WE ARE THE FIRST generation in 100,000 generations of human evolution to have our lives shaped—not by nature—but by an electronic mass media environment of our own making.
LIKE CAGED ANIMALS we have lost our bearings. Our attention spans are flickering near zero, our imaginations are giving out, and we are unable to remember the past.
—SIGN HUNG BY DOUG TOMPKINS IN THE NEWLY OPENED FRONT OFFICE OF HIS PRIVATE PUMALIN PARK IN CHILE
Kris McDivitt found her dream job in high school. And though it took twenty years, that job eventually brought her to Reñihue Fjord, to the conservation project of a lifetime, and to Doug Tompkins.
A California girl, Kris grew up on her grandfather’s ranch south of Santa Barbara. But the family had a beach house in Ventura, too, which is where she met a mountain-climbing surfer—Yvon Chouinard, who lived next door. He gave Kris summer jobs at his climbing equipment company, and when she was done with ski racing and college in Idaho, he hired her full-time.
That was in 1972. She grew up with the Chouinards, saw the birth of the Patagonia company when it had just her and four others on the staff, worked feverishly to make it succeed. And she took pride in the strong environmental commitment that has made Patagonia such a standout among American businesses, dating all the way back to her first full year on the job, when the company gave up scarce space in its cramped offices to a young activist working—successfully, it turned out—to restore the polluted Ventura River and bring back the steelhead trout that spawned there. That commitment continued with the costly decision to use only organic, sustainable cotton in Patagonia clothes, and with the company’s decision to donate 1 percent of its sales every year to environmental causes—and to champion a similar program, One Percent for the Planet, for businesses nationwide.
Kris is athletic and graceful, bluntly outspoken when necessary, but warm and diplomatic by nature, with a fondness for quirky, colloquial phrases. (When something is odd or unreliable, in Kris-speak it’s “funky monkey.”) She was the natural choice in 1988 when Patagonia needed a new CEO, the high school part-timer rising to the top, coolly competent, trusted like family, and always ready to make sure the wheels stayed on when Chouinard went off on one of his trips with Doug Tompkins. By the time she hit her twentieth year at Patagonia, it seemed she was the only staff member who had not traveled to the company’s namesake region in South America. In 1991, the Chouinards insisted she finally accompany them on a trip down to southern Argentine Patagonia. She was newly divorced, ready for something new, and she agreed to come.
The visit proved to be a life-changer. It wasn’t the forest that drew her, as it had Tompkins. It was the grasslands of Argentina, the vast sea of browns and greens, wind moving through it like the waves that lapped the Pacific beaches of her youth, the air crisp, the snowcapped Andes towering over everything, distant but commanding. She had been riding on a bus, staring out the window, and suddenly she was on her feet, saying, “Por favor, señor. Please let me off.” She still had a couple of miles to go, but she just wanted to walk, to let the wind and the vastness wash over her as the bus vanished and the solitude settled around her. She knew at last why Yvon loved this place, felt its pull. It was the old West, the way it must have looked and felt two centuries ago, powerful, alive, untamed. The road was a puny thread in that vastness, a meager scribble in a place that still outshone man’s reach. By the time she reached town, she was thinking, Some day I’m going to live here. She didn’t know how, or whether it was practical, but she identified with that landscape in some profound way she didn’t quite understand, and didn’t really have to. “It was love at first sight,” she says. “I wasn’t really contemplating leaving my work at that point. It hadn’t occurred to me. But I felt something was coming, something would materialize.”
Something did, or rather someone did. She had gone to meet the Chouinards for dinner. “It was a restaurant in some little funky monkey town; all I knew was that Yvon was meeting someone there. We were having drinks and in walks old Tompkins.”
They’d known each other for years—you couldn’t be around Chouinard for two decades and not know Tompkins—but it had been quite some time since they chatted. They had led very different lives, in different towns, with different ambitions. Now something changed; something had put them on the same page. Tompkins had come to pick up Chouinard so they could go climb something, but instead he lingered and talked with Kris about his life here, his conservation work, his plans for the land he had bought and come to love. She realized he had years of work mapped out for himself—decades, really. And she was mesmerized. It seemed so prescient to her, so fateful for her to have this emotional reaction to the landscape, then to meet up with this passionate, committed man, this person she considered a living legend, who had the very same connection to this place that she was feeling.
Kris had come for a ten-day visit. She stayed five weeks. Then she returned to California and broke the news to the Chouinards: She was retiring. And she was marrying Doug Tompkins and moving to Patagonia. No one, not even Kris, could figure out which of those three developments was the most surprising.
