Ok, so I will freely admit that I like to watch travel shows, especially those on PBS. I just finished watching an episode of Travelsope where the host went to Mozambique, Africa. While there, he visited an island 5-star resort that should serve as an example of how living should be. This place has found a near perfect balance among providing 5-star comfort, environmental sustainability, and responsibility to the local community.
The resort was entirely built using local techniques and materials. The furnishings are all African and the building materials were found on the island itself, with the obvious exception of stainless steel kitchen equipment and the like. A good example would be the four great timber pillars supporting the roof of the hotel’s main bar. They were reclaimed when a tropical cyclone washed the timber up on the beach.
Luxury living conditions are also achieved with both the environment and the community in mind. All landscaping is indigenous and reclaimed water is used for its maintenance. Fertilizers are produced from herds owned and maintained by local villagers. Hot water and electricity is nearly entirely provided by solar technologies. In addition, the resort is on the edge of a national wildlife reserve and environmental protection laws are strictly enforced, not that they have much of a problem as the local community supports them fully.
The best aspect of this resort is its total commitment to the local village. Food is not shipped in from somewhere else. Resort managers went around the village and observed which households had thriving gardens to produce their own food. They then paid them to grow more food for the resort to use and to teach their skills to other villagers. Most of the furnishings are made by the villagers, including the straw mats used by the beach-going visitors. If the executive chef wants to make a seafood dish, he will use fish and lobster caught by villagers just a few hundred yards off the resort’s beach. In fact, the chef staffs his kitchen with locals who have shown an aptitude for cooking and mentors the best of them in the hope that they will one day go out into the world and run their own kitchens.
In short, if the world suddenly experienced a complete collapse of the modern economy, the only thing the resort would experience would be a shortage of guests. The community would not suffer in the end at all. The resort has gone above and beyond to teach the local community to be completely self-sufficient. The villagers now know how to produce their own food and energy and how to be good stewards of their environment so they will continue to live a good life off their land in perpetuity.
This is a wonderful example of how human life is supposed to work. The villagers and the resort management cooperate instead of compete. Where there is a need, the person who can meet it will because they know when they have a need, someone else will be there to meet it. This place is not an upper-middle class suburb with a Publix, Starbucks, and high-speed broadband. It is much, much richer than that. It is a community where friends and neighbors look after one another. It is a community that understands the key happiness and comfort is achieved as a group and not as individuals. This is knowledge that, for the most part, has been lost by the greater first world. It is knowledge that allows for this village in a developing country to have, in my humble opinion, a higher quality of life than most of today’s first-worlders will ever experience.