Sustaining Nature and the Economy

After a rewarding and educational year in which I back-packed across North Africa and up the Nile from Alexandria to Juba and then on to Nairobi, where I worked for a while, I learnt to appreciate the plight of poor people. I also became aware of Mother Nature in its rawest form. I was enthralled and touched by the friendliness and hospitality of the various African folks I met. To simplify: they had nothing, but they shared it with me and, somehow, they seemed to be happier than most pleasure seeking first world people who can never get enough of anything. Thirty six years later I am about to open a safari lodge in Tanzania. The lodge should provide a real African experience to its guests yet in a safe and hygienic environment and it should not cost the earth as many “luxury” lodges still do.

To maintain reasonable prices, to offer holidays of a lifetime, and to develop a serious business that will donate much of its profits to aid projects within Tanzania are our genuine targets but how to achieve them? In particular, how do we achieve those targets without destroying the very Nature that enables the business in the fist place?

Well, we must look at what we are doing, why we are doing it, and how we implement our work without negating any of those attributes that make it possible…

What are we doing? Giving people the chance to experience Africa as it was and is, enabling them to see much wildlife in truly wondrous habitats in beautiful natural surroundings. Also providing them with a real life cultural experience with various tribes. We attempt to do that without disturbing nature and traditional lifestyles by keeping the number of visitors low (we have just six rooms with a maximum occupation at any one time of 16). We provide an all inclusive safari holiday in which we visit only two national parks per week, either Ngorongoro Crater Reserve, Lake Manyara or Tarangire National Parks, and if we have three pairs of visitors staying with us we do not send out 3 safari vehicles. When travelling to the Ngorongoro we will at times take eight people per bus. Thus not too many vehicles are harming the environment.

Our three bungalows are also placed widely apart on our 10 acre plot, each with an amazing view of the valley below, from Lake Manyara to the south up to Mount Kitumbeine in the north. They are each built with local brick, have a makuti (palm leaf) roof and are painted in a bamboo colour giving them the look and feel of local huts, yet they have modern en-suite showers and toilets and locally made furniture designed to cater for first world tastes. They are nestled into the bush, hardly visible from a distance. Thus our lodge is literally a site for sore eyes, as beautiful as its surroundings.

All electricity is re-usable energy from solar panels on each bungalow roof and a wind turbine up at the kitchen. Our water is harvested during the rainy season and is sometimes topped up with water from the Simba river but none of it gets into our kitchen or bungalows before going through a series of filtration units: a coarse, synthetic membrane filter, a finer membrane filter and, at each building, an ultraviolet filter which kills all pathogens.

Thanks to our modern compost separating toilets from Sweden we have no major sanitation problems. These toilets do not use water to flush. Man or woman you must sit on these toilets and on impact to the seat the toilet opens up. Faeces are collected in the drum below and urine is piped into a separate tube which is directed into our grey water sewage pipes that run below ground until the edge of the escarpment at which point they run, together with shower water, into purpose built drainage pits and seep through the gravel, large stones and the porous rocks of the escarpment ending up 250 meters below our ground level.

From the toilet the dry faeces are taken out hygienically by placing a lid over the container, taking it out and replacing it with a new one. The human effluent that is taken away is stored in a container in a remote corner of our lodge and left to dry over a period of six months after which time it is free of pathogens and can be freely distributed as fertiliser – although it will never find its way onto our vegetable garden!

We will never have a swimming pool because we want the air of an African village and not that of a Mediterranean holiday hotel and because water is almost as rare on our site as in the villages. We expect our guests to be looking for African ambience with the comfort and culinary pleasures as at home but, at the same time, to appreciate the saving of our scarcer resources.

I believe that many people have an interest in that kind of experience and will appreciate that their short trespass into an endangered area is of minimal impact.

It is not that I am suggesting my lodge is the best (although it must be close!), and certainly not that we are the most advanced in eco and sustainable tourism, nor that we have got everything right (yet) but I do hope that we are on the right path, and I would like to be able to measure our success in these important environmental and social issues.

I propose that international standards are set by conservation bodies to which we can all be measured in an attempt to aspire towards a real, safe ecological footprint across the entire industry in all sensitive areas. For example, if the WWF measured the tourism industry and awarded either nothing, bronze, silver, gold or platinum ecological and sustainability footprint logos for our advertising media and websites we could benefit from such achievements and would be encouraged to improve.

We need a well thought out strategy, achievable standards and a scientifically aware body of control to allow our businesses, the environment and the indigenous peoples to live, in the long term, together in harmony and balance.

With an internationally accepted and approved calibration of eco-tourism and sustainability we can attract guests by aspiring to these targets and by showing that we are there not only for profit but also to help local people and the conditions in which they live – but more about that in my articles on how small business can help the poor and the two lane approach to Africa’s development.