If it were a novel, the plot would seem far-fetched. A young British zoologist travels to Gabon, becomes the confidant of the president-for-life, takes Gabonese citizenship and ends up with the Gandalfian job title of minister of water, forests, the sea and the environment. The president-for-life’s son takes over after his father’s death, but is then deposed in a palace coup and our protagonist, after 35 years in the country, flees to escape corruption charges. All a bit corny, you might say. Except this is the true story of Lee White.

White’s surname is an irony that has not gone unnoticed in Gabon, a country the size of Britain with a population of just 2 million, nearly 90 percent of which is covered in tropical rainforest. Gabon’s forests are home to about 30,000 lowland gorillas and the world’s largest population of forest elephants, an estimated 95,000.

White’s notoriety, first when he was in charge of 13 magnificent national parks and later as a cabinet minister, eventually earned him the nickname “Satan of the Waters and the Forests” among his enemies. White says the real source of his unpopularity — and what he maintains are the completely fabricated charges that followed the coup — is the criminal gangs, many of them tied to China, whose multimillion-dollar timber trade he helped bust.

Long before that, some in Gabon saw him as, reportedly typical of Westerners, someone who cared more about the forests and elephants than about the people whose crops, or even relatives, the animals sometimes trampled. Opponents say he ingratiated himself with the corrupt Bongo dynasty, putting aside any resentment he might have had for the regime’s ostentatious roundup and suppression of opponents because he enjoyed the influence it gave him over Gabon’s vast rainforests.

When White was questioned in the weeks after the coup last August, he said he saw members of the forestry mafia in the building — evidence, he suggests, that they had built better relations with the new regime. “I was not popular with those thugs. It’s like taking on the mafia,” he says. He had also bypassed the forestry ministry’s union, some of whose members, he claims, had ties to the illegal trade.

The interrogation, though never physically threatening, was brutal. He was allowed to go home in the evening, but each new day brought new accusations. He had, they said, stolen 40 billion CFA francs (£52 million) in unpaid bonuses. He had pocketed money that Norway had spent on forest protection. He had even stolen the proceeds from the sale of millions of Gabon carbon credits. This was funny, says White, because although the credits exist, Gabon, to his great annoyance, has never received a cent for them.

“She threw the kitchen sink at me,” he says of the prosecutor. “And then she said, ‘I know you’re a British citizen.’” He saw it as an invitation to flee the country, an offer he readily accepted last October.

Now adjusting to life in Scotland, where his wife Kate is a professor at the University of Stirling and where he has swapped forest elephants and gorillas for a nearby badger lodge, White has seen his chaotic adventures turned into a gripping Sky documentary called Gabon: The last chance for the Earth.

If we do not manage Gabon’s forests, they will disappear, just like all other forests in West Africa.

We enter his home, a modest, cobbled building on a busy street a few miles from St Andrews. “I’d have a property empire in Scotland. This is it,” he says glumly, ushering me into the small kitchen/diner. “We couldn’t afford a house in St Andrews,” he adds for emphasis. Later, during a tour of that town’s famous golf course, he says he’d be tempted to play a round — if only his clubs hadn’t been confiscated in Gabon, along with the rest of his belongings. It’s all a bit of a setback.

White’s rise and fall began in 1968 when his parents moved their three-year-old son from Manchester to Uganda, where his father had taken a teaching job. His playmates included the children of dictator Idi Amin. At home, he grew up with three younger sisters and an orphaned chimpanzee named Cedric, an early attachment that fueled a desire to save the forests where man’s three closest living relatives — chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas — live.

After a degree in zoology at University College London, he did a PhD in Edinburgh on the impact of deforestation on large mammals. His research took him to Gabon. When he arrived at the research station at Lopé, a few huts in the middle of the forest, he knew the names of only two trees. “At UCL I had asked to teach a course in plant taxonomy, and my tutor had looked at me and said, ‘Lee, we’re zoologists.’”

He certainly recognized the elephant emerging from the forest, the fulfillment of a dream that may explain why he remained in that remote location for the next 15 years. Kate, a fellow PhD student from Edinburgh, joined him and began her own research and a family. They raised three children in Gabon, where his eldest daughter developed a taste for ants, a common snack.

