(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Before Mark Shuttleworth became the driving hospitality force in São Tomé and Príncipe, a nation of two volcanic islands off Africa’s western equatorial coast, he was merely looking for a place to get away. Living in London and with family in Cape Town, he has long had a stressful life as chief executive officer of Canonical Ltd., the company that developed the Linux-based operating system Ubuntu. “I was spending nights on Google Maps looking for islands along the way where I could be a vegetable and not feel bad about it,” he says.
That’s how he found Príncipe, where jungles crash into pearlescent beaches dotted with Jurassic-looking palms and vistas are interrupted by little more than the odd thatched roof and emerald hills. The seas hover around 80F (27C), and Technicolor reefs host vast troves of rare creatures endemic to the Gulf of Guinea.
It’s “the Galapagos of Africa, but with rainforests instead of desert,” Shuttleworth says. “There are these really ugly fish that walk on land—I mean, literally, fish that walk on land! When you see them, it’s like you’ve been transported back about 500 million years.”
Fifteen years later, the 51-year-old billionaire has expanded what was supposed to be just a personal vacation property—a dilapidated, abandoned resort built in the 1980s by an eccentric fisherman—into a collection of four hotels scattered across the island. The effort has so far cost him about $50 million, a number that will climb as he gradually morphs each one into a true five-star eco-resort. First up is the low-slung Bom Bom, which reopened in September with 18 beach bungalows.
Putting Príncipe on the global ecotourism map is only one prong of Shuttleworth’s conservation aspirations. Far more wide-reaching and ambitious is his plan to have every local—not just the naturalist guides at his resorts—invested in and benefiting from the protection of the island’s natural resources.
“In terms of GDP, Príncipe may be one of the poorest places on Earth,” Shuttleworth says. “But there’s a difference between poverty and indignity, and this is a very proud, dignified and healthy place.” Much of the island’s population depends on subsistence fishing and farming, plus cocoa exports, a vestige of Portuguese plantations. Joint oil ventures with Nigeria are an emerging economic driver.
“As I fell in love with Príncipe, I also started to realize, ‘OK, there are hard problems here,’ ” he says. Shortly after he bought his first property, Shuttleworth heard murmurs of plans to raze rainforest to build a palm oil plantation. Even tourism risked destabilizing Príncipe’s uniqueness as the local economy grew. The traditional model of conservation—buying up tracts of land to set aside as reserves where hunting, logging and most farming would be illegal—wasn’t going to cut it. On a tiny 55-square-mile island, that approach would mean taking away the 8,500 inhabitants’ resources and agency in choosing their own path to growth.
So Shuttleworth came up with a radical alternative, honed over a decade of discussion with both the government and political opposition leaders. When he pilots it in 2025, the Natural Dividend will be a quarterly sum, at first paid out of his own pocket, for all Príncipeans, with the precise amount fluctuating according to how carefully they maintain the unique ecological value of their surroundings. By involving the entire island’s population, the odds of large-scale success could increase.
“People have an absolute right to food and shelter and development and so on,” Shuttleworth says. “But everybody should also have a stake in the ecosystems, whether they’re an employee of mine or not.” He equates it to a universal basic income or pay incentives for ecosystem-supporting businesses. “This is no different than paying farmers to have beavers on their land so that their dams will prevent regional flooding when it rains like crazy. That person who’s cutting down two hectares of forest to farm peppers? I need to make them a better offer. I need to say, ‘Look, imagine that the trees and the birds and the bees and the butterflies would pay you rent.’ ”
For now, Shuttleworth is working with the government to create a baseline against which to measure a local’s impact. “We’ve been taking a real-time census, surveying the island with drones and taking stock of the ecosystem,” he says, explaining how high-resolution images will get updated weekly and affect dividends. “If you bugger up the land, the number goes down. And we’re not doing that as a policing effort. Wanna cut down a tree? Cut down a tree. If you don’t like my offer, it’s your land.”
Shuttleworth understands the inherent ick factor in this techno-utopian ideal: “Some people would say, ‘Well, that’s a whole new level of surveillance.’ And I would say, ‘Well, we now have a whole new level of interaction between nature and humans.’ ”
His pitch to tourists is simpler. “The way that the jungle just abuts the beach is such a Robinson Crusoe experience,” he says. “But there are no spiders or snakes, and if you’re coming from most of Europe, there’s no jet lag,” he says with an earnest laugh. “It’s tropical Africa for sissies.”
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