Fear Is Good for the Forest

n 2011, the renowned evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson paid a visit to Gorongosa National Park, in Mozambique. It is one of the few places in the world where you can get a feel for the Great African Rift Valley, humanity’s evolutionary home. After a couple hundred thousand years, the area is largely as it was—mostly the same. It is a hopeful, triumphant tale: the story of how the area’s natural beauty and mammals were ravaged during Mozambique’s multi-decade civil war and came roaring back to life on the brink of permanent destruction. The revival of the area might serve as a model for future conservation. “Here, then, in one of the remotest parts of Africa,” Wilson wrote, “a great environmental tragedy has been averted just in time.”