In 2002, things got even weirder. He was summoned to a meeting by Omar Bongo Ondimba, president of Gabon for nearly 42 years until his death in 2009. White worked for the Wildlife Conservation Society, an American NGO affiliated with the Bronx Zoo. He was attending the meeting as a sidekick to Mike Fay, also of WCS, who had just completed a legendary 465-day, 2,000-mile trek through the harsh rainforest, a feat of endurance and ecological mapping forever known as the MegaTransect.

Shortly before the meeting, the red telephones on the desks of each of Bongo’s ministers rang. Quite unexpectedly, Fay and White presented themselves to the entire cabinet. After Fay had spoken, it was White’s turn. He showed a map of 13 fantasy national parks, covering 11 percent of Gabon’s territory. Bongo turned to his ministers. “I want that,” he said.

When it comes to making far-reaching environmental decisions, White sees the benefits of authoritarian rule. He is uncomfortable with criticism of the Bongo dynasty, saying the only part of the Sky documentary that made him wince was “all the Omar Bongo bling” — the many luxury cars, Parisian mansions and decadent lifestyles. Bongo had more than 30 children with various women and wives.

We have the intelligence to put people on Mars, but we don’t have the intelligence to take care of our planet.

White insists that Bongo was elected, albeit in a one-party system. He does not see this as a dictatorship, but as the expression of a “traditional African system that operated through chiefs and chiefs”. It is, he says, no different from Britain of old, where “chieftaincy lines had a long-term vision” and were not bound by the modern prescriptions of five-yearly election cycles. “I would choose a King Charles over a Keir Starmer,” he says of a monarch with well-known environmental credentials.

In the noughties, White introduced the then Prince Charles, for whom he had done some consultancy work on Liberia’s forests, to Ali Bongo, Omar’s son and a budding conservationist. Bongo, who spoke fluent English, had for some reason concealed his ability, and White was obliged to translate from French for the future king. White would later be awarded a CBE, although the citation stated that it was for conservation of the African environment, not translation.

As head of Gabon’s national parks from 2009, White built a paramilitary force to combat the criminal gangs that were harvesting thousand-year-old timber from the forest. His men also uncovered an elephant poaching ring, the proceeds of which funded the West African terrorist group Boko Haram.

He also began quantifying Gabon’s carbon. The laborious measurements he had made in Lopé for his PhD turned out to be the same ones needed to calculate carbon stocks. White helped develop the first carbon map of Gabon. By the time of the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit in 2009, he had become Gabon’s leading climate scientist.

He later made successive sophisticated calculations, eventually validated by the UN, proving that Gabon was one of the few countries in the world that was a net absorber of carbon. Even including emissions from burning the oil that Gabon sells internationally, the country absorbs a net 95 million tonnes per year. By comparison, Britain emits 380 million tonnes.

White also developed a methodology to show that sustainable forestry practices, in which one or two trees are cut from a hectare of forest in a 25-year rotation, can actually increase the amount of carbon absorbed by allowing more light in and encouraging tree growth. His idea was to sell the resulting credits. He reasoned that Gabon should surely be incentivized to absorb carbon and help the world breathe.

White could never sell those credits. He sees the world’s failure to find a mechanism to reward his country—he’s still Gabonese despite his change of address—as a moral failure. “If we don’t manage Gabon’s forests, they’ll disappear, just like all the other forests in West Africa,” he says. As Gabon runs out of oil, the country must find another way to make a living. White says a sustainable forestry sector, with accompanying carbon credits, must be part of the answer.

Expelled from Gabon, he has set his sights on a career in the private sector, where he can apply his experience to solutions for the Congo Basin rainforest. He sees his task as urgent. If the Congo Basin rainforest disappears, he says, it will release many years’ worth of global carbon emissions in one fell swoop. Worse, it would affect rainfall in the Ethiopian highlands, which feed the Blue Nile. He once shocked a Greek diplomat by telling him that would mean 100 million Egyptians heading his way.

“We have the intelligence to put people on Mars,” he says, referring to Elon Musk’s escape plan, “but we don’t have the intelligence to take care of our planet and prevent the implosion of life support systems, which affects billions of people.”

Some people will survive, he admits. “But I can imagine a Hollywood doomsday scenario like Planet of the Apes.” Scotland could be 20 degrees colder. If the Himalayan glaciers melt, 2 billion people will be without water. And to top it all off, there are his golf clubs, still stuck in Gabon.

David Pilling is the FT’s Africa Editor

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