‘Nature can recover’: Inside the race to rescue world’s crisis-hit wildlife

Beneath the dense forest canopy of Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, a troop of gorillas is being quietly observed by a group of tourists who have each paid $800 for the privilege of the experience.In villages around the park, a thriving economy has grown off the back of the gorillas’ presence here, from the sale of wood carvings to visitors and the provision of accommodation for up to 40,000 tourists a year.In the national park, which sprawls along the edge of the Rift Valley and the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), there are many local jobs for rangers and guides.But deeper into the forest, more mountain gorillas live away from human contact, quietly enhancing the natural world around them through their daily routines of foraging, nest building and dispersing seeds.And, crucially, by increasing their own populations.In the 1980s, the mountain gorilla was on the fast track to extinction. Now, there are more than 1,100 living in thriving populations in Uganda, Rwanda and the DRC.Theirs is a story of conservation success that spills beyond the species themselves, into the nature they live in, and the human communities they exist alongside.“The mounta...