PHOTO: The Wilderness Botswana Rhino Project is a partnership between Wilderness Safaris and the Botswana Department of Wildlife and National Parks.

Ecotourism is more than just a slogan to Wilderness Safaris. It is the reason for the company’s existence.

“We exist as we believe that the world’s wilderness areas will save humankind,” proclaims the company on its website. “Our aim is to get to understand the wilderness better, to respect it, care for it and share it.”

Wilderness Safaris aims to accomplish its goal by providing safaris to visitors. The company provides the entire package of what it takes to go on an African safari. It has its own bush airline, its own tour operation and transportation services, its own portfolio of safari lodges that it manages as well as access to lodges owned by other companies that it partners with. It’s an all-inclusive package.

By providing life-changing experiences in the great outdoors, Wilderness Safaris believes it can further its greater goal of preserving and nurturing some of the few vast wilderness areas that remain in the increasingly industrialized world.

Building Rhino Populations
One of the most recent of the company’s ongoing series of environmental projects is the transfer of a population of the Critically Endangered black rhino through a collaboration with the South Africa and Botswana governments. The rhinos are being moved to establish a core population in Botswana.

It is the latest effort in an ongoing series of projects by the Wilderness Botswana Rhino Project, a partnership between Wilderness Safaris and the Botswana Department of Wildlife and National Parks. It began in 2000 with the reintroduction of white rhino from southern Botswana to protected areas in the north of the country. Efforts from 2000 to 2005 increased the white rhino population in the area significantly.

PHOTO: Wilderness Safaris’ environmental stewardship extends to taking responsibility for the welfare of the wildlife populations

Ecotourism Beyond Ambiguity
The word “ecotourism” has become like a brand name that has been thrown around so freely as to almost have lost its ability to convey any meaning at all.

At its root, “ecotourism” refers to companies that conduct tourism in an environmentally responsible way. As pressure on environments increases, the requirements for responsible tourism increase. It starts with a sort of Hippocratic precept: First do no harm.

Just doing no harm is a big improvement over the way much tourism is conducted today and has been in the past. From that point the practice of genuine ecotourism grows into initiatives such as channeling tourism profits back to the places and the communities that made tourism possible. Unfortunately, under current environmental trends it is a real possibility that the great wilderness areas that still survive today will not be there for the grandchildren of people living now.

As Wilderness Safaris describes the conundrum: “Without the wilderness there is no Wilderness.” Put another way, the existence of tourism companies like Wilderness Safaris depends on access to pristine wilderness areas. If the environment is fouled, polluted and trashed, tourism in these places too will become extinct.

With so many threats against the natural environment, Wilderness Safaris places itself among those who protect, not those who destroy. Increasing numbers of American travelers, especially the affluent, want to travel with companies who follow principles of environmental responsibility. As that happens, responsible environmental stewardship increasingly becomes a selling point.

PHOTO: Wilderness Safaris gives its guests life-changing journeys in some of the most remote and pristine areas in Africa

Thirty Years in the Wilderness
Founded in 1983, Wilderness Safaris claims the title of “the continent’s foremost ecotourism operator.”

The company started with a shared concern for the vanishing wilderness by two guides and a third lover of the wilderness who saw the way tourism was being conducted at the time and sought to offer an alternative.

At the time much of Botswana’s land was controlled by hunting safari companies. Photographic safaris, the less-invasive sort of African safari that is the model of today’s safari tourism, were then restricted to the national parks in Botswana. Most of the programs were based from Johannesburg and participants traveled from South Africa to Botswana on land vehicles.

Wilderness Safaris set up an office in Maun, Botswana, to better service safari-goers closer to the end point, and to maximize the amount of trip time that could be spent on safari in the bush. Around that time the government of Botswana changed laws governing land use, which opened large areas of land for safaris, broadening the possibilities for safari operators. Similar legal changes in neighboring countries enabled Wilderness Safaris to expand in Malawi, Namibia and Zimbabwe.

Today, the company offers professionally guided access to nearly 8 million acres of Africa’s wilderness areas and owns and operates more about 60 camps in nine African countries. The company also works with other partner properties, so it can book clients in the Cape Grace Hotel in Cape Town, for example, as part of an itinerary.

The company owns and operates a fleet of nearly 40 light aircraft and employs around 2,800 people from more than 20 different ethnic groups. It hosts about 35,000 guests each year.

Not Vacation Packages
Wilderness Safaris is not just selling vacation packages. According to a company statement, “At Wilderness Safaris, we create journeys, not holidays. A journey is an immersive experience, changing how you view the wild places of Africa and the world.… We give our guests life-changing journeys in some of the most remote and pristine areas in Africa and, in so doing, help conserve Africa’s spectacular biodiversity and share ecotourism’s benefits with rural people.”

Wilderness Safaris specializes in safaris in private game preserves, which offer more privacy, comfort and a higher-quality wilderness experience overall than is available in public areas. The company provides access to a wide range of terrain, from rainforest, to plains, to desert to oceanside.

PHOTO: Wilderness Safaris specializes in safaris in private game preserves.

Four Cs: The Company Mission
Wilderness Safaris builds its company on four pillars, which it calls the Four Cs: commerce, conservation, community and culture.

Though it sees protection of the wilderness as its primary reason for existence, the company cannot do anything toward those goals unless it is profitable. Therefore it places commerce at the top of its list of the Four Cs. Under that formulation, commerce is the indispensable element in the struggle to maintain sustainability, the first step.

“If our business is profitable, based on sound business principles and on good solid moral principles, then we can make good on our promise to make a difference.” says a company statement.

With a viable business model, the company can have the resources it needs to make a difference in its other areas of concern.

Under the category of Conservation, the company channels its efforts into two areas of concern. First is Environmental Management Systems for operating its properties in the most environmentally sensitive way possible with regard to waste management and limiting carbon emissions.

Secondly under Conservation, environmental stewardship extends to taking responsibility for the welfare of the wildlife populations in the area of operation. The company takes part in anti-poaching efforts to save animals, especially rhinos and elephants, from the threat of extinction through mass killings by poachers who supply international black markets with ivory, rhino horns and other things that are seen as rare prizes and bring high prices in some countries. Beyond that, it also takes an active role in supporting the wildlife throughout Southern Africa, as in projects mentioned above.

The other two principles in the mission statement are people-centered. The third principle is Community, which starts with employees and extends to natives of the indigenous communities in the region. The fourth is Culture. Under this principle, the company makes efforts to encourage the celebration of the culture of all 27 ethnic groups represented among people employed in Wilderness camps or offices and in the areas of operation.

To pursue some of its environmental responsibility goals, the business entity of Wilderness Safaris established a separate trust called The Safaris Wildlife Trust, which donates to various projects for the benefit of human or wildlife communities in areas where the company operates.

New on the Market
Aug. 1 is the opening date for Wilderness Safari’s new Hoanib Skeleton Coast Camp in Namibia. The camp is located on privately held land in a valley at the meeting of two tributaries of the Hoanib River. The area is notable for having the world’s largest population of free-roaming, desert-adapted black rhinos. Game drives are offered, as well as nature walks, flights over the Skeleton Coast and shipwreck explorations.

In May 2015, the company plans to open Linkwasha Camp in a private concession rich in game in Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park. It will be the company’s third lodge in the park. The new lodge has been designed to complement the other two, Little Makalolo and Davison’s Camp. It will offer seven double or twin luxury tents and one family tent, accommodating a total of 18 guests. Game-viewing opportunities include elephant, buffalo, prides of lions and an assortment of plains game and birdlife on the savannah grasslands habitat.