A Wild Idea

by Jonathan Franklin

  —CLARA LAZCANO, mayor of Chaiten, a town near Pumalín Park

  The death of Doug forced Kris to work triple time. Although his environmental restoration projects lived on, Doug’s sudden death left innumerable unfinished projects yet finite financing possibilities. Which ones were crucial to complete his life’s work? Kris divested from Moritz Eis, the ice cream company, and sold to Nicolas Ibanez what was suddenly a hot property, a Doug Tompkins original. The timing was crucial, just as money was desperately needed. Kris also sold Doug’s beloved Laguna Blanca, the gorgeous organic farm in Argentina with its curved swaths of golds and yellows. Kris also cashed in the political goodwill that had arrived in sympathy and regrets as Doug’s death catapulted the mega-donation plans forward. They were outlining a five-year plan to transfer all the parklands to public ownership.

  Visitors to Patagonia Park and Pumalín Park arrived first by the hundreds, and later the thousands. They marveled at the aesthetics of these remote lands. Free-flowing rivers sliced through valleys teeming with freshly sprouting grasslands. Backpackers and campers arrived from Brazil, Germany, England, and dozens of other countries. Puma and guanaco populations were soaring. Former poachers, hunters, and ex-loggers guided backpackers and GORE-TEX-clad tourists along nature trails that, like the Esprit showrooms of the 1980s, were designed down to the last detail.

  Campgrounds featured hot showers fueled by solar panels, communal picnic huts, open fields for enjoying starry nights, and groves of trees to shelter tents from driving rain. The beveled rubbish bins matched the construction style of the visitors center and lodge. “He must have done fourteen versions of that garbage can,” laughed Tom Butler, the writer and environmental historian. “It might just be the world’s most beautiful trash can.”

  Kris and her team understood that once they relinquished administration, the standards of maintenance and construction inside their insanely beautiful parks would undoubtedly slip. The national park service was not going to paint the docks at Iberá “Tompkins Green” or maintain the solar paneled showers at the Pumalín campsites. But Chilean conservation officials, including Environment Minister Pablo Badenier, accepted the conditions required to inherit Doug Tompkins’s collection of parks, lodges, campsites, and trails.

  Badenier felt certain that the donation was so historic that he could find larger budgets to administer the new parks. Yet even as the Council of Ministers moved to accept the parklands, letters to the editor in Chilean newspapers and comments on social media pleaded for the deal not to go through. Citizens wrote messages warning Kris, “Don’t donate the lands to the government! They’ll ruin it!” Kris compared the process of donating the parklands to sending a teenager off to college. “You just have to let go. It’s not yours anymore,” she said. “Doug was always very clear that despite all their faults there are no better institutions for long-term conservation than national parks.”

  Gifting the parks was just one piece of the puzzle. Kris and finance manager Debbie Ryker needed to find a long-term economic model that would allow the parks to become self-financing. Could the concept of “the production of nature” become a catalyst for economic development? Could they repeat the success of Iberá throughout Patagonia? Kris bet her chips on Doug’s idea to brand all seventeen parks as the Route of Parks.

  Kris knew that few destinations on Earth offered travelers such variety of forests, ice fields, lakes, undeveloped beaches, ancient glaciers, and wild, untouched beauty. In Doug’s vision each individual park became part of a larger, more meaningful, more valuable whole. From an economic development point of view, the Route of Parks was a stunning multiplier. Communities along the route attending to the first trickle of tourists were encouraged by the flow of dollars. Under the Route of Parks concept, a tourist at one end was not competition but rather a potential visitor to each park.

  Chilean politicians were finally recognizing the potential for Patagonia to be an example of a conservation-based economy. Instead of gold mines or aluminum smelters, Doug’s concept and what he outlined as “the other economy” based on “the production of nature” had won a share of mind in Chile’s economic and political elite, which he knew consisted of no more than a few hundred power brokers. “Things that Doug did twenty-five years ago, taking on climate change and species extinction—it seemed subversive in those days. Unfortunately, those are now things that we’re talking about all the time,” said Mladinic. “He was a counterculture figure, but values and culture have changed. What used to be strange and subversive is now common knowledge and common sense.”

