[CLOCK TICKING]
Tonight on 60 Minutes Presents, Take Me Away.
The saying here goes, you'll know the Newfoundlanders
in heaven.
They'll be the ones who want to go home.
And the adage comes to life on Fogo Island,
a 90-square-mile patchwork of 10 minuscule fishing villages where
clapboard houses the color of jelly beans cling to rock 400
million years old.
Among its quirks, Newfoundland has its own time zone,
half an hour ahead of the mainland.
But wander through Fogo Island's villages,
and you might as well set your watch back to the 18th century.
[CLOCK TICKING]
That's the temple of Castor and Pollux.
Exactly.
The Roman Empire centered around conquest
and the outsized personalities of its emperors.
Research and archaeology continue
to search for reliable evidence from that time,
and tonight, we'll introduce you to some new discoveries
about one of the most-written-about, if not
misunderstood, emperors of all time, Caligula.
I can't believe that we are sitting on the steps
that Caligula may have walked on.
It's amazing.
[CLOCK TICKING]
Just come and sit at a sunset by the lake in the center
of this national park.
Time stops.
And you get a hundred colors of yellow and hundreds
colors of orange, and then the dusk sets in.
Oh, there's an elephant right there.
Is there?
Well, there certainly is.
I just have to stop and say hello to the elephant.
[CLOCK TICKING]
Good evening.
I'm Jon Wertheim.
Welcome to 60 Minutes Presents.
On a dismal, raw and rainy day, who hasn't thought, even begged,
take me away?
Tonight, we'll do just that.
We'll transport you to ancient Rome,
where, through the eyes of archaeologists,
Anderson Cooper visits the unearthed pleasure gardens
of the emperor Caligula.
Then it's off to Africa, where Scott Pelley
checks into a very different pleasure garden.
Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park, transformed from wasteland
to wildlife paradise through the efforts
of an American entrepreneur.
But we begin tonight at the other end
of the world, an island off an island in the Atlantic.
A remote jewel of land off the coast of Canada, Fogo Island
floats in the northeast corner of the northeast province
of Newfoundland and Labrador, the outstretched right
fingertip of this continent.
The place might be drop-dead gorgeous,
but it wasn't immune to the fate befalling
so many small and isolated communities in North America.
Its one and only industry went into steep decline,
and so, in turn, did its population.
Then, in the early 2000s, a local returned home,
fresh off making a fortune in the tech sector.
Her pockets were deep, so was her desire to lift up the place
and bring people back.
So she unleashed a sort of economic experiment.
As we first told you in 2021, we took two planes, a long drive,
and a ferry to reach Fogo Island and check on the results.
The saying, here goes, you'll know the Newfoundlanders
in heaven.
They'll be the ones who want to go home.
And the adage comes to life on Fogo Island,
a 90-square mile patchwork of 10 minuscule fishing villages where
clapboard houses the color of jelly beans cling to rock 400
million years old.
Among its quirks, Newfoundland has its own time zone,
half an hour ahead of the mainland.
But wander through Fogo Island's villages,
and you might as well set your watch back to the 18th century.
Back then, all you needed to get by here
was a pig, a potato patch, and something
called a punt, a small wooden fishing boat
used in pursuit of North Atlantic cod, the species that
once kept this place afloat.
Seemingly, every structure on the island was built in service
of catching and preserving fish, with one gleaming exception--
a $40 million luxury inn, part edge-of-the-earth destination,
part economic engine on stilts, the inn is the brainchild
of eighth-generation Fogo islander Zita Cobb.
And locals gave her a funny look when she first floated the idea.
What kind of reaction did that get?
Why would anyone come here?
We love this place, but it wasn't obvious
when you know there are fancy places in the world that people
go.
Our assumption is everybody wants to go where it's warm.
Someone suggested to us it look like a ship.
The architecture of the inn was obviously
a topic of much conversation.
I think about it as a metaphor.
It's about people from here and people from away.
It's about the future and the past.
The past looms large on Fogo Island.
To fully appreciate the inn, even as a metaphor,
you have to understand Fogo's history.
It's just something.
