Call of the Wild
Daniel Thorne ’69 takes a creative approach to combating wildlife trafficking
BY IAN ALDRICH
Upemba National Park is one of Africa’s natural treasures. Located in the southeastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the property spans nearly 4,500 square miles and is home to a wide range of biological diversity, from prized grasslands and forests to important populations of elephants, buffalo and cheetahs.
But in 2019, it stood on the brink of being devastated. At issue was a deal that was quietly being negotiated by a Congolese businessman and the government’s director of protected areas with illegal miners and Chinese developers to build a mammoth hydroelectric power plant that would have effectively flooded nearly a third of Upemba’s territory. Not only did the project violate DRC law, but when completed, it stood to wipe out precious habitat and drown six villages in the park’s flood plain.
Through intelligence connections, details of the plan landed on the radar of Daniel Thorne ’69, co-founder and chairman of the International Wildlife Trust (IWT). The approach IWT takes to combating the causes and effects of wildlife tracking and habitat destruction is a novel one: By working with local governments and U.S. Justice and Treasury Departments and other intelligence groups, it aims to freeze the financial assets of the organized crime groups behind the illegal activity, stopping them in their tracks by cutting off the funding it requires.
Over the next two years, the IWT worked with the U.S. Justice Department and the Congolese government to wrest control from the Congolese players who were spearheading the dam project.
“The [business] guy who was trying to get this project done stood to make $40 million if it happened,” says Thorne. “We were indirectly able to get the U.S. State Department to bar him from doing any business in the United States and his money was basically frozen. Eventually, the project collapsed.”
Thorne’s commitment to the cause isn’t surprising; he’s long found advantages where others have seen upheaval. In the early 1980s, Thorne recognized the coming computer age and plunged himself into the world of finance. He started his own venture capital business, then largely put Wall Street behind him just before the tech bubble burst in 2000.
That only opened the door wider for Thorne’s true passions: conservation and preservation. Over the years, he’s overseen the complete renovation of several large estates, both in the United States and in Portugal, where he spends part of the year, and for a chunk of his life, Thorne served as a trustee for both the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York and the National Trust for Historic Preservation in Washington, D.C. Today, his philanthropic endeavor, the Daniel K. Thorne Foundation, gives grants to organizations in which preservation of built environments and the natural world are their core focus.
A little more than a decade ago, Thorne began laying the groundwork for the IWT. His inspiration came from participating in an investigative company tasked with disrupting New York City’s organized crime activity in the construction business in the early 2000s.
“It struck me as an approach that also could be used to protect wildlife,” says Thorne.
IWT’s staff is small but includes several heavy hitters, most notably Bruce Ohr, a former associate deputy attorney general and former director of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, who heads the nonprofit’s operations. Much of its work is centered on toughening local laws on criminal trafficking as well as training judges and prosecutors in the work. Currently, IWT is collaborating with governments in the Congo and Uganda, while also pursuing similar work around South America. Over the coming decade, Thorne hopes to expand IWT’s footprint even further. The responsibility, he says, is too great not to.
“More species have gone extinct in the last 10 years than in the 200 years preceding them,” he says. “We have to do everything we can to save what’s there because once it’s gone, it’s never coming back. That’s a huge loss to the planet and ourselves.”