A Wild Idea

by Jonathan Franklin

  From his cockpit Tompkins raged at the sight. He calculated that the Iberá wetlands had perhaps ten years left. Without a structured counterattack in defense of nature, a critical mass of habitat would disappear, making any efforts to rewild the landscape futile. Tompkins took action: he hired the best lawyers in town.

  Lawsuits in Corrientes? To defend nature? Nobody did that. Land disputes were settled with beer, bullets, or bullying. “I told him that in Argentina, we go to the press, or we launch demonstrations, but we don’t believe in the justice system. That could take ten years, and nobody pays any attention; the judges change and they’re all corrupt,” said Heinonen. “He said, ‘I don’t care, we’re going to sue them all!’ I hired three lawyers and we began fifty-four lawsuits, against all the neighbors, and against the state. We set off a storm!”

  In court, Tompkins won round after round. In a memo to his staff, he described “the mismanagement and stupidity” of a Señor Maciavelo, the owner of Forestal Andina, who attempted to defy court rulings that his eight-mile-long dike into the wetlands was illegal. When the courts ordered Maciavelo to destroy his dike, Tompkins celebrated. “For the first time in history,” he declared, “citizens have risen up against this Far West Do-What-You-Like attitude and taken Sr. Maciavelo to court and won every single legal case. One-two-three-four in a row! The law is clear and Mr. Maciavelo has been given seventy-two hours to begin dismantling the dike and restoring the damage or go to jail. This is a positive sign that the justice system can work in Argentina, despite the millions of complaints we hear from rank-and-file citizens.”

  Flying continually over the illegal embankments, Tompkins photographed every truck, every work crew, and told anyone close enough to listen that he was going to kick the developers out of this natural paradise. From now on, he declared, the future of Iberá was going to be as a sanctuary for wild animals. Local workers, who had long been disenfranchised and lived on the brink of poverty, pricked up their ears. No Argentine millionaire was going to bat for nature or challenging the elite. So where was this yanqui headed?

  With the promise of an environmental revolution and the pile of more than fifty lawsuits against the area’s business elite, Tompkins was already on shaky ground when a surprise visitor arrived in Iberá—the Chilean president. “Eduardo Frei arrived, talking badly about Doug,” said senator Flinta. “Frei came to Corrientes; he met with our governor. I was in the meeting, heard it myself. Frei said Doug would try to take all the water, and that they had cut Chile in two. Frei told people that Doug was a devil.”

  Chapter 13

  Pumalín Park

  Doug’s enemies really wanted to kill him! They controlled the press. They had all these crazy, insane stories about what he was doing that were just floating around. We would go way up into these fjords on these beautiful hikes. We’d have lunches and he would just crash, in the middle of the day, which was unusual for him. He had the whole weight of the world on his shoulders. They were trying to make him pay. They were doing any dirty tricks that they could possibly do to get this guy out, and he was so tough that they couldn’t get him out, but I could tell—they’d seriously zapped him.

  —DAN IMHOFF, Doug’s son-in-law and fellow environmental activist

  By the fall of 1997, Tompkins had more Chilean enemies than he could count. The onslaught, led by President Eduardo Frei, included Catholic bishops, Navy admirals, and a conservative press empire known as El Mercurio, which was owned by Augustin Edwards, a powerful ally of General Pinochet. After five years of ongoing battles to build Pumalín Park, Tompkins felt surrounded. Half his waking hours were spent in defensive actions, slowing progress to create the park.

  After months of repairs and rebuilding the municipal ferry docks, Tompkins presented the community of Caleta Gonzalo—population: several hundred sea lions and fewer humans—with a new, properly graded boat ramp. The small ferry crossing included safety lighting, landscaping, and, as a courtesy to local customs, a flagpole.

