When the WTO meeting began on November 30, activists shut down the city of Seattle with civil disobedience in the spirit of marches lead by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Tens of thousands of people—labor activists, students, and environmentalists—took over the streets and trapped WTO delegates in their hotel rooms. The Seattle WTO protests were raucous, largely nonviolent, and hugely effective. The activist group cofounded by Earth First! leader Mike Roselle and dubbed The Ruckus Society had achieved its goal of “a loud, angry interruption, a hullabaloo, a disruption.”
Images of American youth and workers rejecting the dictates of the WTO flew across newswires worldwide. Without a public word, Tompkins had planted one of the seeds for the uprising. “It was amazing,” reflected Mander of the Public Media Center. “We brought 100,000 people out onto the streets of Seattle, and shut down the WTO meeting. That was a fantastic event.”
Back in Patagonia, Doug and Kris were gaining international attention for their conservation plans that now branched into the newly flourishing field known as rewilding. As a conservation strategy, rewilding allows ecosystems to reassemble key flora and fauna, and begin recovery. As practiced by the Tompkins team, it also included the removal of non-native species. Following a clear-cut, there was no recipe for seeding the diversity and equilibrium that a mature forest might finally settle upon after thousands of years of evolution. Despite the government harassment, Doug and Kris now owned nearly a million acres in Chile and Argentina, and they had a huge opportunity to try out their rewilding strategies on the dozens of forests and farms they had now purchased.
Doug put his money into the idea that environmental restoration depends on a rethinking of modern agriculture. Monoculture plantings, intensive insecticide, ignorance of overall soil health, and a growing world appetite for meat made it apparent to Doug that without a farming upheaval, his plans for the wild would be doomed. In Argentina he purchased run-down ranches and began to design organic farming at a 18,000-acre riverfront farm known as Laguna Blanca. Day after day, Doug swirled in his plane above Laguna Blanca, like a painter obsessed with a blank canvas; he sketched his visions on a scale that only a pilot could imagine.
By 2000, Pumalín Park was the largest private park initiative in the world, and supported by a small group of donors who traveled to Patagonia to study the land and meet with this unique couple living off the grid. Arriving in southern Chile, the donors found that Kris and Doug were exquisite hosts. Doug lobbed controversial intellectual arguments, bandied one-liners, eviscerated mainstream attitudes, and often offended an entire room without stopping to take a sip from his decidedly nonalcoholic glass of warm water (no lemon, no tea). Kris was far more than peacekeeper. She was the secret administrator of the projects, building bridges with influential donors, smoothing the ruffled feathers, and sorting through her husband’s wild ideas.
* * *
In the morning, he says, “Come on. I want to show you what the locals call the land of a thousand waterfalls.” And he’s got a couple of planes. One of them was called a Husky. It had a canvas skin. And it’s just two seats, one right behind the pilot. It’s not an ultralight plane, but it’s small—And so we go up and we’re flying in these narrow canyons and looking at these waterfalls and Andean condors. And we didn’t feel much bigger than the condors up there. After he showed me all the beautiful waterfalls, we fly back seaward, and he says, “There’s a hot spring down there.” And he buzzed over it and I can see the piles of rocks people piled up, to have a hot spring pool to lay in. I see the tiniest little sandy beach. And I realized, Oh, Christ. He’s going to land on that. And I’m thinking, He probably could land. I mean it’s really short, but I suspect he’s done this before. He drops down and he catches the edge of the sand and lands. It must have been fairly packed sand. And we go over and strip off our clothes and jump in the hot springs for about twenty minutes. We’re talking about saving the planet and all of our campaigns. Then we get out and dry off on the rocks for another twenty minutes and throw our clothes back on and jump back in the plane. He taxies us back to one end of the runway such that the back wheels were in the water. And he’s gunning that engine to the point I’m thinking it’s going to blow up. Then he pops the clutch, so to speak, and we take off safely. Later that night, he says, “I don’t know if it’s fully legal to land in a place like that but, it was so beautiful, I just needed to take a hot bath.
