- Clark Lungren spent most of his life in Burkina Faso, where he worked on conservation not as an external intervention but as a local, becoming a naturalized citizen and embedding himself in village life. His authority came less from formal credentials than from long familiarity with people and place.
- He was best known for his role in the recovery of the Nazinga area, where wildlife rebounded after communities were granted controlled hunting rights in exchange for protection. The arrangement, initially dismissed by many experts, proved durable.
- Lungren argued consistently that conservation would only last if it aligned with local governance and incentives, a view reflected in community-managed hunting zones and buffer areas around protected lands. He favored workable compromises over strict orthodoxy.
- Active well into his seventies, he continued training, research, and advocacy through a demonstration farm near Ouagadougou. The systems he helped build persisted in a region where many conservation efforts were short-lived.
The history of conservation in West Africa is often written as a record of loss: wildlife depleted, institutions stretched thin, and well-intended projects undone by conflict or poverty. Less often does it include examples of enduring recovery. When such cases do exist, they tend to rest on compromises that look unorthodox on paper but make sense on the ground.
One of those compromises took shape in southern Burkina Faso in the late 1970s and 1980s, at a time when elephants were scarce and hunting had shifted from subsistence to eradication. The idea was simple and, to many specialists, implausible: allow local communities to retain a controlled right to hunt, in exchange for protecting wildlife and habitat. The approach ran against prevailing conservation doctrine. It also ran against the expectations of international development experts, many of whom dismissed it outright.
The person who pursued this arrangement despite the skepticism was Clark Lungren, who was raised in what was then Upper Volta and spent most of his life there. When he proposed that villagers who had long depended on hunting should become partners in conservation, he was told the plan would fail. It did not. At Nazinga, a game reserve south of Ouagadougou, wildlife populations rebounded sharply over the following years, including elephants that had all but vanished from the area. Tourism followed. Some of the men employed as wardens and guides were former poachers.
Lungren’s authority in such negotiations did not come from formal credentials. He did not hold a university degree. What he had instead was familiarity: with languages, village politics, and the slow rhythms of rural life. He became a naturalized citizen of Burkina Faso and remained there through periods of instability that drove many outsiders away. His conviction was that conservation would last only if it aligned with local incentives and governance, a view that later found expression in village hunting zones known as ZOVICs (Zone Villageoise d’Intervention Cynégétique), which act as buffers around protected areas.
Beyond Nazinga, Lungren worked as a field biologist, bird specialist, and advisor on community-managed natural areas across several West and Central African countries. He helped train local monitors and managers, contributed to research on human-elephant conflict, and argued consistently for devolving authority over land and wildlife to communities themselves. In the 1990s he established a demonstration farm at Wedbila, outside the capital, to show that breeding and managing wild species could provide livelihoods without exhausting ecosystems. Tens of thousands of visitors passed through the site over the years, including students and forestry officials.
Recognition came sporadically. In 2007 Burkina Faso awarded him the Order of Merit. He was associated with the Buffett Conservation Leadership Foundation and consulted by governments and NGOs. Yet his work remained rooted in places far from conference halls, shaped by practical concerns rather than theory.
Lungren remained active into his seventies, continuing to teach, research, and argue his case. He died in September 2025, at 74. The animals at Nazinga still move through corridors that were once empty, and the arrangements that protect them remain imperfect but intact. In a region where many experiments end quickly, that persistence may be the most telling measure of his work.
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This story first appeared on Mongabay
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