  After the Chilean flag was raised in a humble ceremony, the local mayor—a former political operative with a decade’s experience in the brutal El Salvador civil war, a politician named José Miguel Fritis—struck back. Fritis forbade Tompkins from flying the Chilean flag. He accused the gringo of infringing national sovereignty. The battle became personal. Tompkins bought land that Fritis lost at auction. Fritis became the eyes and ears of the federal government in a campaign to watch Doug’s every move. When he adopted a new dog, he mockingly named it “Doug.”

  To better surveil Tompkins, the Chilean Navy built a new office astride the boat ramp. President Frei even approved construction of a police station in Vodudahue, population: less than 100. Tompkins joked that the remote police building should be named in his honor, and instead of fighting the measure he offered to donate the lands needed to house the remote outpost.

  “One thing you have to highlight is that Chile has a rule of law, because in Brazil, for something like this, they shoot you. In Peru, they shoot you. He wasn’t shot, because this is Chile, but they really hated the guy,” said Juan Pablo Orrego, a Chilean environmentalist who worked closely with Tompkins. “Plus, he was intelligent, a millionaire, and a good businessman. They should have respected a guy like that, even admired him. They hated his guts. He was a person like them, but on the other side of the road. He funded the birth of the environmental activism movement in Chile. So this guy was an enemy.”

  President Frei ratcheted up the pressure against Tompkins. He ordered tax authorities to double down, to scrutinize every paper Tompkins or his organizations had ever signed. “Find something!” the tax officials were told. President Frei’s obsession to unearth ulterior motives and discover Doug’s sordid secrets ran into a brick wall for the most obvious of reasons: there was no master plan. Yes, Tompkins purchased large chunks of forest in Patagonia, and when he saw a piece of land he liked, he bought it. Sometimes he spent millions fixing it up. Sometimes he sold it later. His top aides knew he was improvising, and capable of more work in a week than most humans could pack into a month.

  Despite outward gestures of calm, Tompkins was seething. He hated living under the microscope, especially when he was so certain he was right. He found solace in the sky. In the cockpit of his airplane, Doug soared above Mount San Valentin, Patagonia’s highest peak. “He left his mundane thoughts behind and concentrated on flying and the beauty of what he was looking at,” recalled a fellow pilot, Rodrigo Noriega. “That mellowed him. He would go for a spin and look around. . . . Part of his masterminding was that he could fly and see things from above. He wouldn’t have had that total vision if he had been a flatlander.”

  When he needed to assess the potential of new lands, Doug circled over them for hours or skimmed the skin of the Earth barely twenty feet above the tree line as he followed hillside contours, the slope of a river, or the depth of a valley. Based on the view from the air, Doug would come up with an architectural masterplan, explained architect Rojas. “Even if the plan wasn’t on paper, he would get it clear in his head.”

  Rojas spent entire afternoons flying with Tompkins as they designed buildings, hiking trails, airstrips, and organic greenhouses for the burgeoning infrastructure their park projects required. “When you’re building in these rural, remote places, you don’t have neighbors, or streets, or zoning laws, or building codes,” said Rojas. “But in these places, you have other laws, which are natural laws: the views, the slopes, forests that could protect you from the weather. Doug figured these out from an aerial perspective.”

  At Reñihue, Doug and Kris designed an organic greenhouse and built a schoolhouse where teachers educated several dozen students in a classroom heated by wood stove and lit with candles. They even launched a beekeeping project that produced every month thousands of pounds of organic honey.

  Realizing that a stable workforce came in the form of a family, Kris and Doug recruited local couples. For families with small children, the attraction was irresistible: quali
ty schooling, purposeful work, and a boss who paid on time. Like his policies at Esprit, Doug didn’t offer the highest wages, but the benefits were excellent. Health insurance, retirement funds, and paid vacations were all respected. Workers facing a medical emergency could count on Tompkins to fire up the Husky and fly them through storms to reach a hospital. When a father needed to witness the birth of his child, Tompkins would fly him there.