—RANDY HAYES, founder, Rainforest Action Network
* * *
Doug and Kris now had a solid infrastructure on their parklands including cabins, a lodge, a visitor center, and a bevy of locals working to guide hiking expeditions and maintain the park grounds. Doug spent months walking the land to understand where to situate trailheads and where to place the campgrounds. He sculpted the hiking paths with the same attention he gave to window displays at The North Face or the curve of a font in the Esprit catalog. The few climbers and backpackers who ventured to Pumalín Park discovered a world-class natural sanctuary in its infancy. Doug like to call one hidden corner of his valley “a hidden Yosemite.”
The election of socialist Ricardo Lagos to the Chilean presidency in 2000 sent Doug and Kris’s possibilities of completing Pumalín Park soaring. Lagos was an ally beginning a six-year presidential term. The left-leaning politician had been forced into exile during the military dictatorship and worked abroad, teaching political science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He was a courageous rebel who, like Tompkins, showed unusual poise while navigating extreme risk. As a young socialist leader, Lagos was placed high on General Pinochet’s hit list. Following a failed 1986 assassination attempt on the dictator near his summer estate, secret police death squads went hunting for Lagos. When Chilean detectives got word of his whereabouts, they arrested him and, in order to protect him, placed him under heavy guard in a jail. The detectives were hoping to keep Lagos out of the feared torture chambers that many Chileans called “concentration camps.”
After Chile’s return to democracy, Lagos become the minister of public works, and jump-started the Chilean economy via a multibillion-dollar highway and bridge program. Given Chile’s dependence on the export of raw materials, including cellulose, copper, fishmeal, and fresh fruit, Lagos invested his ministry’s resources in infrastructure ranging from national cell phone coverage, modern airports, multilane highways, and container-friendly ports. Tourism, he recognized, was also going to become an important part of his country’s development. What other country could offer visits to geysers in the world’s driest desert or support cruise ships en route to Antarctica with stops at wineries and Easter Island along the way?
President Lagos provided Pumalín with legal protection, not as a park but a “nature sanctuary.” Despite intense opposition, bureaucratic sabotage, and unusual delays, Pumalín Park gained its first degree of protected status. Under Lagos, doors slowly opened for Doug and Kris at government ministries that had previously ignored them. Doug ceded to the requests of his lawyer and provided private briefings to Chamber of Commerce executives, tourism officials, and reactionary elements within the Chilean government.
At a VIP meeting at Chile’s presidential palace, Tompkins was scheduled to meet the head of the navy, and etiquette dictated he wear a tie. “Doug was really struggling with that because he was a rebel at heart,” laughed Daniel Gonzalez, his aide. “He kept saying, ‘Why on Earth do I have to wear a tie to visit with these people? I don’t wear ties!’ I remember him putting a tie on at the very last minute before going in, and as soon as we left taking that tie off.”
“Doug made a presentation about his ideas to the navy—his project of creating national parks,” recalled Pedro Pablo Gutierrez. “Afterward one of the officers apologized, saying, ‘Look, all that nonsense we heard about you? Now that we had the chance to meet you, we realize we were taken for a ride.’”
Tompkins spent much of his waking hours working on a book documenting the destruction of Chilean forests. Enti
tled The Tragedy of the Chilean Forest, it was essentially a Chilean version of his Clearcut book created years earlier. The project was the result of hundreds of hours flying above Patagonia in small airplanes. From his cockpit, Tompkins snapped thousands of photographs, then in the evening studied the remaining forests. One evening, looking at the pictures, he discovered a rare stand of old-growth coastal cypress—known as Guaiteca—in a bay called Bahia Tic Toc. With no access by land and rough seas off the coast, much of the area had never been logged, and what had been destroyed hadn’t been touched in decades; Tompkins saw that natural regeneration in these forests was well on its way. He scouted about—who owned Tic Toc?
