1 · Position
Wilderness was founded in Botswana in 1983 by two overland guides, Colin Bell and Chris McIntyre — the first tour operator of its kind to form a registered company on that model. It now operates across seven countries and lists some 2.5 million hectares under protection and 33 IUCN Red List species. The Trust, an independent entity associated with the group, funds more than twenty conservation, community and anti-poaching projects a year and has funded over a hundred in a decade.
2 · Why it is in the Library
The Mombo rhino programme is the clearest result: working with Botswana’s Department of Wildlife and the government on translocation and anti-poaching, black rhino were brought back to the Mombo concession — LHL-H-048 Mombo Camp — from local extinction. A guest watching rhino at Mombo is watching the output of the arrangement, which is the plainest statement of the group’s proposition that anyone has managed.
3 · ⚡ A correction
Two earlier searches for a “Wilderness Trust” returned a Bulgarian NGO of 1989 and a British charity of 1956, and I reported that Wilderness might have no trust at all. It has one; I had the name wrong. The lesson is recorded rather than quietly fixed: a negative search result is evidence about the search, not about the world.
4 · Candour
Hectares, species counts and project totals are the group’s own. Wilderness is a listed company on the Botswana Stock Exchange, and a trust associated with a listed operator depends on that operator’s trading position in a way a wholly independent charity does not.