180° South

Five hydroelectric dams are planned for construction along the Baker and Pascua rivers in southern Chile. Most of the local residents oppose the dams because their livelihoods depend on free-flowing rivers. Up in arms, gaucho Erasmo Betancore set out on horseback for a four-day ride to protest at the capital. Word got out as he passed the small ranches and farms along the way. Within two days more than 200 riders had joined him; by the time they reached the capital that number had grown to more than 300. Photo: Frame-grab from the film 180° South

Doug Tompkins: If you look around the world in the last hundred years at who launched the ideas taken up by others, John Muir was definitely a major figure. He was an outdoor person who loved nature for nature’s sake. He didn’t see the world in terms of utilitarian productivity – a more-or-less Western worldview, which sees nature as a basket of resources, a cornucopia to benefit the human economy.

Of course, the human economy does use resources, but Muir saw the value of nature in itself; that there is intrinsic worth to not just the mountains, or a species, but for nature in its entirety. His philosophical perspective informed generations that came after him and, in many ways, he is the father of the American conservation movement.

Once you go along with the concept of nature having intrinsic value, you take different strategies to create policy change. Muir also was a kindred spirit to the relatively small circle of people in our generation who loved the outdoors. Certainly, I was influenced by Muir and his writings. He was seminal to conservationists and activists like Dave Foreman and David Brower.

Yvon Chouinard: Muir influenced us a lot, Muir and the naturalist American philosophers, Emerson and Thoreau.

My climbing heroes were all Europeans – all the north-wall climbers in the Alps. The Europeans had a manifest-destiny philosophy as far as climbing goes. They were conquering the mountains – they’d do a new route and leave all the pitons in place to make it easier for mankind to follow.

Our attitude was to do these climbs and leave no trace. That got me into the business of hammering out pitons, a better piton – made of steel rather than iron – that could be used over and over again instead of just once. Reusable pitons allowed us to do these big walls on El Capitan.

But for every technology there is an unintended consequence. So many climbers putting in these pitons and taking them out started to scar the rock on the popular routes. And I thought, I’ve created this technology that is actually ruining the thing I love. So we got away from using pitons and into using these little chocks you could jam in with your fingers and slip out without using a hammer. That was a good lesson. It taught me that you’ve really got to lead an examined life. You’ve got to be careful adopting any new technology because you never know what the unintended consequences of that technology are going to be.

Doug: Of course the promoters of the new technology never tell you about that. I remember talking to Steve Jobs about personal computers ruining the world. For him the benefits are unarguable – and it is pretty hard to argue against some of the benefits computers provide. The trouble is that computers have an overwhelmingly negative influence. They accelerate economic activity and the transfer of nature to the realm of production. That means less biomass in the ocean, less forest cover, more soil erosion, more contaminated water, and the building up of what’s called a phantom carrying capacity.

This is not the sort of thing Apple wants to advertise – it’s against their self-interest. It takes a very special businessperson to say we are making something that is good for our business, but bad for the world. Every once in a while someone does something like change from pitons to chocks, but that’s rare. Mostly technology just keeps marching forward, and the world just gets poorer and poorer for it.

Yvon: Modern man thinks we can do without nature, or we’re better than nature. We can manipulate it in our own way. We don’t need free-flowing rivers to have salmon: we can farm them. But Muir and these other philosophers said that we are part of nature, that we can’t divorce ourselves from it.

We are going through the sixth mass extinction of species around the world – and we are a species. Somehow we think we’re not going to be part of that extinction. But in fact, as one of the big mammals, we’ll probably go first. The key to any kind of so-called sustainability is to take care of nature, to work with nature. To think we’re better than nature – and can come up with something to isolate us from the laws of nature – is ridiculous.

Doug: Indigenous cultures all over the world have a cosmological vision. They believed that we were part of a great system. That great system is what modern society calls ecology. Everything is connected with everything else. As long as we base our economy on the technological worldview, not the ecological worldview, we are going to continue to take society – global society – into the abyss.

Jeff Johnson on his drive to Valle Chacabuco passes one of the many “¡Sin Represas!” (Without Dams) banners. Photo: Frame-grab from the film 180° South

More than 300 riders make the journey to the capital to protest against the dams along the Baker and Pascua rivers. Patagonia, Chile. Photo: Frame-grab from the film 180° South

Following spread: Valle Chacabuco, Chile. Photo: Scott Soens