Flying over the region again with his friend Peter Buckley, Tompkins pointed out tracts of land for sale. The vast wilderness offered majestic possibilities for conservation projects. Tompkins was talking a mile a minute and so enthused that Buckley joked it was like flying with “an overcaffeinated real estate agent.” When they zoomed over Corcovado, a volcano-shaped peak with the crystalline waters of Bahia Tic Toc below, Buckley was mesmerized. “The moment I saw this big rock, kind of like a miniature Sugar Loaf in Rio de Janeiro, and this beautiful bay and granite islands with a river coming down, I said, ‘Well, if this is available, I’ll buy it.’”
One week later, Tompkins informed Buckley that the volcano, the bay, and the surrounding forest were all for sale. The complicated part, Tompkins informed his friend, was the money transfer. They needed to buy a company in Lichtenstein, then buy a Panamanian company that owned one asset—the land in Chile. “That’s how Pinochet cronies covered up their ownership and interests in these things,” explained Buckley. The entire deal was consummated in record time, and Tompkins suddenly had a critical piece of land for building Corcovado National Park.
“When Peter Buckley agreed on plunking $1.75 million for a big chunk of wilderness and forests down here, it was as true a pure gesture as I’ve ever seen anyone make,” Tompkins wrote his friends. “He absolutely spontaneously said yes when I asked him. I was very touched, I can tell you. That was a bright spot in a bit of dismal atmosphere!”
After further studying the maps, Tompkins realized that much of the land surrounding Buckley’s purchase was owned by the Chilean Army and Navy. He’d had an inkling as his caretaker described submarines, Marine invasions, and battlefield practice that left the pristine beaches littered with copper shell casings.
Conservative elements of the Chilean government described Bahia Tic Toc as “a secret submarine base,” but Tompkins knew better. It was a remote outpost with zero strategic significance and a rich biodiversity. He focused his efforts on building a new national park. If he couldn’t overcome the hurdles at Pumalín Park, perhaps he could break the logjam with Corcovado.
* * *
I got to know him well, and saw that his breakfast consisted of hot water. I said, “Aren’t you going to put some lemon in it?” He replied, “No, just hot water.” And I thought, This guy is very weird. Hot water for breakfast? He was a man with exquisite taste, yet who dressed in ripped blue jeans. How do you pull those threads together? He ordered sophisticated furniture made in Buenos Aires and he was an aesthete to the max, but not with himself. He walked in with shoes so worn, let me tell you. I know that the more shoes are worn, the more comfortable they are, but I could never go around with those shoes. How do you reconcile it? He was a man of good taste, refined, who read a lot, was up to date with everything. He always bombarded me with the things he was reading, and I’d have to read it or he would think I was an idiot. And I am not accustomed to being taken for an idiot.
—RICARDO LAGOS, president of Chile, 2000–2006
* * *
“We maintained a good relationship when I became Chile’s president,” said Lagos. “The tipping point was one day he came to visit me and he said, ‘Mr. President, I’ve come to propose some business.’ ‘Great,’ I replied. ‘What’s the business?’ And he replied, ‘I’ve got 80,000 hectares in Corcovado, the Army has 80,000, and you have 100,000 hectares’ [‘you’ meaning the Chilean state]. ‘What do you think of us creating a park? I’ll give my 80,000, you convince the Army to give theirs, and you give the other 100,000.’ I replied, ‘Let’s do it!’”
President Lagos instinctively trusted Tompkins, and was wary of the military, given the way it had tortured and even executed some of his political colleagues in the early years of the Pinochet dictatorship. Although he never called the creation of Corcovado National Park an act of revenge, President Lagos knew that every Chilean president since the 1920s had created a national park, and he himself relished the idea of converting military land into a national park.
The joint collaboration was completed without any of the battles and hassles that shrouded nearly every move at Pumalín Park. Virtually no settlers lived in the zone, the land titles were clean, and the sheer beauty of the snowcapped Corcovado volcano made it difficult to resist. Lagos prodded and pushed. He knew exactly how to manipulate the levers of power, and he made a point of inviting Doug to sit next to him at the celebratory dinner in Puerto Montt when the park was a done deal. Tompkins, for his part, was agog. In a letter to Buckley, he described the scene:
I went for a long walk on the beach with the president and had some good conversations about many subjects but primarily on environmental protection. I began the conversations about a second national park that would be ready in his second term! He laughed about this and said, “Okay!” Maybe all this work is finally paying off and the insults to my integrity, the dirty political maneuvers, the low-class moves on the part of small-minded bureaucrats, the carping details, the agonizing delays, the huge costs, my temper getting short even with my darling wife—all could be worth it.
