A Wild Idea

by Jonathan Franklin

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  Iberá was rugged, at times lawless, and not a place where an arrogant yanqui could invest without first understanding the local landscape. Seven years of battling Chileans on the other side of the Andes had taught Doug to study the local culture, then act. He immediately went flying with a local pilot named Carlos, a bad boy and daredevil who could guide him around. Carlos was notorious for flying upside down like a stuntman. Doug and Carlos fed off each other. Doug could fly as wild as the local hotshot, if not better, and Carlos pulled out his revolver and blasted away at the sky as they careened down the runaway en route to yet another flyover of the wetlands. The association with Carlos was both a natural inclination and a shrewd move by Tompkins. Regardless of how locals interpreted his presence, there was no chance anyone would characterize the new yanqui as a “normal guy.”

  The gregarious and feisty Correntinos were the opposite of Chileans who tended to be introverted, suspicious, and decidedly nonviolent. “Corrientes felt like a warrior province. That’s how it imagines itself, and it’s not a joke,” said Kris. “They’re tough, very independent, and many did not like the national government, and they don’t take to foreigners.”

  Iberá was also home to a mythical figure—the gaucho. But this was not the noble gaucho figure of southern Argentina. In these northern wetlands, the word “gaucho” also meant a fugitive, a solitary man who at times abandoned society to live in the bush and perhaps survives as a hunter-gather hermit.

  The marshland’s soundtrack was a raucous squawk of birds. Yellow cardinals and white woodpeckers flew through the reeds and pockets of forest that provided a home to more than 300 species of birds—nearly as many species as found in all of Europe. Flamingos and geese migrated from Patagonia every year to pass the winter. “Iberá gets migratory birds from the north during one-half of the year and from the south in the other half of the year,” explained Juan Ramon Diaz, a wildlife photographer working in Iberá.

  As part of the larger Paraná watershed, the Iberá marshlands were once riverbeds. When the great Paraná meandered north, the wetlands filled with rainwater year-round and created an entrance to the Guarani Aquifer, the world’s second-largest aquifer. The difficulty in traversing the area had converted the wetlands into a cauldron of myths, rumors, and conspiracy theories. As much as they distrusted yanquis from the United States, however, there was one enemy even more repugnant to locals—the political bosses back in Buenos Aires. Correntinos felt abandoned by the politicians in the capital and the rest of the federal government. Their flag was Argentine but their loyalties provincial. “They say Corrientes is another country,” said one local. “And that they give you a passport when you come here, and if Argentina gets into a war, Corrientes will support her.” Tompkins found Iberá’s rebel attitude comforting. In a land without rules, regulations, or routines, anything was possible.

  Doug realized that in Iberá wetlands he had found a diamond in the rough. “Like a painting,” he told friends as he described the view from flying above the wetlands that native Guarani culture named Iberá, which when translated means “The Land of Shining Waters.”

  In 2000, Kris sold her Patagonia company stock and founded Conservacíon Patagónica, a California nonprofit designed to facilitate the creation of national parks. She investigated areas rich in biodiversity and in Argentina explored the country from its northern jungles, where jaguars still prowled along the border with Brazil, to the southern extremes near the Argentine lakes region. Together with Doug she mapped out the fragments of once-thriving biological corridors. Were there remnants enough left to stitch together a critical mass? If not, were individual islands of biodiversity worth saving?

  Kris and Doug debated which ecosystems to prioritize. Local environmental activists had compiled a depressingly rich list of finalists. Did they want to first protect native forests from soybean plantations? Or was it more important to go offshore and develop Marine Protected Areas (known as MPAs) to allow the ocean’s remaining fish and marine mammals a bit of protection after three centuries of plundering?

  “They were a team,” said the environmental historian Harold Glasser. “Doug was the sort of stalwart bulldog, but she was the one who knew how people work and smoothed things over and knew how to bring out the best in people. Kris is the one who always seemed quite rational, really open-minded, and a very good critical thinker.”