Zita Cobb took us through dozens of tiny islands
that dot Fogo's waters to a place called Little Fogo Island.
And for those keeping track, that's an island off
an island off an island.
This is a slip.
Her ancestors landed here from Ireland and South England.
They came for one reason.
Fish, fish and fish.
When you say fish, is it just a given?
It's a given.
So, yes, when we say fish, we mean cod.
Is it possible to exaggerate the importance of cod to this place?
No, it's not possible, because everything
that you need to know about someone from here,
you can figure it out by just studying that lowly fish.
It's actually quite a noble fish.
A noble fish?
It asks very little and gives so much.
They exist on almost anything.
I think a cod could eat a rubber boot if it had to.
Not unlike the noble fish, Zita Cobb's family
survived without fuss.
In cod they trusted.
Families worked side by side here,
trading their fish for goods.
No bank accounts, no cash.
Cobb's parents could neither read nor write.
She and her six brothers grew up in a house with no electricity.
She says it was a happy childhood, until it wasn't.
What happened?
The worst of the 20th century came down on top of us very
quickly in the form of the industrialization
of the fisheries.
So these enormous factory ships showed up here,
all along the coast of Newfoundland,
and fished day and night until just about every last fish
was gone.
With one small punt launched from this one dock,
Cobb's father couldn't compete with commercial vessels
that had come to the North Atlantic
from all over the world.
How bad did things get for him?
He would go out and come back with nothing.
But one day in particular, he came back with one fish.
And he brought the fish into the house,
and he slapped it down onto the kitchen floor and said,
well, it's done.
And it was the next day he burned his boat.
He burned his boat?
He burned his boat.
It's almost like a sacrifice.
It was.
He did it as a statement.
He did it as an expression of pain and anger.
Lambert Cobb made this sacrifice once he realized
that those big boats were, in his words,
turning fish into money.
He said to me, as a 10-year-old, you have got to figure out how
this money thing works.
Because if you don't, it's going to eat everything we love.
He wasn't wrong.
As fish stocks dwindled, so did the island's population,
from 5,000 to 2,500.
The Cobbs left grudgingly for the mainland in the 1970s.
Zita Cobb's father died shortly thereafter,
but she heeded his advice.
She got a business degree, worked in fiber optics,
landed in Silicon Valley, and, before long,
was the third highest paid female executive in America.
In her early 40s, she cashed out tens of millions in stock
options, dropped out of the winner-take-all economy,
and took her business savvy home,
determined to revitalize Fogo Island.
Instead of writing a check, she posed a question.
What do we have, and what do we know?
And how can we put that forward in a way that's
dignified for Fogo Islanders and creates economy
and connects us to the world?
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Spend one night at what the locals call a shed party,
and the answer emerges.
When you think about the people of this place,
if there's one thing we're really good at,
it's hospitality.
What does hospitality mean here?
Hospitality in its purest form is the love of a stranger.
We didn't get a lot of strangers.
And when they arrived, as my mother used to say,
it's always better to see a light coming into the harbor
than a light going out.
So in 2013, Cobb built the biggest beacon in the harbor.
She made the Fogo Island Inn the centerpiece
of a charitable trust, called Shorefast,
with profits reinvested in the island.
At $2,000 a night, the inn does turn a profit.
But there were other considerations.
We're going to put a 29-room inn on an island that's never had
an inn.
What are the consequences of that?
Well, more people will come.
Well, how many more people?
As one woman said, well, we're only 2,500 people.
We can only love so many people at a time.
Shorefast and the inn employ more than 300 islanders,
but the real payoff is the ripple effect.
For starters, all the furniture at the inn is locally made.
Same for the pillows and quilts.
It so happens the women of Fogo Island
have been making them for their own homes for 400 years.
We're getting there.
We got half done.
Word is out now.
This quilt is destined for a customer in Baltimore.
We joined the quilting bee--
Watch him, Millicent.
--but didn't last long.
It was all very nice except for this one square.
This is our lettuce room.
Shorefast puts up seed money for new businesses, too--
a quarter of a million so far.
And then you put your plant in.