  Despite his death, many of Doug’s most ambitious ideas lived on. His commitment to bringing the jaguar back to Iberá wetlands was slowly notching milestones. In March 2017 a male jaguar named Chiqui was shipped from Paraguay to the jaguar center in Iberá. Soon thereafter, Tania, a three-legged female jaguar, survivor of zoos and circus, also arrived. A mating program commenced and little more than a year later, while traveling in Kenya, Kris received a video of what “looked like two little pieces of tar.”

  Initially, she didn’t understand. Why had her staff sent her a video of melted rubber? Then she realized the “tar balls” were moving—ever so slightly. They were two baby jaguars, only a few hours old. “I just went berserk, because then I saw a tongue, a tail. And, oh my God!—it was extremely powerful for all of us. These things become like B12 shots to your bum.” As the jaguar cubs grew, Kris couldn’t stop watching the videos, and giggled about too much “jaguar porn.”

  Using Valley Chacabuco as her HQ, Kris ping-ponged between lectures in New York City, tours of national parks in Tanzania, and visits to far-flung national park projects in South America. In a moment of escape from her hectic schedule, she went hiking with Sofia Heinonen, the master-planner with Doug of their Iberá park. Camping in a rugged northern corner of Argentina jungle named “Impenetrable Park,” Kris came to a realization. She was not just making national parks. Her fight was to return the wild—the wild grasses, the wild jaguar, and her own wild identity. “You have to rewild yourself,” she said. “You have to recognize how far from ‘wild’ you personally have become. Because you can’t get into this mindset unless you realize the distance that you’ve come away from wildness. I talk about rewilding the human mind.”

  Her passion for conservation intensified after the Corrientes province approved ceding some provincial lands it held to the nation of Argentina, thus forming Iberá National Park in addition to the provincial park. While the ink was still wet on that agreement, she vowed to double down on the reintroduction of lost or nearly extinct species on bringing back wildlife. How had she not seen it earlier? Hiking and brainstorming with Heinonen, they vowed to change the name of the Tompkins foundation’s Argentine affiliate. Conservation Land Trust would now be known as Rewilding Argentina.

  Given earlier success reintroducing the giant anteaters, the pampas deer, the collared peccary, and the red-and-green macaw, the jaguar births cemented her faith that Iberá could be restored. So Kris budgeted millions of dollars for her rewilding commitment then stepped up her worldwide travels, giving speeches to raise the money to restore the lost animals to Iberá. Seven jaguars were now living in the wetlands, all in huge pens. And the apex predator had powerful allies fighting to recoup space, first in the culture and then in the grasslands. The jaguars were set to be released within several years, and would be free to roam the marshlands and—thanks to more than a decade of education and much patience—many Correntinos were now passionately rooting for the wild cat.

  In January 2018, Kris Tompkins received the final approval from the Chilean government for her “all or nothing” offer of a mega-donation. “It was tense, high stakes poker,” said one colleague. The Bachelet government accepted the terms of a historic environmental conservation agreement which created five national parks and in total added ten million acres of new national parklands. A ceremony was arranged on the grounds of Pumalín Park.

  On the morning of the official tr
ansition, as several hundred guests gathered for the formal handover of the parks, the deal was still not sealed. Kris and Carolina held firm. “All the areas are included or the deal’s off,” they declared. Chilean president Michelle Bachelet was set to arrive by helicopter within the hour. The press and dignitaries were already assembled, yet her team was sorting a flurry of logistical details. The negotiations had not been sealed—a last-minute debate erupted among her staff about missing terms in the documents. They rushed to prepare and print the final agreements. As Kris finished breakfast with the Tompkins Conservation board members, Hernan Mladinic rushed in with news. “The figures are off!” he declared. “We just found another 143,000 acres”—then, smiling, he added, “rounding error.”

