I spoke to Charles Munn about Ecotourism

Charles Munn has spent over 20 years in pioneering conservation-oriented ecotourism in South America. He has successfully led the teams that created 12 million acres (five million hectares, or a Costa Rica's worth) of protected areas in Manu, Tambopata, and Vilcabamba in Peru and Madidi in Bolivia. In 2000, Munn established Tropical Nature, a U.S.-based non-profit organization that conserves tropical rain forest through the planning and implementation of model ecotourism projects. Currently Tropical Nature works in Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Gabon. During 26 years of field work in Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil. In 1994, TIME chose Munn as one of 100 young leaders for the planet, one of only three environmentalists.

I communicated with Charles through email. He was in the middle of Jungle in Brazil but was kind enough to reply and I blessed the new media for conecting us. I asked him :( part of interview)

What triggered the establishment of Tropical Nature?

At the age of nine, I became fanatical about birds and nature while growing up in a tall forest near Washington, DC. By the age of 11, I was showing birds to everyone through my tripod-mounted spotting scope. At that time, I decided that if people could see animals up close and appreciate their colours and interesting behaviour, they would learn to love nature and therefore would stop cutting forests, stop killing wildlife, and have fewer children. This simplistic belief stayed with me and became more highly elaborated, resulting in my creation in 2000 of Tropical Nature to try to add create a force to push back against the destruc tion of tropical rainforests in the Amazon and Pantanal.

What is the vision and mission of Tropical Nature?
Tropical Nature was born with the goal of testing and developing new models for making intact rainforests more interesting, more fun, and, above all, more economically-relevant. Since that point, we have tested, developed, and now expanded our work to the point where the Tropical Nature conservation system is the largest and most ambitious rainforest lodge network in the world. We are still very small as businesses or nonprofits go, but our achievements are outsized for the amount of capital we have invested, and we now have perfected economic models that have real legs for making rainforests worth more standing and showcased than devastated. Our work now holds special promise to help slow the rate of carbon release in that we can and do help prevent the invasion and burning of enormous biological reserves in the Amazon and Pantanal.

What do you think should be done to promote eco-tourism?
First, ecotourism should not only do no harm to nature, but it should actively protect nature. A lot of lodges or tour operators around the world label themselves under "ecotourism" when in fact many or most have little or nothing "eco" about them. The best thing that could happen to promote ecotourism would be for all "ecotourism" operators to look carefully at the high level of wildlife viewings and services offered in East and southern Africa, and then to reflect on what most lodges in Latin American rainforest show you in terms of real, non-pet wildlife at photo distance with good background and good light. Probably one can learn a lot from the way we have been engaged with eco-touris