How to save the wild? For a number of eco-friendly entrepeneurs, the answer is to buy and build.

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Ecological Visionaries

It was a river and an abandoned lodge that made film director Francis Ford Coppola fall for Belize. “After shooting Apocalypse Now in the Philippines I wanted a bit of jungle paradise, but nothing so far away,” he explains. An acquaintance told him about an old lodge for sale in Belize, a two-hour flight from Miami or Dallas. “When I looked in the windows of the lodge, I thought, ‘I could write here,’ so I bought it.”

What Francis connects with most about the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve and Blancaneaux Lodge, the resort he owns there, is the Privassion River. “I love to be in it or beside it or hear it when I go to sleep at night,” he says.

That river is the source of 90 percent of Blancaneaux Lodge’s power. The lodge was built with renewable, non-endangered woods, including bamboo and palmetto. An organic garden supplies the produce for the restaurant kitchen—no small accomplishment in a bug- and bird-filled jungle. “Our gardeners have shared organic techniques like composting with their neighbors so our little experiment has helped other farmers as well as the environment,” Francis reports.

As a spinner of onscreen stories and human sagas, Coppola knows that travelers are hungry for authentic experiences, which usually means getting to know some locals. And that makes the lodge’s staff perhaps its most highly prized local resource. “The people of Belize are proud to welcome visitors. They are friendly and anxious to share their culture, their knowledge of local wildlife and plants,” says Francis. “It becomes a genuine culture exchange,” he adds, “which doesn’t happen in a big hotel.”

King Pacific Lodge in British Columbia leaves such a light footprint on the land that it’s actually incorrect to say the lodge is on Princess Royal Island. Instead it floats in the waters just off the island, keeping a respectful distance from a beach where wolves go to hunt for otters and from passing pods of orca whales. The lodge itself—all 17 rooms, the spa, and the restaurant—is towed to its anchoring point each spring and then towed away again in the fall to Prince Rupert, 75 miles away. During its winter hibernation, the lodge gets day-to-day upkeep—impossible in the snowy, road-less wilderness that is Princess Royal Island during the off-season.

The mobility of King Pacific Lodge is “one of the key factors in keeping the environment intact and pristine,” says lodge president Michael Uehara. Along with removing the lodge, Michael’s staff members take away the season’s supply of used bottles and cans to be recycled, as well as sewage and dirty water held in tanks. “We leave nothing behind, not even our docks,” he explains.

This past February, after years of environmental lobbying on the part of Uehara and local First Nations people, the British Columbia government announced that the 4.4-million acres of forest surrounding King Pacific Lodge’s summer home are now a national park. Twice the size of Yellowstone, the Great Bear Rainforest ranks as the largest remaining tract of temperate rainforest in the world. As one of the most biologically diverse areas on the planet, “It is a treasure chest of nature,” Michael emphasizes.

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