  Taking the outdoor podium before a crowd of fellow activists, political allies, and a who’s-who of the Chilean government, Kris stumbled over her words. She was nervous and took her hands off the papers, then a breeze scattered her speech across the lawn. Gathering her breath and her notes, Kris looked up: an eagle circled above the ceremony. Kris was struck—she was positive it was Doug soaring above them for an aerial view of the historic proceedings. It was surely a scene he had envisioned many times in the twenty-five years since he had launched his bold conservation plans when, on a whim, he bought the original Reñihue farm.

  As media headlines worldwide touted Chile’s new national parks as a historic conservation victory, many environmental activists who had battled and chafed with Doug over the years saluted his achievements. Mark Tercek, the CEO of The Nature Conservancy, celebrated his accomplishments. Tercek held terrible memories of his personal interactions with Doug. They had argued and clashed. Doug thought TNC was far too accommodating, too willing to compromise. Leaders of TNC, a hugely successful conservation alliance, viewed Doug as a lone kamikaze pilot willing to crash and burn rather than change course to face reality. But when Chile’s new parks were announced, they had no doubt that Doug’s wildly optimistic park plans had come about in large part because of what Tercek admiringly characterized as his “single-minded vision, huge determination, indifference to critics, doing it his way.” Said Tercek, “I think for conservation to happen at any kind of scale in this complicated modern world, you need some kind of extremist.”

  “He is in the category of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Henry Ford,” said William Ginn, the former executive vice president at The Nature Conservancy. “I have personally spent some $3 billion and saved maybe three million acres over the past twenty-two years. He was far more effective.”

  Following the park handover ceremony, the Chilean government ordered that official maps of the country now include the five new national parks. And in a posthumous recognition of all that Doug had done for the nation, they officially designated his first park as “Pumalín Douglas Tompkins National Park.” Doug would likely have chafed at the self-promotion, but after raining criticism and doubts on the motivations of his bold ideas, the government was belatedly celebrating his defense of nature.

  Throughout his life Doug Tompkins surrounded himself with breathtaking art, including paintings, quilts, and architectural masterpieces—be they showrooms or campgrounds. Yet it is this strengthening of seventeen national parks including forests, glaciers, and lakes that is most enduring. The Route of Parks stretches for hundreds of miles down the narrowing tail of South America, a dash of wild so extensive that just as astronauts can make out the Great Wall of China they can also note this swash of green—Tompkins Green.

  A year after the creation of the new national parks, a video surfaced from Patagonia National Park. In the foreground, wind whips the grasslands behind Doug’s tombstone. The footage is shaky and ill-framed, clearly a handheld cell phone video. Then a figure emerges from the golden hues. A mountain lion strolls along the hillside. The camera pans a few feet and stops on a second puma. Then there is more movement—a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, and then a seventh puma gather. The mountain lions laze on the hill, just above Doug’s tombstone. Two puma then climb up on the cornerstone pillar of the graveyard. Gazing out like sentinels, the pumas survey the landscape. Kris watched the video over and over. Had the pumas come down from the mountains to visit Doug?

  Then a remarkable event occurred in Argentina with the jaguar. After a decade of hard work, the Tompkins conservation team in Iberá completed what was essentially Mission Impossible. Despite the hurdles, they had raised a litter of jaguar cubs with such minimal human contact that they were essentially wild. During one of just two interactions with humans, one cub viciously scratched at the vaccination team trying to administer a dose. The jaguar cub was clearly savage and this pleased Kris to no end.

  As the world prepared to go into COVID-19 lockdown, two jaguar cubs and their mother were released on San Alonso island in the heart of Iberá. Another litter was set to follow, providing hope that a baseline jaguar population could be established. “For us, it is incredible . . . seeing these animals leaving the pen in the video and leaving their footprints in the middle of the Iberá wetlands,” said Sebastian di Martino, the biologist. “We’ve had the opportunity to spot them twice already, free in the park.”