A $7,500 microloan went to Dwight Budden and his father,
Hayward, a former fisher who left Fogo Island when
the industry collapsed.
He's back now as a hydroponic farmer,
growing greens for the inn.
Yeah, there's our kale.
Does Howard eat kale?
Not too much.
[LAUGHTER]
Beyond the kale, new culture is taking root.
Futuristic-looking studios now speckle the landscape,
part of Shorefast's ambition to bring
artists and residents to Fogo.
And back at the inn, a chef turns cod into haute cuisine.
If your dad saw cod with magnolia oil and sea foam--
And porcini.
--and porcini, what would he say?
Yes.
First thing he'd say, can you really eat that?
You can do more than eat cod.
You can fish for it again.
Now that a decades-long ban has been eased,
Fogo Island's fishers are back hauling cod.
We ventured out of Fogo Harbor with brothers Glen and Jerry
Best--
You know we're gonna fish tonight.
--the fifth generation of their family to harvest these waters.
You go east, your next stop is Ireland.
Ireland?
We're not going there today.
Hand over hand, like that.
The Best brothers showed us the traditional Newfoundland way
of fishing with a handline, 150 down, no rods, reels, or nets.
Now we're talking.
That's a beauty.
Up comes cod, without much of a fight.
Now that's a nice cod.
That's probably a 20-pound fish.
Cod is making a comeback in the North Atlantic.
Canada still imposes catch limits.
But when the best get down to business,
they use an automated system to drop thousands of hooks
in the water at a time.
We watched them offload 20,000 pounds of cod from a single
trip.
What's more, shellfish has done the unthinkable and dethroned
cod as king.
Crab and shrimp now make up 80% of Glen Best's business,
and he's never had a better year.
You told me you caught 400,000 pounds of snow crab.
At $760 a pound, that's $3 million bucks.
That's pretty good.
Yeah, it was a good year.
But a thriving fishery isn't always
enough to keep the kids around.
Best's three children have moved away from Fogo
to pursue other careers.
[BIRDS SQUAWKING]
Your family's been doing this for generations.
You named this boat after your dad.
So the sad part about it is that Jerry
and myself, we probably could be the last generation that
will fish within our family.
When the day comes that that happens,
that will probably be a sad day.
Still, Fogo Island's population has stabilized.
There's hope the next census will show an uptick.
Babies are the island's biggest celebrities.
But as ever, with growth come growing pains.
It's already become one of those islands
where you have to pray to get a spot on the ferry.
Jennifer Sexton spent Summers on Fogo Island visiting
her grandparents.
She recently moved here from Western Canada
to open this coffee joint, where locals mix
with those who come from away.
Everybody asks about the inn.
What do you tell them?
Well, it's a blessing and a curse.
Her regulars grumble that not long ago,
they could get a home for $25,000, Canadian.
Now homes cost 10 times as much.
For somebody from away, that wouldn't be a lot.
But for somebody from here, that is a lot of money.
Zita Cobb, the woman who turned this tide,
says she doesn't want unchecked growth either.
As the economy grows, we will be smaller
as a percentage of the whole economy.
A rare business leader that wants less market share.
We want less market share.
Exactly.
You said it with a smile on your face,
but there's a lot of responsibility here.
Yeah.
The consequences are huge.
Because, as my brother says, yes, our parents
will get out of the graveyard and wring our necks
if we mess this up.
What's your response to the capitalist who would say,
why are you limiting your growth?
That is the techno-economic question.
But I start with a different question.
What are we optimizing for?
We are optimizing for place.
We're optimizing for community.
The pillars of this community have been won over.
If Cobb's experiment helps diversify the economy,
Glen Best says he's all in.
It's not like we're overrun by tourism.
That's not the way it works here.
We're not the Venice of Newfoundland.
We're not out of patience with people yet.
On our last night at the shed party--
[FESTIVE MUSIC]
--we got the full sweep of Fogo island, its hospitality
and its contrasts laid out on the table.
Cod and crab, young and old, warmth, wit, and this.
(SINGING) Don't tell--
A traditional song delivered with a handshake,
a kind of hope that comes tempered by history.
