Edward Norton settles around a table in a small office overlooking Times Square, the American actor dressed smartly in a black collared shirt. Next to him is Samson Parashina, a Maasai warrior from the East African savannah, wearing a colourful tunic and intricately beaded jewelry.Two very different people from two very different backgrounds preparing to run the New York City Marathon on Sunday for the very same cause.
Norton is lending his celebrity support to the Maasai Wilderness Conservation Trust, an attempt to preserve the biodiversity within tribal lands in Kenya and Tanzania through conservation, education and health services to indigenous people. The goal is to raise money by running through the streets of New York, but it's also to raise awareness of one of the world's last truly dynamic ecosystems.
"The wildlife from that part of the world is in a lot of ways the wildlife of our childhood imaginations," the "Fight Club" star said. "It is lions and giraffes and rhinoceros, and I think there are deep-seated reasons we're still connected to that.
"I think for a lot of people, it's horrifying to imagine having to say to their kids or grandkids that these things used to exist and now they're gone. Most people aren't aware of how possible that is, that lions would actually disappear."
The trust began as an ecotourism lodge called Campi ya Kanzi, near the base of Kilimanjaro. The idea was to use profits from the camp to preserve the environment and to sustain the traditional culture of the Maasai people, who number about 7,000 in that region of Kenya. Four years later, founders Luca Belpietro and Antonella Bonomi created the land trust to further their goals.
Along with the Maasai people, the trust now manages about 113,000 hectares.
"I moved to this community land because I didn't want to purchase land and own thousands of acres with Africans being moved out of the land I purchased," said Belpietro, who grew enamoured of Kenya while doing a thesis on wildlife as a natural resource.
"I created the ecological camp with the idea that it would give the community an income so that they would have a motivation to keep the land as it is."
Norton joined the cause after a trip to Kenya, where he climbed Kilimanjaro and stayed at the lodge. He said the conservation model that Belpietro and the Maasai people are employing - using the land in an ecofriendly manner as a means to preserve it - somehow resonated with him.
Finally, he thought, here's a path toward sustainability that just might work.
"I was looking at these guys going, 'They are absolutely blazing a trail toward a very effective example of this,"' Norton said. "But they are somewhat limited in that the main funding of their work is tied to the conservation surcharges off tourism. What I understood was how to engineer organizational support that's more tied to the global capacity of giving."
That's how Norton arrived at the idea of running the New York City Marathon.
The Maasai people spend most of their lives running, sometimes travelling up to 40 kilometres just to find water. It made sense to Norton, who's spent the last 20 years living in New York, to bring Parashina and two of his fellow warriors to compete in one of the world's iconic distance races.
They'll be joined by about 30 others. Some of them are corporate officials lending their support, others celebrities like Canadian singer Alanis Morissette and illusionist David Blaine who can give a public face to a relatively unknown cause. Through T-shirts sponsored by Puma and online donations, the runners had raised close to $500,000 by Monday morning.
"I think the common interest that connects us all," Parashina said, "(is that) you find everybody plays a role in protecting the environment."
Norton and Belpietro were reminded of that when they were running through Central Park last week, wearily putting in a training run over the same paths where they hope to finish the marathon Sunday.
The American actor was telling the conservationist from Kenya about how the park grew out of the need to preserve even a sliver of New York's natural resources for future generations. It dovetailed, on a much smaller scale, what the Maasai conservation trust is accomplishing in Africa.
"It's interesting to think the idea that millions of people are benefiting from the idea of a man who was so much ahead of his time," Belpietro said. "Running this marathon will get many people understanding, it's not just about the fundraising but about the connectivity."
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