She had fallen in love in her early forties with this man, so seemingly gruff, distant, and guarded, yet passionate in his commitment, in his desire to do something really good, to lead something really good. And she saw his joy in finding someone who wanted to share that, to help build it, and to take it in new directions, he to the forests, she to the grasslands. They moved into Doug’s home in Reñihue, by then a beautifully restored wooden ranch house, with no electricity, no phone, no appliances, no television, not even a refrigerator. Doug was living what he preached: He wrote letters longhand and sat by the fire; and in the kitchen, an old-fashioned icebox was kept cool by a vent that circulated chilly air from beneath the house. Ice cream became a rare and special treat you went out for, which is what it had been before World War II. Kris found this different and liberating—she saw that her life had been filled with stuff she didn’t need and didn’t miss. It felt right.
The timing of Kris’s arrival was another matter. She got there right about the time that the Chilean press, politicians, and public became fully aware of Tompkins and his large land purchases in Patagonia—and of the fact that they might not completely approve of what he was doing. Doug had traded obscurity for notoriety by lodging a formal complaint about salmon farms polluting his property and the surrounding ocean, killing enormous amounts of marine life. Salmon farming is one of the crown jewels of the Chilean economy, part of the “Chilean miracle” once touted by President Reagan and advocates of “Reaganomics” as evidence that their ideas about privatization and unregulated market economies were sound. Criticizing the salmon industry was considered bad form and impolitic, especially when the source was a gringo environmentalist millionaire who, the Chilean press suddenly realized, had bought up so much land he had become the second largest landowner in Chile—so much land, in fact, that his holdings effectively sliced Chile in half. It didn’t matter that he was right, that salmon farming really was less a miracle than an ecological disaster. In fact, his being right made things worse. A delegation of Chilean politicians responded in short order, appearing at Tompkins’s gates to begin an investigation. But the investigation was not of the salmon farm and its alleged pollution.
They would be investigating Tompkins.
The funny thing about wanting to give away a boatload of money, Doug Tompkins says, is that people either think you’re up to something nefarious or think you’re crazy. Or both.
This is what nearly always happens to eco-philanthropists—it’s been the same for the past 100 years, he says in his gravelly, deliberate voice, staring ahead but looking inward, resignation written in his expression, arms crossed. He fully expected opposition and acrimony in Chile, if not ferocity. You’d be crazy not to anticipate some kind of trouble, he asserts, given the stormy history of America’s early national parks, each of which was opposed vehemently and embraced only much later on. But Tompkins’s calmly historical perspective on the inevitable travails of eco-philanthropists runs contrary to the most common portrait of him in the press. The same story seems to get recycled every year or two in the U.S. media. It pegs him as being caught totally off guard by the controversy that has swirled about him for decades, a naive true believer who couldn’t see the hornets’ nest until he was being swarmed. He laughs at it now, if a bit wearily. Still, if not surprised at having his environmental work attacked, he nevertheless finds the reactions to his philanthropy at home and abroad both perplexing and saddening to ponder.
Think about it, he suggests: When he used his money and clout to ship American jobs overseas, or to strong-arm department stores into giving his brand preferential display, or to expend huge amounts of energy and resources selling products nobody needed, he was arguably doing considerable harm to nature and humanity, yet he was lauded as a visionary entrepreneur, a properly hard-nosed businessman, and he was richly rewarded. This was capitalism at its respectable best, doing what it was supposed to do: maximize profits, any way necessary. And if he had done the same thing in Chile, if he used his Esprit fortune to snap up Patagonian forestland, pastures, and coastal properties in order to mine, dam, or develop them, he would have been welcomed with open arms, no questions asked, as countless other foreign investors had been welcomed into Latin America’s most wide-open free-market economy. That was, after all, what all the old Pinochetistas had been hoping to do before their dictator’s downfall. He would be living the dream.
Instead, he bought the broken-down ranch and the surrounding land at Reñihue to preserve it as a world-class national park that would one day be donated to the people of Chile. He stopped the logging on his lands, canceled development projects, and moved to protect and restore native species that generated no profit, in place of the non-native cows and sheep that profitably devastated the fragile landscape.
Meanwhile, in the United States, he parceled out grants to little-known environmental organizations that showed a willingness to scrap and offend in the name of saving wilderness, species, and the environment. Tompkins became a new kind of green sugar daddy: He supported dozens and eventually hundreds of activists and organizations that had not been considered by the major grant-issuing foundations, many of which would rather support more established and less confrontational conservation groups, the sort that did substantial good works but that rarely caused businessmen and politicians to rip their hair out. Tompkins wanted more hair ripping. And so his foundation gave important support to fledgling groups that were attacking logging and development in important wilderness areas by suing under the Endangered Species Act and other powerful federal laws dating from the 1970s, laws that government and industry had been flouting for years. A number of those groups have had stunning success, preserving millions of acres of wildlands and forcing polluters and developers to change their ways; a number of these groups might not have made it without Tompkins’s grants.
In short, Tompkins did things with his money that indisputably benefited nature and humanity far more than he ever did at Esprit. And for that he has been vilified.