The undoing of this traditional way of making a life
was very painful.
I think I still carry those broken hearts.
I think that kind of pain doesn't go away.
To what extent has that been repaired
by the work you've done since you've come back?
Yeah, I think it actually does help.
You can heal a broken heart.
(SINGING) Be satisfied with what you've got
leave well enough alone
[CHEERS, APPLAUSE]
[CLOCK TICKING]
When workers broke ground on an underground parking lot
in the heart of Rome 18 years ago,
they had no idea what their backhoes were about to unearth.
The site turned out to be what Italian archaeologists believe
was once the pleasure gardens of the Roman emperor Caligula,
where some 2,000 years ago, all sorts of lavish parties,
royal intrigue, and debauched behavior likely took place.
Caligula became the third emperor of Rome in 37 AD,
and he reigned for barely four years.
He's been portrayed as one of the most deranged and despicable
Roman emperors ever to rule.
But as we first reported in 2021,
scholars have been re-examining Caligula's story
to see if history has it right.
Could we discover some new fragments of truth
in Caligula's gardens?
Anderson Cooper went to Rome to find out.
The temples and palaces of ancient Rome
may have crumbled long ago, but the legend
of one of its oddest emperors lives on.
Down on your knees, all of you.
Bend your heads.
I shall sever each one at the neck.
What most people know about Caligula
comes from this iconic BBC series I, Claudius,
which was based on two historical novels
by Robert Graves.
In the show, Caligula turns his palace into a brothel,
makes his horse a high-ranking senator,
and declares himself a living god.
For now, you may address me as Zeus.
It's a torrid tale of incest, infanticide--
Don't go in there.
[MANIACAL LAUGH]
--and imperial madness.
Help me.
But how much of that portrayal is real?
Did Caligula impregnate his sister and then eat her baby?
[LAUGHS] Caligula did not impregnate his sister
and eat her baby.
Did Caligula make a horse a high-ranking senator or consul?
[LAUGHS] No, no.
Of course he didn't.
Did he turn his palace into a brothel?
No.
So where did all these ideas come from?
Well, largely from Robert Graves.
His I, Claudius novels are awesome.
But he wasn't an academic.
He was a writer.
Andrew Wallace-Hadrill is an academic, a professor emeritus
at the University of Cambridge, and he's closely
studied the few written accounts that
survive from Caligula's time.
I grew up watching I, Claudius.
I loved the book.
I love the old TV series.
You're telling me a lot of that just wasn't true.
Now, what I'm not denying is they had sex in the palace.
Of course they had sex.
Pretty spectacularly, of course they had sex.
[LAUGHS] Pretty spectacularly.?
But Wallace-Hadrill does believe Caligula
could be very impulsive and brutal,
and he doesn't rule out the possibility
that he may have had a severe physical or mental disorder.
I think there's a serious danger that Caligula was pathological,
that he actually didn't care about the hurt he caused.
Wallace-Hadrill says Robert Graves's novels were largely
based on stories published around 121 AD, 80
years after Caligula's death, by Suetonius,
a well-known biographer and advisor to later emperors.
But Suetonius often had to rely on secondhand stories and gossip
from members of the imperial court.
These members of the court, it's like staffers
in the White House.
It's like all those leaky people in Buckingham Palace.
What are these stories worth?
How can you pin them down?
Archaeology can help pin down the past,
but in a city full of amazing ruins,
not much directly linked to Caligula had been discovered.
That is, until 2006, when a pension fund
for Italian doctors, called Enpam,
started digging an underground parking
garage for its new office building
in the Esquilino neighborhood of Rome.
In ancient times, this was one of a number of tranquil garden
estates located about 10 minutes by carriage
from the bustling Roman forum.
These recreations from Rome's superintendent of antiquities
give some sense of the sprawling grounds and buildings enjoyed
by emperors and their guests for about four centuries.
It took archaeologists nine years
to carefully recover more than a million pieces of the past,
while an underground parking garage and modern building
was built around them.
Everything found was taken to a large warehouse, where
it was closely analyzed, logged into a database,
and, when possible, painstakingly restored.
