5 Questions: Mark Jordahl Talks Conservation and Travel

A world without wild places is difficult for Mark Jordahl to imagine and even harder to accept. After years spent living in Uganda, where conservation and survival often exist in uneasy tension, Jordahl has built a career around advocating for landscapes and species that cannot speak for themselves. Now based in Gold Hill, Colorado, the writer, educator and trip leader continues to wrestle with what it means to protect nature in a world shaped as much by economic inequality as environmental collapse.

Jordahl’s work in conservation education has taken him from leading immersive trips through East African national parks to helping develop tourism initiatives that support both wildlife protection and local communities. Along the way, his thinking has evolved. What once seemed like a straightforward challenge—balancing human need with ecological preservation—has become a more complicated reckoning with the global systems that shape who gets to make decisions about the future of the planet.

In this week’s 5 Questions, Jordahl reflects on why keeping “wildness in the world” remains central to his work, what rewilding efforts across the globe are teaching him about hope and how travel can deepen our understanding of place. He also discusses his family’s decision to spend four months living in Peru and why time, more than any itinerary, is essential for truly knowing a landscape and the people who call it home.

You spent many years living in Africa, where you leaned into a conservation journey that continues to this day. Why is it important to you to keep conservation front and center?

I am a selfish conservationist. When I imagine a world covered in concrete and skyscrapers, with polluted air and water and a depleted cast of wild critters, I feel my soul die a little bit. I feel compelled to help preserve a world that I want to live in, which is a battle against some very powerful forces.

I used to say that poverty was the biggest threat to conservation. Maslow’s Hierarchy meant that the hundreds of millions of people living in extreme poverty would need to engage in activities like poaching and forest encroachment to survive. I now realize that I was putting the onus on the wrong people. 

I now realize that the biggest threat is greed.

Most of the world’s challenges are caused by the hunger for money and power. The relatively small number of people who have those two things in abundance get to make the big decisions that impact everyone else on the planet. While a few use them for good, money and power are mostly used to consolidate more money and power, and the way to do that is to consume the planet’s resources without paying a fair price and without considering the downstream effects.  

Wild animals and wild landscapes have neither money nor power (in the political sense). They can’t speak for themselves and they can’t vote. Nature needs people to be its voice, and those of us who want to help, and are able to help, are vastly outnumbered but need to do it anyway.

One of the reasons it is important for me to keep conservation front and center is that I can. Living in Uganda taught me that actively working to protect the environment is a privilege. That phrase has lost some potency in recent years, but in its original meaning, it holds a lot of truth.

It is impossible to live on Earth without having an impact on it. We all eat, drink, build shelters, generate heat, move around somehow, etc.   

Many people in the world simply can’t do anything about it and shouldn’t be expected to. If you live on the edge of survival in South Sudan or Haiti or Bangladesh, you probably need to consume more. It should be our responsibility in the wealthier parts of the world to make sure you have what you need to keep your children fed, educated and healthy until fair systems are in place for you to do it yourself. You get a free pass. If I was worried about feeding my children, I wouldn’t be worried about the environment.

I focus on conservation because I can, and because the world I want to live in is full of beauty and wild things. I wish that more of the people with money and power cared about that too.     

You say you want to keep “wildness in the world.” What does that look like and are we accomplishing it? 

There are two sides to this in my mind. There are wild spaces, and there are wild species. 

Big, wild landscapes are critical for keeping the earth habitable for humans. That’s where our air and water get purified, where plants and animals can flourish, and where we, as humans, can go to have our spirits healed from the impacts of the overdeveloped world we live in. We need wild spaces. Our life support systems will collapse without them. A million one-acre parcels are not the same as a single one-million-acre parcel. We need Big Wild. 

Wild species are critical for the healthy functioning of ecosystems. Wildness isn’t just for the crunchy hippy backpackers. It’s for anyone who likes to breathe or eat or drink water. Extinction is a failure on our part to understand where we fit into the greater systems of life.   

I honestly don’t know if we are accomplishing keeping wildness in the world. There are daily reports of new extinctions and constant pressures to eliminate protected lands. Despite all the grim news, I will say that I am excited by the rewilding efforts happening across the globe. 