  Finally, Kris put her effort (and stock proceeds) into Monte Léon, an overgrazed, eroded, coastal ecosystem used and abused as a sheep ranch along the Atlantic Coast in southern Argentina. Monte Léon stretched for 165,000 land acres including twenty-five miles of wild coastline, penguin colonies, and a fragile, desertlike coastal vegetation nibbled to nothing by thousands of sheep.

  Working with Erize, the esteemed Argentine National Parks executive director, they laid the groundwork for a three-way transfer. Conservación Patagónica would fund the purchase of the ragged ranchlands through a nonprofit called Fundación Vida Silvestres Argentina, which in turn would transfer the lands to the National Parks Administration. In thirty-six months the project was complete, and Monte Léon was added to the Argentina national park system. It was the country’s first coastal national park and it opened the path for Marine Protected Areas to create ocean-based conservation initiatives in the future. “When you go to these anti-American Argentines and explain that you have all this money and that you want to buy private lands, fix them up, and then donate them back to the state, they don’t have a hard time finding that to be a great idea,” said Tompkins. “You are paying the costs, then allowing them to renationalize the land.”

  Kris and Doug Tompkins were now establishing a yearly routine, a seasonal migration, from Pumalín to the Iberá, where they were becoming ever more involved in a campaign to protect the wetlands. Winter in Patagonia was damp and dark at just the time the Iberá wetlands felt spring-like. Journeying from their rainy Reñihue ranch to Argentina was a pilgrimage that Kris likened to “a honeymoon over and over.” During the days long drive, they took turns reading aloud to one another. “We would just have a great time laughing and debating things in the car,” said Kris. “I would get tired of sitting, so he would stop and read, and I would run out in front of the car and then signal to him when I’d gone far enough. He’d put whatever he was reading aside and come get me.”

  Expanding their footprint in Iberá, Doug and Kris hired Sofia Heinonen, a pioneering Argentine biologist with seventeen years’ experience in the Argentine National Park Administration. Heinonen, a confident and passionate advocate for nature, was fearless, yet even she was stunned by Doug’s audacity. His introductory tour and chat with locals (which Sofia had suggested) became a revolutionary declaration. Tompkins explained matter-of-factly that he had come to build a national park, reintroduce the jaguar, and reinvent the local economy, with conservation as the backbone.

  Heinonen was flabbergasted. She watched in bewilderment as Tompkins publicly announced his revolution to one rural community after another as they traveled around the perimeter of the vast wetlands. She had been working for Tompkins just four weeks, and already his meetings with the various conservative agricultural and farming associations had sparked an uproar. Tompkins presented his vision with such confidence and certainty that the locals took a deep swallow, unsure how to react. “It was like he had said, I’m going to the moon, after that to Mars, and then I’m going to build my house on Jupiter,” laughed Heinonen. “They thought he was crazy, that it was an impossible dream, like he was an extraterrestrial that didn’t know where he had landed.”

  To better help him understand the unique biology of the region, Tompkins also hired Ignacio Jimenez, a Spanish wildlife biologist. But before he could delve into the intricacies of rewilding the wetlands with giant anteaters, pampas deer, and jaguar, Jimenez had to deal with a rebellion on his front step as he attempted to quell fears by locals that Tompkins was a fraud. “For the Argentines it was like, No way; tell me another story because I don’t believ
e it,” said Jimenez. “First, every American wants to screw us; second, every millionaire is an asshole; so there must be a hidden agenda here. It was shocking for me. There was so much aggression, so much hatred. Any private company owned by a foreigner that bought land to do business as usual, let’s say mining or forestry or rice—it wouldn’t create any controversy. But it was the fact that a foreigner was buying lots of land for conservation. That created the controversy. He was a UFO. Since nobody had seen this before, they had to create alternative versions of the story because they would never believe the real story.”

  Among the critics was Argentine senator Sergio Flinta, who represented the Iberá region in the provincial legislature. “The first objection I had was that he is an American coming to buy land. We’ve always had a strong yanqui-phobia here,” he said. “The second was that he was coming for the water in Iberá, and that he was coming to create a barrier so that Iberá could not be utilized by the province. He was interested in conservation over production, and there were things being said about him—that in Chile he had cut the country in two. This generated a strong opposition in the local farmers federations.”