  Tompkins invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into the local economy. He hired metalsmiths and stonemasons to build the administration building and lodge at the entrance to Pumalín Park. Woodworkers carved signage and carpenters crafted furniture. “It was a beautiful process, because it gave dignity to the artisans’ work, and when it was finished the people were proud of their work and liked to show it to others,” said Francisco Morandé, a young architect working with Doug on the growing collection of farms and park-related buildings.

  Tompkins was a stickler for the smallest details. Inside his park signage had to be pleasing and elegant. When painting buildings in Pumalín, he was so fussy about the colors that the local hardware store added a new shade of green to their inventory. It was just easier to set the color, rather than color correcting over and over again until it was just so. They called it “Tompkins Green.”

  For the placemats at his dining room table he commissioned handsewn creations from local weavers. Local metalworkers hammered out the copper-plated exhaust hood for the kitchen. Milk pitchers and flower pots were purchased in Quinchamali, a Chilean village known for pottery. With no electricity on site, local craftsman used hand drills, post-and-beam techniques, plus oxen to accomplish tasks usually powered by electric drills, cranes, and backhoes. They built with little hand axes and handsaws. That’s what they knew how to do, and they did it incredibly well. Tompkins was fascinated by their skill; he loved how the artisans could make anything by hand.

  In showcasing a touch of local beauty, Tompkins also provided a spark to keep these crafts alive. He even created a series of posters celebrating the backhoe operators as artists. “How do you make the guy who’s driving the tractor feel like his work is valuable and adds up to something and is a creative and important act? It’s getting that guy to see that the way he drove the tractor was part of this bigger project,” said Nadine Lehner, an aide to Doug and Kris Tompkins. “Doug was often working elbow-to-elbow with the people doing very ground-level work on these projects. It made people feel like their work was visible and valuable.”

  On a scale matched by few foreigners in the region, Doug and Kris invested in frontier culture. Doug donated money to a church radio station, and convinced Monsignor Juan Luis Ysern to broadcast a daily show promoting environmental conservation themes. Behind the scenes, Doug and Kris bought soccer equipment for the local team and an accordion for the town band made up of firefighters. “He went to meet the people, to see how they lived, who they were,” said Ingrid Espinoza, a forestry engineer whom Doug had hired. “One time I prepared everything for a visit to a property he wanted to buy. It was a ranch house, very simple, but the owners had prepared a barbecue with baked lamb and potatoes and were all ready to sit down with Douglas and talk business. It was so pleasant; Doug didn’t feel uncomfortable. He was never in a hurry, in that sense, despite his being very accelerated normally. He took all the time in the world. He ate the lamb, the potatoes, he drank the mate, and I never saw him remove the straw from the mate. Never!”

  Despite the burgeoning relationship with neighbors and support from Chile’s nascent environmental activist movement, Doug’s allies in government were few. Audits by tax authorities continued unabated. But he held a trump card: he knew the Chilean government craved to be the first South American country to sign a Free Trade Agreement with the United States. If they pulled it off, billion-dollar investments would arrive. Few questioned that the money would fund environmentally destructive projects including copper mines, timber clear-cuts, and sulphur dioxide–spewing aluminum smelters. The Chileans were begging for a free trade agreement with the United States.

  Tompkins had both Prince Charles and Ted Turner on speed dial, and knew how to play politics at that level. At Esprit he’d spent two years negotiating trade treaties with Chinese officials, so he knew the Chileans were not willing to derail a high-profile investor from California. Tompkins saw through their bluff. He was certain that the Chileans were not going to risk the fallout seizing his investments would cause just as they were soliciting billion-dollar commitments from the captains of US financial markets.

  After years of public feuding, in 1998, Tompkins signed a cease-fire agreement with the Chilean government. In order to gain peace, Tompkins promised to avoid buying any more lands for twelve months. “The agreement we signed is a protocol, not a binding document. It makes the government comfortable, and helps push this project along,” Doug wrote in a letter to staff. “It’s a step in the right direction. I’d say another eight years of serious work lie ahead. We used to spend half our time fending off attacks of all kinds—tricks, threats, and criticism. Now, we can concentrate ninety-eight percent of our time working on the park. We achieved a little blow for the environment. A drop in the bucket. But it’s going to take lots of drops in that bucket from a lot of people to become a corrective force looking after our world.”

