John Wamsley passionately believes in two things: the need to preserve native species in his homeland of Australia and the power of free enterprise. I stumbled across his story one day while I was reading a National Geographic story about him and the company he founded called Earth Sanctuaries, LTD.
Wamsley did not believe that government and charitable conservation was working. So he raised money in a public offering to create a company that would make a profit in the process of securing areas that would be free of non-native species, such as feral cats, rabbits, and so forth. He also created various means of revenue generation to create his business, including a ecotourism, lodging, a snack bar, selling non-threatened plants and animals, and so forth.
The start-up was tough, as many are, and Wamsley got some real life lessons about the power of markets to make or break your dreams as seen in the 2002 interview from abc.net:
?The Government conservation doesn’t work, and charitable conservation doesn’t work, and in fact, I still believe that it is the only hope our wildlife has, the only hope our environment has, is to commercialise it but there’s a long way to go and Earth Sanctuaries is the first experiment of this type and it hasn’t failed yet.
?I mean, I don’t give up that easy.
?But it’s hard and it’s going to be harder before we get there.?
By 2003 it became clear that changes had to be made if Earth Sanctuaries was to survive. Wamsley was a better conservationist than business person, so he hired professional management. The company is projected to breakeven in 2004, while still expanding its conservations efforts by buying more land to set up protected preserves.
The examples of non-profits trying to pretend to be entrepreneurs is everywhere, but this is one of the only examples I have even seen of a man with a vision that is usually assumed to be the domain of the subsidized non-profits trying to make it in the market of free enterprise.
I found examples on the web of media writers being critical of his efforts, ready to count him out at every stumble. But entrepreneurs do, and always will stumble. But, Wamsley already has succeeded. He has created many new areas that will conserve Australian species, created many new jobs, and shown that capitalism can be an effective mechanism to achieve conservation. In spite of his many early setbacks, he has been an effective entrepreneur and may yet also succeed in terms of his financial goals.
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