Article body copy

When Hurricane Maria swept through the Caribbean in 2017, tiny Dominica was hit particularly hard—howling winds and torrential rain damaged or destroyed 95 percent of the country’s housing stock. Similarly, Oceans Forward, a Dominica-based conservation organization focused on community-centered projects, lost most of its buildings and equipment. “Everything we had was destroyed,” says Jake Levenson, the founder of Oceans Forward.

In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, Levenson says his first move was to help organize a relief mission—chartering a cargo plane to bring supplies into the battered country. Then he started thinking about how to rebuild Oceans Forward’s conservation projects.

At the best of times, financing for conservation projects is hard to come by in Dominica, Levenson says. Few people have heard of the country—or they confuse it with the better-known Dominican Republic. And while tourism has never been big business in Dominica, the COVID-19 pandemic—and the sudden end of so much international travel—demonstrated how unreliable ecotourism can be as a source of income. User fees from visiting scuba divers and other tourists has traditionally funded the costs of patrolling and maintaining Dominica’s two marine reserves.

In the wake of so much destruction and financial turmoil, Levenson turned his attention to devising a more sustainable way to keep the money flowing in. He considered selling handicrafts like driftwood art made by locals but decided the economics didn’t work. Then Levenson hit on what even he admits is a crazy idea: starting a rum distillery.

“We have all the ingredients,” he says. “We have the fertile Caribbean island; sugar cane grows everywhere.” Many Oceans Forward employees are farmers, he adds. “We just didn’t have the know-how or infrastructure.”

But with advice from Jaime Windon, from Lyon Rum in Maryland, Levenson and his team spent the past five years climbing the “really steep learning curve” of building a distillery and creating a rum from scratch. The project cost around US $4-million—with funding from a few private foundations and around 400 individual donors. And earlier this summer, the small Rosalie Bay Distillery produced its first 781 bottles.

The hope, says Levenson, is that a successful distillery will fund conservation projects on the island for decades to come. “You’ve got turtles that aren’t reproductively mature until they are in their 20s. You have coral reefs that live for thousands of years. We need to plan for conservation on a timescale that’s not a one-year grant cycle,” says Levenson.

“Long-term financial sustainability is not something a lot of organizations think about,” Levenson says. But he’s encouraging other conservation organizations to consider launching similar projects to insure themselves against the vagaries of philanthropic funding and tourism income.

David Meyers, executive director of the Conservation Finance Alliance, says it is important for conservation groups to look for alternative funding sources. “Being overreliant on one or two sources of funding is limiting,” he says. “You should really think about a portfolio of finance solutions if you’re trying to do conservation.”

While many conservation groups around the world sell merchandise to help fund their work or partner with companies like Patagonia that have conservation foundations, the idea of starting a whole new business is much less common, says Meyers. Not least because starting and running a profitable business is hard when it is outside your usual area of expertise. But he says the idea is “really cool” and thinks Oceans Forward has made a wise choice in opening a distillery. “Alcohol is one of the great small businesses that can be highly profitable,” he says.

Rosalie Bay’s rum—called the Sperm Whale Reserve—will soon be available for sale online and at select liquor stores in the United States as well as in Dominica itself. Closer to a French rhum agricole than a typical rum, the beverage is made from fresh sugar cane juice rather than refined sugar cane. It has a grassy, earthy flavor probably unfamiliar to most rum drinkers. So Simon Walsh, who runs Oceans Forward’s coral restoration program and is pretty much the only regular rum drinker on staff, recommends enjoying it in a Ti’ Punch, a classic Caribbean cocktail with lime juice and sugar cane syrup.

“It’s probably one of the best rhums agricole I’ve tasted,” says Walsh. “But you’re not really buying a bottle of rum. You’re donating to ocean conservation and getting a bottle for free.”

To that end, Oceans Forward designed the entire project to be as environmentally sustainable as possible. The distillery is housed in a prefabricated circular building that is solar-powered and designed to withstand hurricanes as powerful as Category 4. The distillery sources its water from the rain and a local spring, and wastewater is treated on-site in a runoff pond, which is also used to grow edible common water hyacinth and farm freshwater tilapia. All the distillery’s proceeds will go toward supporting Oceans Forward’s turtle patrols, coral restoration, and whale protection programs.

To really make the dent in Oceans Forward’s finances that Levenson is hoping for, the operation will have to scale up quickly. The organization is looking to sell between 7,000 and 10,000 bottles a year—each retailing at around $100—to cover its basic needs, Levenson says.

But it is not just the turtles and reefs that will benefit, says Kernean George, the head distiller and manager of Oceans Forward’s science and conservation center in the village of Rosalie. The project also provides jobs and gets people excited about ocean conservation.

“Back in the day, people were not so keen to conserve turtles,” says the 33-year-old George. “But once they saw that it can be a job to protect them—that it brings tourists and income for the community—they started saying, ‘Let’s protect them.’”

Oceans Forward works closely with the Dominica Sea Turtle Conservation Organization, which employs 25 to 30 people to patrol beaches around Dominica to keep an eye on nesting sea turtles, and several of them also work at the distillery. The new distillery also provides a local market for the island’s sugar cane farmers, around 40 of whom have already signed up as suppliers, says George, with many more expressing interest. Most of them grow sugar cane in small backyard plots, she says, but with a new, reliable customer, some are looking to expand. “The bigger we get, the more jobs we will have for everyone,” she says.

For Levenson, this is a core piece of the puzzle: “You can’t have successful conservation without taking care of people, too. They are part of the ecosystem you’re protecting.”

Beyond jobs, George hopes the excitement around the distillery project will draw more of the community into conservation efforts by showing that they have a part to play in protecting the oceans surrounding their home. “When I started with Oceans Forward, there were so many things I didn’t know about turtles,” says George. “Now I know all the different species and where they go.”

“I want this to succeed so we can give more people a chance to get involved,” George adds. “They might fall in love with [conservation] like I did.”