Two years ago, I worked for the Gorilla Rehabilitation and Conservation Education Center (GRACE). The organization operates a sanctuary in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo for Grauer’s gorillas that were rescued from the illegal wildlife trade. In October of 2024, a partnership including GRACE, Virunga National Park, Re:wild, and Gorilla Doctors, with the support of Disney animal care experts, released four breeding-aged females into the home range of the last seven wild Grauer’s gorillas on Mt. Tshiabarimu in Virunga National Park. 

That wild population was considered to be “functionally extinct.” Those seven wild gorillas were likely to die out in the next twenty years without genetic reinforcement. 

After years of planning and preparation, all the pieces were in place for the release. A transfer facility was built on Mt. Tshiabarimu with the expectation that the four females would spend months there adjusting to the climate and foods available on this mountain that was thousands of feet higher than the sanctuary where they had lived much of their lives. Nobody knew if these females, who had grown up in the sanctuary after being rescued as infants, would know how to respond to a wild silverback male. It was impossible to know how the wild silverback would respond to four new females suddenly appearing in his forest.

Instead of months, it was a matter of weeks. The male approached the fence of the transfer facility days after the females were transferred and started displaying his strength and interest. The females responded perfectly, making it clear that they were far more interested in this hairy Valentino than they were in returning to their indoor enclosure for the night. Soon after that initial interaction, the staff made the decision to cut the fence and allow nature to take its course. It was the largest and most successful release ever of Grauer’s gorillas into the wild.

When we create the right conditions, or allow the right conditions to exist, nature will find a way to thrive. I find hope in that.

This is just one example of many. From gorillas to wolves to bison to condors, wild animals are being reintroduced to the landscapes where they belong.   

You recently wrote about travel feeling like a competitive sport and how we need to reconsider how we take in the world. What did you mean by that?

Particularly as Americans, we live in an achievement-focused society. We must be the best at things. We need to do the most and have the most. We humble-brag about the 80 hours of work we put in this week instead of the meaningful time we spent with our children. Companies have to constantly grow, and if you aren’t “climbing the corporate ladder,” there is something wrong with you.   

More and more, I see people taking that same framing into their travels. I hesitate to even call them vacations, because they seem exhausting to me. 

That article was inspired by a guest I had on a trip I was leading in Uganda who kept asking if I had “done” different destinations. She had been to more than 100 countries, and I got the sense that her travels were like a to-do list at work. It wasn’t about the quality or amount of time spent in each country; it was just about checking countries off her list. 

I don’t believe you can ever “do” a country. What does that even mean? Can you imagine someone visiting New York City and then saying they’ve “done” the United States?   

We need to slow down when we travel. We need to talk to locals, stretch out of our comfort zones, take the time to hop a bus or even (gasp) walk to the temple that’s a mile from our hotel. 

You announced that your family is moving to Peru for four months. Why are you doing this now and how important is it to immerse yourself in a country to really understand a place?  

South America is relatively new to us, but international living is not. The first year my wife and I were together, we lived in a small flat in New Delhi, India for six months and then traveled throughout Southeast Asia. We made a commitment at that time that we would try to spend one year of every five abroad to stay engaged as global citizens. For most of the last 20 years our focus has been on Africa, so it is exciting to dive into a new continent. 

We traveled to Peru for the first time about three years ago, and we were fascinated by everything we saw and learned during that trip. It was a quick, small-group, guided trip. We spent a week in the Sacred Valley near Cusco visiting Machu Picchu and other Inca sites and then spent a few days on a boat in the Pacaya-Samiria Reserve at the headwaters of the Amazon River. The diversity of ecosystems in Peru—from the Pacific coast to the snow-capped high Andes to the vast Amazon Basin—is staggering. As a naturalist, I was like a kid in a candy store every moment we were there.

The cultural elements in Peru add another level of richness. The Inca built 10,000 miles of paved roads and thousands of stone structures with no machines in a single century! In our modern world, it takes longer than that to open 10 miles of light rail. They created an empire of millions by dominating a culture-scape of hundreds of pre-Incan indigenous communities, each with their own histories and languages. Then, incredibly, a couple hundred Spaniards took down the entire Incan empire in the blink of an eye.

By the end of that two-week trip, we knew we needed to go back when we could dedicate more time. We had only scratched the surface of the surface, and that wasn’t enough for us. We would never say we had “done” Peru after such a fleeting experience, but our visit gave us enough of a taste to know it is a country that we want to know better.  

