“While your father is alive, make as many friends as you can. While your horse is alive, see as many lands as you can.”
Three Camel Lodge founder Jalsa Urubshurow shared this Mongolian proverb during the 2026 Beyond Green Global Leadership Summit.
For four days in August, its message found particular relevance at Three Camel Lodge. Hospitality leaders had traveled from different parts of the world to consider a question central to the summit’s theme, Creating a Lasting Legacy: what do the choices we make today leave for the people and places that follow?
The second annual Beyond Green Leadership Summit brought together hotel owners, executives, sustainability leaders, writers, and other voices in travel for discussions grounded in the realities of hospitality and the places it touches.
For Three Camel Lodge, a founding member of Beyond Green, hosting those conversations in Mongolia carried particular significance.
A Global Community Comes to the Gobi
Beyond Green brings together hotels, resorts, and lodges working to advance more responsible approaches to travel. Its members operate in very different environments, which made gathering them in one place an opportunity to compare what stewardship looks like across destinations.
Representatives came from Arenas Del Mar in Costa Rica, Aristi Mountain Resort in Greece, Hotel Las Islas in Colombia, Post Ranch Inn, Cavallo Point, and The Ranch at Laguna Beach in California, as well as The Family Coppola Hideaways and Vermejo, a Ted Turner Reserve. Three Camel Lodge welcomed the group as host property.
The value of bringing this group together lay partly in those differences. A coastal resort and a lodge in the Gobi will encounter different environmental realities and community relationships. The summit created room to exchange what each property has learned within its own setting.
That exchange continued throughout the program, including a dedicated best-practice workshop where members could learn directly from one another.
Beginning with Mongolia
Hosting the summit in Mongolia also meant grounding the conversation in knowledge from within the country.
Narangerel Naranpurev, Conservation Director of the Wildlife Science and Conservation Center of Mongolia, joined Odgerel Odonchimed, Executive Director of the Arts Council of Mongolia, for a discussion devoted to the stewardship of Mongolia’s natural and cultural heritage.
Naranpurev has spent more than 15 years working in conservation and protected-area management. Her work brings biodiversity protection into conversation with climate resilience and community engagement, with experience across ecosystems throughout Mongolia.
Odonchimed has spent more than two decades working in Mongolia’s cultural sector. Through the Arts Council of Mongolia, she has helped strengthen cultural programs and international collaboration while advancing philanthropy in support of Mongolia’s arts.
Their participation gave the summit an important local foundation. Stewardship in Mongolia includes questions about how landscapes are cared for and how cultural knowledge is carried forward. For a gathering concerned with legacy, both belong in the conversation.
Expanding the Meaning of Sustainability
The summit also examined how the travel industry talks about sustainability. A media discussion brought together Delia Barth of AFAR, Juliet Kinsman, and Paul Brady of Travel + Leisure, followed by Kinsman’s workshop on telling real stories for meaningful impact.
One of the questions raised by Barth went to the heart of cultural sustainability:
“How are we supporting the communities we visit? How can our presence here be a net positive?”
It is a useful question for hospitality, particularly in destinations where tourism brings visitors into close contact with communities whose ways of life are deeply connected to the surrounding landscape.
At Three Camel Lodge, those relationships have informed our approach since the Lodge opened in 2002. Travel in the Gobi carries a responsibility to understand that this landscape is also home, shaped by generations of knowledge and adaptation.
Sustainability therefore reaches beyond what happens within the physical boundaries of a hotel. It includes how tourism participates in the life of a destination and what remains after the traveler leaves.
Learning Across Hospitality
Other conversations brought experience from across the hospitality industry into the Gobi.
Claire Chiang, Co-Founder and Senior Vice President of Banyan Group, joined Ho Ren Yung, the group’s Deputy CEO, for a fireside conversation moderated by Preferred Travel Group CEO Lindsey Ueberroth. Chiang’s work has helped shape Banyan Group’s approach to corporate responsibility and community development, while Ho works across the group’s strategy and innovation initiatives.
The summit was also shaped by the Beyond Green leadership team, including President Philipp Weghmann, Vice President of Sustainability Nina Boys, and Head of Community Laura Rankin, alongside leadership from Preferred Travel Group.
One thought shared by Boys captured the longer view behind the gathering:
“Whenever we travel, we are planting seeds, and you never know where those trees will grow.”
That idea resonates particularly well in a conversation about legacy. The influence of a journey is not always immediate or easily measured. It can emerge later in how someone thinks about a destination, runs a property, or approaches the communities connected to their work.
Beyond the Meeting Room
Some of the summit’s most relevant context came from leaving the meeting room altogether.
Participants spent an afternoon with a nomadic camel-herding family, learning about pastoral life and traveling into the surrounding landscape. Mornings offered opportunities to walk through the desert at sunrise, while the opening evening brought the group outdoors near ancient Bronze Age burial grounds. Another session explored Mongolia’s history of paleontological discovery and the expeditions associated with it.
These experiences brought greater context to conversations taking place at the Lodge.
Pastoral life in the Gobi has long depended upon close observation of land and seasonal conditions. Knowledge is carried between generations and continually adapted to the realities of the environment. Encountering that relationship firsthand gave participants another way to consider the summit’s central idea of legacy.
It also allowed Mongolia to be understood through the people who live here, rather than solely through discussions about sustainability in hospitality.
Beyond the Meeting Room
The Gobi encourages a longer sense of time. Human history remains visible across the landscape, while traditions of pastoral life continue in the present. For several days, conversations about stewardship unfolded within that context.
The experience gave participants time to consider how the principles discussed during formal sessions translate into decisions made at individual properties and within their surrounding communities.
Juliet Kinsman described her time at Three Camel Lodge as having “shifted thinking and deepened commitments.” Christine Amour-Levar captured the effect of the setting in an even simpler observation:
“A few days in the Gobi Desert can shift your perspective.”
The value of gathering in person was found in that exchange between discussion and experience. Ideas raised inside the Lodge could be considered again while walking through the desert or spending time with people whose relationship with the Gobi extends across generations.
What Will We Make Possible?
The summit’s final morning turned explicitly toward what comes next. Christine Amour-Levar, Co-Founder of Investors for Climate, led the closing session, Going Beyond Leadership: Building Legacies That Last. Participants then gathered for a final reflection centered on commitments and looking ahead.
Amour-Levar left the gathering with a question that captures much of what had been considered during the preceding days:
“What will the choices we make today make possible for those who come after us?”
For Three Camel Lodge, that question reaches beyond a single summit.
Since opening in 2002, the Lodge has sought to demonstrate how thoughtful travel can contribute to the conservation of Mongolia’s heritage while creating meaningful connections between visitors and the people who call the Gobi home.
Hosting the Beyond Green community allowed us to share what we have learned here while listening to others undertaking similar work in very different destinations.
The gathering ended on August 29. The ideas discussed in the Gobi now return with each participant to their own property and community, where the meaning of Creating a Lasting Legacy will continue to take shape.