  Hardline advisers to President Frei sought to muzzle Tompkins and wanted the cease-fire to include prohibitions on Tompkins’s taking any actions or making statements against the US-Chilean Free Trade Agreement—and to avoid criticizing the president. The attempts to muzzle the renegade American via legal accord tanked. Working with Chilean activists Carlos Cuevas and Patricio Rodrigo, Tompkins was learning to build bridges into the government bureaucracy, particularly with Ricardo Lagos, the public works minister and a man on the short list to become the next president of Chile. Cuevas and Rodrigo were passionate activists and each had worked inside the public lands ministry. Tompkins valued their insider POV and considered them key allies.

  Powerful forces at the US embassy, including Ambassador John O’Leary, publicly hosted Tompkins at the embassy and made a point of flying south to attend the annual folk festival sponsored by Kris and Doug. Along with some 300 guests who attended the festive, buffet-style event, Ambassador O’Leary wandered the tidy pastures, feasted on homemade apple pie, and admired the stunning attention to detail throughout the parklands. Whether it was a small bridge or a creek or the black-and-white photographs decorating the lodge, the entire project radiated beauty.

  Doug was advancing on his park plans and now had seven families living full time on his ranch. “We had thirty projects going and we worked together all day, dined together at night,” said Morandé. “We designed everything from the lodges and restaurants to the doghouse.”

  Although he was half a world away, Tompkins kept close tabs on his foundation back in San Francisco. He remained committed to funding a worldwide network of environmental activists. His grantmaking, run through the Foundation for Deep Ecology, continued to donate $3 million a year. Tompkins loved to fund the underdogs. Many of the grants went to small, tightly focused groups like those that sought to block road building inside national forests and those that fought to protect beluga whales in the Arctic. These small startup funds allowed dozens of environmental activist communities to build their organizations, pay the rent, organize seminars, and publish books. He also funded million-dollar newspaper ad campaigns, including an uprising he stoked against the World Trade Organization.

  Throughout the late 1990s, as he built his pioneer village at the tip of South America, Tompkins commuted regularly to San Francisco. He chaired board meetings at his foundation, visited friends, and helped strengthen the International Forum on Globalization, a think tank run by his friend Jerry Mander. Tompkins fought for citizens and the environment as he sought to unmask what he saw as the hidden hand of global capitalism. Specifically, he sought to warn of the rising power of global corporations. Together with a team from the Publ
ic Media Center and Andy Kimbrell from the International Forum on Globalization office in San Francisco, they designed a series of full-page advertisements for what they called “The Turning Point Project.”

  The $60,000 full-page advertisements ran in the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and challenged the power of corporations that avoided taxes or sought out the weakest link in environmental protection agreements. These corporations—often publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange—held loyalty to no nation and behaved as if the planet was their oyster. Tompkins and Mander put a name on the enemy: The Invisible Government.

  In 1999, the World Trade Organization’s annual gathering was scheduled for early December in Seattle. In the weeks leading up to the WTO meetings, Tompkins ran a series of Turning Point ads in San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle newspapers. He bankrolled the IFG’s massive teach-ins that gathered some 3,000 antiglobalization activists each day for strategy sessions. Tompkins put up the cash to rent Benaroya Hall, home to the Seattle Symphony and a building with the finest acoustics in town. He paid for everything from guests’ airfare to the rented microphones. Day after day, this critical mass of impassioned activists became ever more fired up as they shared stories. “All these activists from around the world were involved,” recalled Mander. “It was a gigantic, noisy success. It got press attention, and then people poured onto the streets after that. Seattle got really turned on against the WTO.”