The office buildings completed now
and Rome's newest archaeological site, the Nymphaeum Museum,
opened in the basement, preserving
some of the excavation and suggesting
what a lush and lavish place this once was.
It contains thousands of items from the second century BC
through the fifth century AD, like this drinking glass that
somehow survived largely intact for 1,900 years.
Mirella Serlorenzi, director of excavations
for the Italian Ministry of Culture,
took us to a small staircase normally closed to the public
and brought us to the level of the ground
during Caligula's time.
And so back then, in the first century, 2,000 years ago,
this was outside?
[SPEAKING ITALIAN]
(INTERPRETED) It was clearly a garden,
because we found in the layers traces
of the roots of the plants.
And in this part here, the staircase
connected the various levels of the garden.
Is it possible to walk on it?
[SPEAKING ITALIAN]
Excellent.
This is what Serlorenzi's team believes the area looked
like during Caligula's reign.
[SPEAKING ITALIAN]
We ended up talking for a long time on the garden steps.
Is it all right to sit down?
OK.
There was something about touching
those old slabs of marble that made
ancient history feel very real.
I can't believe that we are sitting on the steps
that Caligula may have walked on.
It's amazing.
She told us the water pipe by our feet
was installed by Caligula's successor, his uncle Claudius.
His name is stamped on the pipe.
One of the most remarkable things about Caligula
is that he lived to become emperor at all.
The emperor before him, his adoptive grandfather, Tiberius,
was suspected of killing Caligula's father, mother,
and two brothers.
And when Caligula turned 19, he was
summoned to live with Tiberius at his palace
on the island of Capri.
It sits high on a cliff, and it said
Tiberius would have people who crossed him
tossed onto the rocks below.
Through some combination of flattery and deceit,
Caligula managed to survive here for six years with a man who may
have killed much of his family.
He became Tiberius's successor in 37 AD.
He was just 24 years old and in charge of an empire.
He was in a very, very difficult position.
I like the saying of Tiberius, who says being emperor
is like having to hold a wolf by the ears.
There's this sort of savage beast
that can turn on you any moment.
What is so insecure about it?
Was it the system itself?
You've got this enormous concentration
of power and resource, wealth, concentrated
on the palace in Rome, and everyone wants in on it.
They are prepared to do anything to seize this power.
Back then, the Roman Empire dominated the Mediterranean
world, and items found in the gardens
give some sense of the riches that flowed towards Rome.
Rare and intricately carved marble
from the far reaches of the empire decorated
the walls of the buildings.
Glass recovered at the site appears
to have been used in very early windows,
and large amounts of oysters appear
to have been served at meals.
Mirella Serlorenzi says her team recovered
the bones of wild animals that would have been brought here
from faraway lands.
She showed us the leg of an ostrich, the foot of a lion,
and the tooth of a bear.
[SPEAKING ITALIAN]
(INTERPRETED) It's evident that wild animals were here
for the entertainment of the emperor.
Games were carried out here with gladiators,
we can imagine, and battles with ferocious beasts.
When he became emperor, Caligula started improving
Rome's infrastructure.
He began work on new aqueducts.
He also cut taxes.
Serlorenzi says this coin, found in the gardens,
was minted around 39 AD to remind Romans that Caligula
got rid of a sales tax.
2,000 years ago, politicians were just like politicians
today.
If they cut taxes, they wanted everybody to know about it.
[SPEAKING ITALIAN]
(INTERPRETED) That's exactly right.
The coins are a form of imperial propaganda.
But something changed as the years progressed.
Suetonius says Caligula wanted to be treated as a god
and connected his palace in the Roman forum to a major temple.
That's the temple of Castor and Pollux?
Exactly.
And this column would have been standing there for more than
2,000 years.
They have been created in year six.
Paolo Carafa, a professor of archaeology
at Sapienza University of Rome, has
been studying the Roman forum area for more than 35 years.
So, according to Suetonius, Caligula extended his house up
to that temple.
Exactly.
Have you found evidence of that?
Behind the temple, recent excavation
have identified fragments of a large house, a luxury house.
