory.

Having been privileged to see the Mountain Gorillas of Uganda first hand, I celebrate their population growth.

At the same time, the real achievement is the economic development – and the corresponding improvement of human lives – that has come from the immense natural gifts in these countries and the ever-entrepreneurial human mind. The true miracle in this situation is the opportunity for human flourishing provided by ecotourism and the Mountain Gorilla.