A Living Ark: The Wildlife Gamble on Necker Island

An island as an ark

It is easy to file Necker Island under celebrity real estate and move on. Richard Branson bought the 74-acre speck in the British Virgin Islands as a young man for a famously small sum, built a resort on it, and made it a byword for luxury. That is the part everyone knows, and it is the least interesting thing about the place.

The interesting thing is what lives there. Over four decades Necker has been quietly stocked, on purpose, with animals losing their homes elsewhere, flamingos hunted out of these islands and brought back, giant tortoises, an iguana all but gone from the wild, and, most controversially, lemurs flown in from Madagascar. By the island's own count it now hosts more than 140 animal species, a large share of them threatened. It is not a zoo. It is closer to an ark: a privately funded refuge built on the belief that land and money, pointed at a problem, can buy a species a little more time. That ark sits on top of a second project, a clean-energy, fresh-water, ocean-protection experiment that keeps the whole thing running. But the animals are the heart of it, and the animals are where the optimism meets its hardest questions.

A living ark

Necker's conservation story is most literal on land. Caribbean flamingos, a species once native to these islands, hunted out, then deliberately reintroduced, wade the salt ponds; four birds arrived in 2006 and the flock now numbers in the hundreds. Aldabra giant tortoises graze the lawns. Scarlet and white ibis stalk the flats. Rock iguanas, including the critically endangered Anegada iguana that is all but gone from the wild, are bred here as insurance against the day the wild population blinks out.

By the island's own count it hosts more than 140 animal species, a large share of them threatened in the wild. That is a genuinely unusual thing for a private island to be, not a menagerie for guests, but a working refuge, stocked on purpose with animals that are losing ground everywhere else. It is the most concrete expression of the idea that a fortune, aimed carefully, can hold a line against extinction.

Then there are the lemurs, and the lemurs are where the whole project meets its critics.

The bet that split the scientists

Beginning in 2012, Branson imported ring-tailed and red-fronted brown lemurs from Madagascar to Necker and neighboring Moskito Island. Madagascar's lemurs are, by the IUCN's reckoning, the most endangered large group of mammals on Earth, and the stated logic was a safety net: a free-ranging population in a predator-light refuge, plus the visibility that comes with a famous host. The animals in the gallery below are those introductions, lemurs, a red-necked wallaby, an ornamental pheasant.

Conservationists were not charmed. When the plan surfaced, the reaction from parts of the scientific community ranged from skeptical to alarmed. Necker and Moskito are home to native reptiles found almost nowhere else, the stout iguana, the turnip-tailed gecko, the dwarf gecko. Lemurs are opportunistic omnivores; some will take lizards, bird eggs, and invertebrates as readily as fruit. Critics in the British Virgin Islands argued the environmental assessment had not seriously weighed the risk of loosing an exotic primate onto small islands with fragile, endemic reptile populations, the textbook recipe, elsewhere in the world, for an ecological accident.

This is the part a brochure would leave out, and the part the Conservation Report keeps in. Introducing a non-native species to save it is one of conservation's genuinely hard trade-offs, and serious scientists land on opposite sides of it. More than a decade on, the island has not suffered an obvious collapse, but "no visible disaster yet" is not the same as "vindicated," and the people who raised the alarm have not withdrawn it. The boldness and the recklessness are, frustratingly, the same decision seen from two angles.

Down to the reef

The least ambiguous chapter is underwater. In 2017 Branson helped sink the Kodiak Queen, a WWII ship, one of a handful afloat that survived the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, off Virgin Gorda, and dropped an 80-foot steel kraken over it. The wreck and the porous sculpture are an artificial reef seeded with transplanted coral, a dive site, and a marine-education center for BVI students, built with Unite BVI and the science nonprofit Beneath the Waves. A piece of history, turned into living reef.

The bigger lever is Ocean Unite, incubated by Virgin Unite and launched in 2015. In 2016 it helped convene 30 of the world's largest conservation groups behind a single number, protect at least 30% of the ocean by 2030, the target now known as 30x30. Over roughly six years, the initiative and its partners say they helped push well over five million square kilometres of ocean into strong protection before folding into a larger coastal-resilience alliance. Necker is the salon where a good deal of that gets brokered: the island as convening power, not just habitat.

The machine that keeps it running

An ark in the Caribbean needs the two things every island fights for: water and power. Necker makes its own.

A reverse-osmosis desalination plant turns seawater into drinking water, by some accounts capable of tens of thousands of gallons a day, and Branson has worked to run it on clean energy rather than diesel. The power comes from a renewable microgrid: three wind turbines and more than 1,200 solar panels feeding a large battery, capable of around 650 kilowatts. On a good day the island runs on roughly 95% renewable energy. That system was not a vanity build, it proved itself. When Hurricane Irma flattened much of Necker in 2017, the solar array largely survived, and the island, animals and all, had power again within about a day, while much of the region sat dark for weeks.

The point of proving it on a private island is to hand the blueprint to everyone who cannot afford to fail. That is the argument Branson made after Irma, calling for a renewable "Marshall Plan" for the Caribbean: rebuild the region's fragile, diesel-dependent grids as clean, storm-hardened systems, so the next hurricane does not mean months without electricity. Necker is the demonstration model, and the reason the ark had lights and fresh water while its neighbors did not.

Lifting the neighbors

Conservation on a private island only means something if it reaches past the fence line, and this is where Branson's foundation, Virgin Unite, does its least glamorous and most durable work.

Through Unite BVI, its British Virgin Islands arm, the money goes into the machinery of a resilient community. After Irma, that included a micro-loan program to restart small businesses, the restoration of a local educational center, a Chromebook program to keep children learning, mosquito-borne-disease prevention, community clean-ups, and, tellingly, a solar-installer training program run with the H. Lavity Stoutt Community College, so the clean-energy transition is built and maintained by local hands rather than flown in. The Branson Centre of Entrepreneurship Caribbean, launched in 2011, has spent over a decade training and mentoring purpose-driven small-business owners across the islands. The instinct on display, self-sufficiency at home, know-how shared next door, is the thread that ties the flamingo pond to the solar-installer classroom.

The honest ledger

So what is Necker Island, really? First, it is an ark: a place where a very rich man has spent decades bringing back a lost flamingo, breeding an iguana that is gone from the wild, and holding 140-plus species against the tide, while making fresh water from sunlight, going nearly off-diesel after a hurricane, sinking a warship to grow coral, and using a legendary address to nudge a global ocean target toward done.

It is also a place where that same instinct, bold, well-funded, impatient, loosed a primate onto small islands over the objections of scientists who study exactly those ecosystems, and called it conservation. The generosity and the overreach come from the same source, and the honest thing is to hold both in view rather than pick the flattering one.

Wildlife philanthropy on this scale is worth cheering for. It is also worth checking, because the whole point of a moonshot is that it might miss, and the honest ones tell you where.

Point a fortune and an island at the problem of vanishing species and you will not save them by yourself. But you might prove, on 74 acres, that a refuge is buildable, self-powered, storm-hardened, stocked with the animals nobody else has room for, and then make the case for more of them. On the evidence, that is the bet Necker is running. It is not finished, and it is not above criticism. It is, unmistakably, aimed at the right horizon.