He can't say for sure it was Caligula's house,
but he says it comes from that time period.
And only an emperor like Caligula
would have dared do something so shocking.
He wanted the temple to be the entrance to his own house.
Which is quite unusual.
One of the things I, Claudius seems to have gotten right,
Wallace-Hadrill told us, was Caligula's capacity
for both physical and mental cruelty.
There is no doubt that Caligula's brutal.
but Suetonius says he's not only brutal.
He thinks it's amusing.
He takes pleasure in it.
Perhaps the most telling account comes
from a contemporary of Caligula's, the philosopher
Seneca, who describes how Caligula invited
a father to a festive dinner on the day he'd
executed the man's son.
And at the dinner, he insists that the father
should have a jolly time.
He plies him with wine and food.
He even plies him with perfume and a garland.
On the very day his son--
On the very day.
And Seneca says people asked, how on earth
could he endure to do it?
And the answer is he had a second son.
And I think that anecdote just evokes the atmosphere of terror
of the court of Caligula.
[SCREAMS]
As I, Claudius showed, the end came in 41 AD
when Caligula was stabbed to death by members
of his own imperial guard.
He's killed by his own guardsmen.
But then they haven't got a candidate.
They don't have somebody waiting to take over.
There's no one in the wings except poor old Claudius.
Does that argue the point that he
had to have been really awful if they were
so motivated to just kill him?
Yeah.
It's an assassination born of anger, humiliation, disgust.
We can't take this anymore.
Long after the assassination itself, some historians
believe Caligula's enemies assassinated his memory as well.
There's a number of contemporary scholars
who have argued that Caligula's critics distorted his memory,
that they have falsely made him out to be far worse than he was.
Of course.
It's like entering a hall of mirrors.
And some of them are concave, and some are convex.
And there are no flat mirrors.
But isn't that terrifying, that what
we think we know about history is so dependent on rumors or--
I think it's an enormous mistake to look at the past
as a series of solid rocks, that that was definitely there,
and that was definitely-- it's a great morass, a flowing sea.
I think that ancient history is very good for people
because it's got so much uncertainty in it.
But why is it good that there's a lot of misinformation?
It's good because the world we live in
is full of misinformation, as we have learned spectacularly
in recent years.
People invent truths.
You have to be skeptical.
As we prepare to leave the Nymphaeum Museum,
we couldn't help thinking about how time tramples
even the mightiest of empires, turning lavish gardens
into underground parking lots.
What do you think Caligula would think of what's
happened to his gardens?
[LAUGHS]
(INTERPRETED) I think he'd be in total disagreement,
and I don't think he'd be very happy
that we're sitting on his staircase.
[BOTH LAUGH]
[CLOCK TICKING]
How did a mosaic from Caligula's reign
turn up as a coffee table in a New York City apartment?
That story at 60minutesovertime.com.
[CLOCK TICKING]
Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park was the envy of Africa.
Wildlife drew tourists from around the world.
But beginning in the 1960s, a man-made catastrophe slaughtered
the animals until, it was said, there was nothing left
but mosquitoes and landmines.
In 2008, we followed an American entrepreneur
who dreamed of returning a wasteland to greatness.
And now Greg Carr has something to show the world.
As Scott Pelley reported in December 2022,
60 Minutes couldn't resist a return to Gorongosa
when Carr sends out invitations like this.
Just come and sit at a sunset by the lake in the center
of this national park.
Time stops.
And you get a hundred colors of yellow and hundreds
colors of orange, and then the dusk sets in.
And then a flock of birds go over the water,
and there's a hippo over there, making a noise.
[HIPPO GROANS]
And there's an impala over there.
And it's like, well, I could have been here
a hundred thousand years ago, and it might have been the same.
Greg Carr's wonder is almost like disbelief.
A million acres of Africa reborn.
When I first came here in 2004, I
could drive around with my Mozambican friends all day long,
and if we were lucky, maybe we'd see one baboon
or one warthog or something.
Now we drive around, and it's an ocean of wildlife.
Come around the corner, there's a herd of elephants.
Go the other direction, there's some lion cubs.
