Looking for a Gate Towards Preservation

By Zoraida Diaz

Long before the global financial crisis of 2008 held the world in a choking vice, before Al Gore became an environmental apostle preaching uncomfortable truths, and certainly long before the Kyoto Protocol fell through, again and again, Alex Khajavi knew the Earth was in trouble.

He felt it in his bones, like a genetic imprint going back to the first civilizations, back to his Persian forbearers. Then, life’s unfathomable designs set him on a different path, one of financial success that quieted the rumor within.

He speaks of what one can interpret as an epiphany—that day, back in the early 70’s, when he told Dean Witter he was resigning his post as a successful investment banker to work in Africa.

“I wanted to move toward something that wasn’t main street,” he explains, “I left Water Street off Wall Street in New York to go where there were no streets.”

Mr Khajavi, Chief Executive Officer of Costa Rica's adventure travel airline Nature Air, was then 35.

He needed to find a passage back to a different way. He became obsessed with finding a gate, one where the villages, the rivers, the jungle could be preserved.

“I took courses in ancient farming methods, and studied the symbiotic relationships that developed in the crops planted by those cultures,” he explains.

That challenge took Mr Khajavi to identifying, financing and developing projects in East Africa and the Middle East. He was instrumental in the creation and funding of $20 million for the Sudan Development Bank.

Mr Khajavi quickly realized that there was one way where social responsibility in the third world could advance development, for it to have a chance. He wanted to preserve village life, tribal migrations, and ancient knowledge.

But there must be no confusion: heritage is not restricted to the protection of ancient architecture, points out Mr Khajavi.

“Heritage is not just the sites, there’s also an invisible heritage…clothing, songs, recipes, respect, shyness, mystery, the stories handed down mouth to mouth…”

© Zoraida Diaz

“I saw tourism coming into the horn of Africa, and it dawned on me in the late 70s that tourism was a good way to bring hard currency into those countries,” he recounts.

If one were to coin a phrase for the driving force behind Mr Khajavi’s mission, it could very well be “fair trade tourism,” a concept so visionary that words like eco-tourism did not yet exist.

“People and land, tied together in great cultural exchanges that would eliminate strife, and it was then that I started doing country studies to develop low-impact tourism.”

And so, as he acknowledges, he moved from development into the development of tourism. And he founded Naturegate, a global tourism development consulting firm.

“I knew that people wanted to see the gate to a place, to open it and be there, but where was that gate, and how does one define it?”

The concept challenges every park in the US: what to do when 100 000 cars start driving through? That is the question to be answered in sustainable tourism development. Where does one draw the line?

Mr Khajavi, took over the flailing Travel Air at the start of the second millennium. By accident.

He had been hired to conceive of a business strategy so save the one-plane airline that was so perfect, he fell in love with it.

But as always, after implementing the strategy, Mr Khajavi was ready to move on to another project. And shortly thereafter, September 11 happened, changing the world radically. The investors pulled out, and Mr Khajavi suddenly found himself the owner of an airline.

Surely a sign, for Nature Air is a model success story. With a fleet of seven planes, the airline it the world’s first zero carbon emissions airline. The company offsets more than 6000 tons of carbon dioxide annually using carbon credits to help conserve Costa Rica’s richly diverse Osa Peninsula.

Mr Khajavi may have very well found his gate.