1 · Position
Dereck and Beverly Joubert are filmmakers and National Geographic Explorers-at-Large who have worked in Africa for more than thirty years. They built Great Plains Conservation and the Great Plains Foundation together, as commercial and charitable arms of one organisation, and the mechanism is stated plainly in their own material: identify land under threat, often beside national parks and World Heritage Sites, and **acquire the rights to convert it to protected area**. Around a million acres are held on that basis.
2 · Why it is in the Library
Two projects show what the model does. **Rhinos Without Borders** relocated at least a hundred rhino out of poaching hot zones in southern Africa to Botswana. The **Sapi Concession** in Zimbabwe was converted away from hunting — the land did not change hands to a park authority, it changed use because a tourism business bought the right to stop the shooting. **Project Ranger** began in 2020 as an emergency response when the pandemic emptied the parks and left rangers unpaid. The National Geographic Big Cats Initiative, which the Jouberts founded, was folded under the Foundation after thirteen years.
3 · ⚡ It breaks the classifier, and honestly
The Library files a conservation body in Part X where the house created it, and in Capital where it holds the land the house stands on. Great Plains does both at once and was designed to: the company and the foundation were founded together, and the company acquires land in order to protect it. It sits in Part X because the tourism business is the older and larger half, but the hybrid is the interesting thing about it and the classifier should not be read as having settled the question.
4 · Candour
Acreage and project figures are the organisation’s own. A private company buying the right to convert land to conservation is a model with obvious critics: it makes protection contingent on a business remaining solvent and on the founders’ continued interest, and it places decisions about African land in private hands. Great Plains answers the first by holding the land rather than leasing it; it does not answer the second.