10,000 waterbuck.
And I say to myself, you know what?
Nature can rebound.
The rebound is in southeast Africa,
near the center of Mozambique.
Here, 28 years of war from the '60s to the '90s killed
an estimated 1 million people and wiped out 95%
of the wildlife in Gorongosa for food and profit.
As the war raged in the 1980s, Greg Carr was a tech
entrepreneur who'd made a fortune perfecting voicemail.
He quit business to devote himself to human rights,
and in 2004, he met Mozambique's president, Joaquim Chissano,
who made a wild pitch.
And he said, look, please come to Mozambique and help us.
We want to restore our national park.
When we flew over this, I said, this is it.
When we met Carr in 2008, his nonprofit foundation had signed
a 20-year contract with Mozambique.
His plan was to import animals from all over Africa.
Well, step one, we had to remove 20,000 traps and wire snares
that were left in this park, left over from the war,
get rid of all those.
Because when I first came here, we
think we had five or six lions, maybe.
In a million acres?
In a million acres.
And the lions that we did have, most of them
had three legs because they had stepped in a trap or something.
And then second, some of the species
were just gone completely.
So we went on a process.
First, bring in the herbivores.
So we bring in 200 buffalo.
We bring in 200 wildebeest.
We bring in some zebra.
And then when you got enough herbivores.
Then you're going to want the carnivores back.
So we reintroduced leopards.
We reintroduced hyenas.
The lions, all by themselves, their numbers just took off.
So from five or six lions when we started,
we now have probably 200.
Gorongosa's lion conservation is urgent because since 1950,
Africa's lion population has fallen from half a million
to 20,000 due to habitat loss and hunting.
We saw how Gorongosa is protecting its lions
on a mission with park veterinarian Antonio Paolo.
OK, I will shoot now.
Paolo fired a tranquilizer dart--
Right on target.
--and a 300-pound lioness led us on a chase.
Reverse.
Give space.
Turn around.
She left us behind, but she couldn't outrun the sedative.
There she is.
Yeah, she's there, sleeping.
She'd be out about an hour, as Dr. Paolo changed her failing
GPS collar.
The signal goes to headquarters, where they
track the prides and herds.
A bit of ear was nicked for genetic tests.
And then there was a surprise.
You think she's pregnant?
Yeah.
She's look like pregnant.
And there is the future of the park.
Yes, the future cubs of the park.
Later, she awoke and headed out, with her future cub.
I never imagined it would go so well or so fast.
In 2018, we did an aerial survey.
So counting only the big animals.
We counted 100,000 large animals from the air.
Thrilled as he is, it wasn't wildlife that drew this
63-year-old Idaho native to Africa.
In 2008, he introduced us to the 200,000 people living around
the park, survivors of the wars, living on $1 a day.
People had nothing.
They didn't have clothes.
They were wearing rags, or they had made clothes out
of tree bark.
They were eating insects and trying to catch mice.
And that's when it struck me.
Well, this national park's going to have to help the people.
Today, Gorongosa National Park employs 1,600 workers.
Tourism brings in cash, which goes to the people
and to the park.
[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]
And Greg Carr has partnered with the government on health care
and education.
Carr is the biggest donor, but US foreign aid
kicks in about $6 million a year.
We now work in 89 primary schools,
which is every single school that
surrounds this national park.
We are training 600 school teachers right now.
Now, think about how difficult it is to create a school system
when you don't have school teachers that
know how to read and write because of generations of war.
Now, something we really focused on, as step one,
was really vulnerable girls.
Now, a lot of times what happens in the poor families
around here, a girl turns 13 or 14,
and the family says, well, it's time for her to get married.
Now, it may not be what they actually want,
but they don't think there's another choice.
And this is what happens, and know, she marries a farmer.
And that's it.
[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]
So we started something called the Girls Club.
[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]
There are 3,000 girls in 92 after-school clubs.
The program is led by Larissa Sousa.
Why is this the job of a conservation park?
Why not?
It should be the job for everyone.
For everyone.
Education is for everyone.
The clubs provide the resources to get the girls
into high school, and it gives students an answer
to our question which, five years ago, wouldn't
have made sense.