  Tompkins recognized that the limited access to the wetlands played in his favor. Few ranchers or even their farmhands felt comfortable trekking into the mysterious swamp that was known as the exclusive territory of the mariscadores—nomadic hunters who hunted and captured anything they could sell. Mariscadores trapped otter, used salt licks to lure marsh deer, and sent up smoke signals from island to island as they moved cattle herds through the wetlands. They captured so many caimans that the population plunged from hundreds of thousands to mere hundreds.

  “Iberá was an empty space. It had no fauna when Doug bought it. But he saw the chance to fill it with critters, because the habitat was there, and was not being used for something else,” said Heinonen. “When Doug flew over Iberá he saw the opportunity to revive it with wildlife, and to try rewilding as a tool on an empty stage.”

  The yellow anaconda, which reached lengths of eighteen feet, had been poached into near-extinction as the mariscadores earned a few dollars selling skins. Egret feathers kept entire families employed as they used sticky traps to glue the feet of the birds to branches, then harvested them for a few ounces of hat feathers. The crash of such garish fashion led to a steep decline in the mariscador population. From a total of several thousand, their numbers fell to perhaps only 300—which included a roaming population of outlaws.

  “They’re not necessarily dangerous bandits. It’s more like they don’t understand what law is; for them it doesn’t exist,” explained Heinonen. “For example, a mariscador goes to town for a party, meets an underage girl, and brings her back with him to the marshlands. He didn’t know how old the girl was or why, afterwards, there was a legal complaint lodged against him in the town—which he now can’t go back to anymore. He doesn’t understand why they would be looking for him.”

  To better understand who and what was living on the floating islands, Heinonen offered to investigate. Saddling up, sometimes with her horse dragging a canoe, she ventured far into the swamplands. When the water got too deep, she tied up the horse and used a pole to push her wooden canoe through the reeds. For ten months she explored the hinterlands, spotting endangered marsh deer and inspecting scat to understand what species were still living in the wilds. Her mission was to survey the hermitlike encampments.

  Making contact with these remote homesteads, Heinonen came across a wide zoology of humankind. Fugitive murderers. Kidnapped women. Illicit families with children born and raised in the swamp. Sometimes she would find a solitary man whose only companions were dogs and horses. Sitting by campfires she tried to decipher the mystery of the wetlands by listening to stories of the olden days when pelts of jaguar could be sold at the local market and guns trumped government. She gained their confidence by drinking mate tea with them.

  Mate drinking is a ritual all across Argentina, Uruguay, Patagonia, and parts of Paraguay and Brazil. Dried stems and leaves of the yerba mate plant are stuffed into a cup made out of a squash gourd, then soaked in water. After adding sugar (or not) the tea-like beverage is sucked up through a thick, stainless-steel straw. The yerba mate plant is native to Corrientes, and few rituals more clearly distinguished city dweller from country folk. Moving the straw causes debris to clog it. Stirring with the straw was akin to insulting local culture and considered a colossal blunder.

  Heinonen evoked surprise and respect as she ventured into the backwaters. Unaccompanied women rarely explored these quarters. “It was a life without resources—only really old guys, or completely undocumented guys outside of the system, who didn’t speak Spanish, only Guarani,” said Heinonen. “We hired many of those guys to be park rangers and thus no more hunting. I didn’t hire them all, but I tried to hire at least one from each family.”

  These poachers-turned-protectors now roamed the marshlands in canoes and motorboats on a mission to protect the animals. Asked how he secured the trust of local field hands and mariscadores to work with an outsider, the Spanish biologist Jimenez smiled and confessed he had consumed “rivers of mate.”

  For months on end, Doug and Kris explored the dirt streets of Mercedes, Concepción, San Miguel, and the other communities that ringed the Iberá wetlands—what locals disparagingly called “our soup bowl.” Kris—who had been raised in Venezuela for several years as a child—understood Spanish and outback traditions. She gradually fell in love with this rebellious outpost.

