The end of the tax year approaches, and mass mailings cram my letterbox, many of them urgently seeking write-off dollars to keep Noah's Ark afloat. In next year's calendars, affecting photographs of endangered species clamor for our attention: black rhinos, elephants, blue whales, gorillas, condors, otters, hairy-nosed wombats, western giant elands. And people do the right thing, hauling out their checkbooks, taking their charitable deductions.
But as the big conservation outfits will tell you, the costs of protecting habitats soar up and up. Reportedly, in Africa, they double every year. The great goal of all conservation is sustainability, but charitable conservation by definition is not sustainable. Noah's Ark is sinking faster than the donors can bale.
In 1996, Mike Korchinsky, 34 years old at the time, sat in an eco-tour campsite in Kenya, looked around him and, as he remembers, concluded that "high-end ecotourism clearly wasn't saving the land I was on."
