September 25, 2006
"Consider the Wildebeest"
In yesterday's travel-theme issue of T, the New York Times' style magazine, Verlyn Klinkenborg, a superb writer (author of, most recently, Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile), has his "Consider the Lobster" moment in northwestern Tanzania. The occasion is a visit to Grumeti Reserves, a new, private reserve run by the American financier Paul Tudor Jones II. While not as introspective as David Foster Wallace's infamous August 2004 Gourmet essay (scroll down after clicking for a PDF of the article), "Your Own Private Africa" nonetheless offers a few glimpses around the carefully patrolled borders of the reserve:
One morning, Fuller and I were driving down the hill before dawn, slipping out of the woodland and into the open, a clear, blue day ahead. Fuller said, with satisfaction, “Just us and 140,000 hectares.” I knew exactly how he felt.It was never really just us, of course. There were guests and staff at Sasakwa Lodge and its sister lodge, Sabora Plains Tented Camp, as well as a construction crew at a river camp being built at Grumeti called Faru Faru River Lodge. There were askaris (uniformed guards) in hidden observation posts all around us, armed with binoculars and two-way radios. Every day we saw antipoaching patrols coming and going, men crowded into the backs of Toyota pickups, waving as we passed. . . . But 140,000 hectares is about 346,000 acres, or more than 540 square miles, bigger than Grand Teton National Park and almost one-tenth the size of Serengeti proper. This is for the exclusive use of guests staying at Grumeti Reserves.
[ . . . ]
In the midst of all this is Sasakwa Lodge, a cluster of elegant colonial cottages with a spa and equestrian center on Sasakwa Hill. At $1,500 a night (part of which goes to the government as “hunting” revenue), Sasakwa is one of the most luxurious resorts in Africa. Which leaves only a few questions: Do you really need a pedicure after watching a cheetah with her cubs? And do you judge conservation solely by the good it does? Or do you judge it by the good it does, divided by the number of people who are able to witness and directly benefit from it?
What makes these questions more complicated is that Grumeti Reserves borders the fastest-growing human population anywhere around the Serengeti between the park and Lake Victoria. Some call it a “human fence.”
I do not suspect that this article will generate the controversy raised by Wallace's text (later the centerpiece of Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays), but it is somewhat heartening to see ethical questions raised in the midst of a magazine perhaps more known for genuflection. (To wit: "Sofia Coppola's Paris.")