Then last spring, I had the chance to help lead a week-long trip in the Peruvian Amazon that cemented my desire to know it better. 

We started talking to our 14-year-old son about moving down there. However, he was heading into his last year of middle school, has a great group of friends, and loves the little mountain town where we live. He wasn’t ready to go.

Then my wife and I learned a very important parenting lesson: It’s all about the timing. Our original mistake was that we talked to him about it in the middle of summer when he was living that sweet life of a kid with no responsibilities and endless warm days ahead. It turns out that asking during the school term, when he was deep in homework, daily bus rides, and the social angst of middle school, elicited a far more positive response to the idea of leaving all that behind and moving to South America. With his green light, we had our departure plans set within a few weeks. 

I strongly believe that time is an essential ingredient in getting to know a place. Every country and every culture is multi-faceted, and what you see on one trip, in one season, is only one tiny window into that place. 

The country I know best outside of the United States is Uganda. Our family has been living and working there on and off for more than 20 years. Our sons partially grew up there. I’ve been leading trips to Uganda since 2007. And yet I often say that I know Uganda less and less every year. Because places and people are complex and ever-changing.

Time breaks down assumptions. If you spend enough time in a place, once you think you have figured something out, you will have an experience that proves you wrong.

The first time I went to Uganda, I had all the answers. I knew for a fact that the animals need to be protected at all costs, that fortified national parks are essential for conservation, and that if people just understood their value, they would want to protect them as well. Then I started meeting farmers who had lost their entire season’s crops to elephants and weren’t sure how they were going to feed their families. I met refugees who left the camps to collect firewood from National Forests because it was the only way to cook the grains sent to them by the World Food Program. I started out with all the answers because I had never been confronted with the fear that my children might starve.

I now travel with more questions than answers, and that feels right. 

I am writing this from seat 37D on United Flight 854 to Lima. I have no idea yet what our long-term relationship with Peru will be. When my wife and I moved to Uganda the first time, we expected to spend a year and never go back. That was two decades ago. Our plan right now is to be in Peru for 4 months. Who knows where we will be in another 20 years?

I still won’t “understand” Peru after four months. I don’t even “understand” the United States, since my experience is so different from that of a coal miner in Kentucky or a Wall Street financier. But four months is a reasonable amount of time to give Peru a chance to get under my skin—to help me ask better questions than I can think of now. 

What have been your most memorable adventures and what do you recommend people do at least once in their life?  

If you like animals and don’t mind a bit of a hike, spending an hour with a mountain gorilla family is one of the most intimate wildlife experiences you can ever have.

I had a guest on a trip many years ago who had dreamed her whole life about seeing mountain gorillas in the wild. She was getting to an age where she felt this would be her last chance, so there was a lot riding on this adventure.

A few days into the trip, she slipped on a wet root while we were trekking chimpanzees in Kibale Forest National Park in western Uganda. She bruised her ribs, which caused a lot of pain any time she breathed heavily.

When it came time to trek the gorillas, she was still in a lot of pain and wasn’t sure if she could do it. I knew how important this was to her, so I encouraged her to give it a try. She could always turn back with her porter if necessary, but she would always regret it if she didn’t at least make the attempt.

It was a painful hike in, but she made it all the way to the gorilla family. In this particular group was a blackback male, about 11 years old. He was known as a caretaker within the family, playing with the infants and helping any family members who were sick or injured.

As soon as we sat down at the edge of the clearing to watch the family eating, that blackback immediately looked at Barri and came straight toward her. He gently placed his hand on the back of her calf and gazed into her eyes. As a caretaker, even across species, he knew that she was in pain and needed support.

It was a moment none of us in that group are likely to ever forget.

Overall, my most memorable adventures have always been the surprises. I recommend that everyone, at least once in their life, travel without a destination in mind. Buy a one-way ticket and ask people along the way where you should go next. In our early 20s, my wife and I traveled through southeast Asia that way. We had just spent six months in India for her to do an internship for her undergraduate program. At the end of that, we flew to Thailand and just kept hopping buses, trains and ferries for several months, following recommendations from people we met along the way, until we headed home from Indonesia. We had no plan, no tickets and virtually no money. It was truly magical.