  After nearly a hundred-year absence, the magic of wild jaguars in Iberá returned. For dozens of conservation activists it was the culmination of eight years of bureaucratic battles, scientific investigations, and an intense cultural campaign to clear the trails for the return of the revered yaguarete. Magalí Longo, a biologist who worked on the jaguar rewilding program with Tompkins Conservation, defined the breeding and release program as essential restoration. “We’re fixing the damage,” she said. “And it feels great to start seeing results. We’re working to make our jobs extinct, but that’s a good thing.”

  Despite the joy at the creation of the parks, to those who knew Doug Tompkins it was clear he would never have celebrated. Yes, the preservation of millions of acres provided refuge for animals, and, yes, the jaguar and puma were reclaiming their habitat. The enthusiasm of rural communities to tie their economic future to the defense of nature was also a valuable victory. But Doug always knew he was losing the greater struggle. A human population topping seven billion, fueled by a carbon-charged lifestyle, meant that his parks remained biological islands. As the greater storm raged, as forests burned and species fell extinct, a broader revolution was needed.

  Doug Tompkins never felt there was any other choice but to play a part in the solution. He’d been warning of the dangers of technology and globalization since the early ’80s, when he argued with friend and neighbor Steve Jobs. He’d been lecturing politicians, friends, and business leaders for decades. But he always expected leadership to come from below, from the street, from the people. Always the rebel and a strong believer in action rather than proclamations, Tompkins left a legacy not only in the millions of acres he saved but also the thousands of people he influenced.

  In countless ways Doug Tompkins has already seeded his next revolution. Emerging environmentally sound businesses—often run by his former employees—are now sprouting up across Patagonia. Nadine Lehner, his assistant for years, is now leading wilderness treks with her company Chulengo Expeditions. Thomas Kimber, his energetic twenty-something neighbor in Puerto Varas, found a way to convert recycled beach plastics into Karün, a collection of sustainably manufactured sunglasses sold in France and sponsored by National Geographic. Francisco and Javier, farmers who worked with Doug, are now promoting organic farming via Huerto Cuatro Estaciones, their innovative business that brings fresh produce to locals all year round. “Across Chile, ideas that Doug planted are sprouting and gaining momentum,” said Nadine. “Now, even a long way down the road, I see a lot of this around me. In Patagonia all the young people who worked with him have now started their own independent ‘earth-positive’ projects.”

  Doug Tompkins never flinched from his conviction that, in the words of Ed Abbey, “sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.” To the young activists he met while battling to stop the Jap
anese whale hunt, Tompkins had posed a challenge: “Are you ready to do your part? Everyone is capable of taking up their position to use their energy, political influence, financial or other resources, and talents of all kinds to be part of a global movement for ecological and cultural health. All will be useful. There is important and meaningful work to be done. To change everything, everyone is needed. All are welcome.”

  Author’s Note

  On Tompkins’s Voice

  Throughout this book the quotations from Doug Tompkins include a wide variety of sources, including my own recorded interviews with Doug, his interviews with fellow journalists, radio shows, TV documentaries, letters, emails, and impossibly faded fax proclamations that his staff labeled “Ramblings from the Southern Listening Post.” Personal journals kept by close friends Chris Jones, Rick Ridgeway, and Dick Dorworth were extremely useful in capturing details of key scenes.

  On Translations from Spanish

  For much of the last two decades of his life, Doug Tompkins lived in South America, and when conversations took place in Spanish, every effort was made to maintain the spirit—not the literal translation—of the phrases. Given the heavy use of slang in rural Chile and Argentina, the quotations and sayings have been translated to maintain their humor and wry double meanings wherever possible, but no doubt quite a bit is lost in translation when one is recounting the tales of an Argentine alligator hunter or a calloused Chilean cowboy.

  List of Interviews

  A special thanks to the dozens of people who took the time to recount their experiences with Doug Tompkins. This is clearly a partial list—there were many more who helped. Apologies to those names inadvertently left out. Notebooks were lost. Conversations blended together.

  LORENZO ALVAREZ-ROOS. River guide and expedition leader who was kayaking with Doug on the day of the accident.