  Doug felt comfortable in the rural milieu of Colonia Carlos Pellegrini, the small town that served as the center of his initial efforts to win over locals. Years of backpacking left him with an ability to casually wander open-air markets asking for tips about canoe routes into the swamps. Sharing a BBQ or swatting back jokes and sparring in the local lingo, he enjoyed the banter. “Doug had a great affinity for the culture. He loved people who wanted to preserve their culture. He really respected people who lived in tough circumstances,” said Kris. “They had a culture and they wanted to keep it. That was very, very strong in him.”

  Doug could sleep in a hammock or on the ground. Locals were abuzz with stories of this eccentric newcomer. He was sometimes seen sleeping in the back of a car. Stories were told that he had swum for an hour in waters teeming with caimans. Then there was his diet. He never smoked and ate little fried or deep-fried food. He rarely drank alcohol. Doug followed a Spartan tradition, mens sana in corpore sano—a sound mind in a sound body. Everyone noted his stylish outfits: white beret-style cap, boat shoes, and button-down shirts. Locals found him exotic in a dozen ways, and never boring.

  At one aristocratic Argentine wedding ceremony where he was an honored guest, he arrived early and, following his love of profile photography, began snapping portraits of the guests. Assuming the camera-crazed American snapping away was the marriage photographer, wedding guests began ordering him about. Tompkins played along. When it was time to take seats at the main table, there was a missing VIP—where was Mr. Tompkins, the wealthy American? As Doug sheepishly put aside his camera and took his seat, the guests were mortified. The man they’d been ordering about like hired help was in fact their guest of honor. Tompkins grinned, as he loved a good practical joke. Photography was also his way to hide in a crowd. Not one to chit-chat at big social events, he used his camera as a shield and subsequently became quite skilled at shooting portraits.

  As Doug barged into ideological and political battles, enjoying the chaos and uproar, Kris hired powerful local women to wage the ground campaign. “Kris is a person who always thinks of the contingencies, but Doug never did,” said Heinonen. “That gave them a kind of balance. I think Doug could rest easy a little bit, knowing that he had Kris by his side. Doug without Kris would have been like a rocket headed for the moon. Kris anchored him, and gave him order.”

  Marisi Lopez worked as a receptionist in the Iberá office until Doug and Kris realized her particular talent: she could read the local
landscape like a politician. Lopez became key in building bridges to the local political infrastructure, particularly with the senator Sergio Flinta. As Marisi took over more responsibilities, things took off. “Doug never put limits on the people he hired,” she remarked. “He liked to hire strong women and give them a lot of responsibility. He was so sure you could do more than even you imagined. He’d throw you in the deep end of the pool and tell you to swim. If you swam he’d celebrate and if you needed help he would blame himself for throwing you in.”

  Teresita Iturralde, a lawyer working for Tompkins, rallied locals as she described the synergy of rewilding Iberá’s lost species while also cultivating a tourism-based economy. Accompanied by stunning photographs, Iturralde responded to questions and inquiries that erupted in the wake of Tompkins’s bold moves.

  Tompkins pelted the business elite of Corrientes first with criticism, then with an outright challenge to their dominion over the land. Tompkins loved being the underdog and enjoyed challenging the local captains of industry to a competition on their home court. Rice barons, pine plantation owners, and cattle ranchers in and around the marshlands were accustomed to ignoring bothersome environmental laws. They considered their fiefdoms private affairs, and had no idea what was about to hit them.

  Until Tompkins began his impertinent questions and flyovers, few people protested the powerful business leaders, who entered and altered the wetlands as they wished. “Doug was the first to give us a kick in the pants and say, ‘Correntinos, look what you’ve got here,’” said senator Flinta. “I told Governor Colombi, ‘Hey, we’ve got to do something. We can’t have this gringo coming here telling us when we ourselves know what we have to do.’”

  After surveying Iberá from the air, Tompkins realized that ranchers had dredged mile after mile of illegal causeways into the wetlands, allowing cattle to walk along the embankments. As the cows grazed, they fouled the water, and the causeways interrupted the natural flow of nutrients and the migration of native species. Massive rice paddies were also being carved out, then boxed in by four walls that further strangled the ecosystem. These activities were clearly illegal. Given the importance of the Paraná River and its greater watershed to the local economy, a strict code of water-usage laws supposedly regulated any alteration of natural waterways. The laws designed to prohibit such projects, however, were rarely enforced.