After Corcovado National Park was dedicated, Tompkins sent Buckley a stack of pictures highlighting President Lagos, the military ships, and the park inauguration ceremony. But he didn’t realize he had never invited Buckley. “I said, ‘Thanks a lot for inviting me,’” Buckley recalled. “He said, ‘I’m sorry, I guess I kinda screwed up.’ I said, ‘You’re not off the hook. I want a thank-you note from Richard Lagos.’ He said, ‘I can’t do that.’ I said, ‘Oh, yes, yeah you can. I’m serious, I want a note from Richard Lagos. You can call him.’” Months later Chile had its brand-new Corcovado National Park, and Buckley had his signed thank-you note from the president of Chile.
Chapter 14
In the Heart of Patagonia
Where we live in South America, we’re still on the agricultural frontier. They’re still taking down forests and converting to ploughed agriculture. You see it happening very fast. What’s happening in those habitats? They’re disappearing! Where is the space for the other creatures that are supposed to share the planet with us? Why do we have a whale sanctuary in the far South? We are trying to hold off the human project, to keep it at bay.
—DOUG TOMPKINS
Like the stray dogs so common in Chile, the Valley Chacabuco ranch was scruffy, filthy, and beaten down when Doug and Kris first visited. More than 25,000 sheep ranged the valley, eating all grass, shrubs, and even seedlings. Everything green was gone. The valley’s flowing prairie grass, the native calafate berries, winter’s bark, and wild strawberries had been eliminated. Herds of sheep—“hooved locusts,” in the words of the naturalist Edward Abbey—were fenced in by hundreds of miles of barbed wire, and the ranch employed a team of hunters, known as “lion men,” who shot, poisoned, and trapped wild puma.
In the high-mountain lakes, flocks of flamingos bathed, and at dawn, buss-necked ibis with their striking curved beaks searched for food in the grass and screeched a warning to the other animals whenever humans arrived. Tiny Austral pygmy owls sat on fence posts. Thousands of feet high in the sky, Andean condors rode the updrafts created when winds off the Patagonia ice field collided with the flanks of mountains. Patches of beech forest, small packs of wild South American camelids known as guanacos, and the string of twenty high-mountain lakes buzzing wit
h birdlife made it possible to imagine its earlier splendor, yet by 2004 “ValChac”—as the ranch was known—was hemorrhaging both money and biodiversity. “When I drove through the Chacabuco Valley for the first time, I saw the extra-high ‘guanaco fences’ designed to keep these first-rate jumpers out of the best grasslands, which were reserved for the cattle,” said Kris Tompkins. “My eyes glazed over, looking out on the tens of thousands of sheep grazing the bunch grasses up and down the valley. The grasses looked patchy and dead. Nothing left for wildlife.”
Kris imagined a grand plan to revitalize ValChac’s degraded lands. She seemed smitten by the challenge, and together with Doug they had ogled the ranch from the air, taking so many high-resolution aerial photos that when a ranch owner named Francisco De Smet accepted an invitation to their Reñihue homestead, he discovered that the couple had thoroughly mapped his ranch with their aerial photos. Like secret admirers from above, Doug and Kris imagined life with the Valley Chacabuco ranch under their care. Could they promote native flora and rewild the fauna? Yvon and Malinda Chouinard shared their passion, donating land and money, and threw their considerable influence behind the park project.
After years of wrangling, the sale was formalized in October 2004. De Smet wanted $9 million for the land and $1 million for the animals. Kris fought hard to buy the ranch without the 25,000 sheep, but to no avail, as De Smet didn’t want the animals either. Both parties knew that dumping that many sheep into the market would collapse the price, harming other sheep farmers, and there wasn’t nearly the capacity for the refrigeration or the trucking for such volume.
A Wild Idea Page 21