What do you want to be?
[NON-ENGLISH]
We have a teacher, a nurse, a conservation park ranger,
and another nurse.
Another nurse, yes.
When we started the program, they
didn't know that they had this choice.
And now they do.
Now they do.
[APPLAUSE]
This land belongs to these people.
They've been here forever.
It's their animals.
It's their land.
It's their trees.
It's their cultural and spiritual heritage.
Right?
It's an idea that came from my hero, Nelson Mandela.
And the idea was to create a human rights park.
What does that mean?
A park that cares about the people.
A park that belongs to the people.
So instead of a park turning its back
on the people, a park opening itself to the people and say,
this is your park.
These are your animals.
These are your opportunities.
[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]
We saw those opportunities on Mount Gorongosa,
which was stripped of trees during the wars.
Here, Carr's nonprofit foundation
is giving away coffee trees.
868 family farmers working for themselves are earning far more
than ever, so they can't plant trees fast enough,
which reforests the mountain.
Carr's foundation buys the beans at above the market rate
and built the farmers a roasting plant.
[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]
There's no better example of Carr's model for lifting
people and healing the wild.
It's working.
But the last 14 years haven't been sweet music alone.
Since we were here in 2008--
Yes.
--there have been enormous roadblocks to this project.
That's right.
If I had known then what was going to come--
[LAUGHS]
What came was another civil war, in 2013.
And then in 2019, a cyclone leveled 100,000 homes.
OK, there was the six years of war and then the cyclone.
When cyclone Idai hit, basically every one of our employees
became a first responder.
So in other words-- oh, there's an elephant right there.
Is there?
Well, there certainly is.
I just have to stop and say hello to the elephant.
We couldn't find the wildlife in 2008.
And now they're interrupting our interview.
And now they're walking in on the interview.
[BOTH LAUGH]
Was there ever a time that you thought
to yourself, I did my best, but this just isn't
going to be humanly possible?
Not for a second.
Not for one second.
With the cyclones, with the return of the civil war--
I just think every time something like that happens,
it just makes you more determined, not less determined.
And when you've got people suffering
in a war that need help or people suffering in a cyclone
need help, you're more committed.
You don't lose commitment at a time like that.
[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]
We saw commitment in the rangers who protect the park.
"For the flora and the fauna," they sing,
"we will die for our park."
Part of what they protect are endangered species,
including this mammal with a bottomless taste for termites.
Pangolins are hunted for their scales, which
are prized in folk medicine.
Veterinarian Mercia Angela told us
that pangolins ride on their mother's backs.
Hello there.
But we found any back will do.
That's funny.
He just naturally goes right up to the shoulder
and hangs on your back.
Yeah.
Powerful tail.
Yeah, the tail is very powerful.
They also use for protection.
I'm surprised they're so docile.
This is a wild animal.
Yes, it's a wild animal.
Success, eh?
But for us, the most interesting animal in the park--
[NON-ENGLISH]
--is Greg Carr, an entrepreneur with the empathy to see,
the humility to listen, and the optimism to act.
His business model is creating a new ecosystem
where animals that were hunted are suddenly worth
much more alive.
How much of your personal fortune have you put into this?
Well, I'd like to keep that a secret,
but, unfortunately, I think you could probably do the math
and figure it out.
It's more than a hundred million dollars.
My message to anybody with money is,
what are you going to do, stick it all in your casket?
Why not enjoy the joy of philanthropy?
[BIRDS SQUAWKING]
I would say to the billionaire next door,
go out and enjoy spending your money to help some people.
Find your Gorongosa.
[LAUGHS] Find your Gorongosa.
And it will bless you more than you can possibly ever bless it.
[CLOCK TICKING]
I'm Jon Wertheim.
Thanks for joining us.
We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So when you see all that green, what do you think?
I see money leaving America.
Is this a battle of rich versus poor?
In part, it is.
Black versus white?
In part, it is.
If you're not willing to protect a place like this,
then what are you willing to protect?
1, 2, 3--
Go!
I want a strong America.
I want a proud America.