He is not the least bit apologetic for what he has done and whom he supports—he takes pride in both. As an environmentalist, he is as forceful, stern, obsessive, and convinced of his own righteousness as he was as a fashion mogul. He is a harsh critic of the global economy, of business as usual, and he is quick to take others to task for not taking a stand against the destruction of nature—or for remaining willfully blind to it.
“Nature is collapsing; science is telling us this: The world is collapsing,” he says. “But it’s more than science—you can see it with your own eyes. It doesn’t take much, if you travel around and see. Beauty is the baseline. Nature is beautiful on its own. But if you open your eyes, you can see how ugly the world has gotten from the technological industrial society. You can see it—climate, extinctions, fish kills, ocean dead zones, diseased forests. Just connect the dots. The world is collapsing. But people won’t connect the dots. They don’t want to.”
At the same time Tompkins began buying up land in Patagonia, a logging company from Washington state, Trillium, bought up 625,000 acres of gorgeous forest to the south, in Tierra del Fuego, at the tip of the Americas. Trillium bought up almost as much land as Tompkins had accumulated at the time. “They want to cut down all the trees on their land,” Tompkins observed. “I want to preserve mine forever. And I’m the one threatened with being run out of the country.”
When he and Kris had their fateful meeting in Argentina, Tompkins was still splitting his time between California, where he had just formed the Foundation for Deep Ecology, and Patagonia, where he was in the thick of his first phase of land acquisitions, for which he formed another nonprofit entity, the Conservation Land Trust.
He had gotten his feet wet with the initial forest land purchase and donation he had made with Chouinard in 1989—the 1,186-acre Cani Araucaria Sanctuary, which they undertook at the behest of an environmental group, Ancient Forests International. The forest, surrounding a network of deep-blue lagoons in the collapsed caldera of a volcano, lies just outside the resort town of Pucon. It’s home to rare old-growth stands of the ancient araucaria—the monkey puzzle tree, with its single tuft of foliage atop a tall, silver-barked trunk. The land became the first officially designated private park in Chile, donated to a Chilean foundation under the supervision of one of the country’s leading botanists, Adrianna Hoffman. She later became head of Chile’s version of the Environmental Protection Agency, and an important ally to the Tompkinses when few prominent Chileans would stand with them.
A few months after the Cani land purchase, a phone call interrupted a meeting at the Foundation for Deep Ecology’s offices in Sausalito, California, where Tompkins and his staff were reviewing grant applications. The Cat Survival Trust had declared an “environmental emergency”—a desperate search for a quick infusion of cash to prevent the logging of irreplaceable South American rain forest habitat. The trust, based in Hertsfordshire, England, wanted to create a 10,000-acre ecological preserve in the Misiones province of Argentina to fulfill the group’s core mission—conserving and, where possible, “re-wilding” endangered wildcats. The area it was negotiating to buy consisted of lush subtropical rain forest north of Patagonia, occupying a narrow thumb of land at the border with Paraguay and Brazil. The last of the area’s once plentiful jaguar, the king of South American predators, had been killed ninety years before, but the jungles of Misiones still held small, endangered populations of other big cats: the jaguarundi, ocelot, margay, puma, and tiger cat—half the wildcat species on the continent. And wildlife biologists considered the region a prime candidate for reintroducing the jaguar into its native habitat.
The presence of these healthy populations of wildcats made the Misiones property particularly vital for environmentalists and the Cat Survival Trust: Wildlife biologists had recently discovered that the health of ecosystems was related to—and dependent on—the health and numbers of major predators. Even populations of prey animals eventually suffered from the wildcats’ absence because, with no predators to winnow their numbers, the prey would overpopulate an area and exhaust its food supply, throwing an ecosystem’s entire food chain out of balance. This pattern had been seen throughout the world: The steady extermination of wolves, bears, and other large predators in the American West had led to overpopulations of deer and other prey animals in some areas, with disastrous ecological results. This property in Misiones offered a rare opportunity to preserve a rain forest ecosystem from the top of the food chain down. But now those plans were collapsing. A skittish seller, tired of waiting for the British charity to come up with the cash, had turned to a large timber company, which was eager to harvest the property. The habitats would be destroyed.
Tompkins agreed that day to provide the money to buy the 10,000 acres out from under the timber company, and El Piñalito Provincial Park was born. After the property was purchased, other rare and endangered animals and plants were discovered there: a threatened bird species never before found in Argentina, two new species of edible fruit, four new orchids, and the largest population of giant tree ferns in the country. Giant tree ferns have been driven to near-extinction because they are highly prized for making plant pots to cultivate orchids and decorative ferns.
El Piñalito eventually become the key segment in a “green corridor” designated by the environmentally progressive Misiones provincial government—a wildlife corridor 125 miles long, where fences, logging, mining, and development are banned. The corridor links the park to other public lands, allowing unimpeded migration, predation, and natural animal movements to resume for the first time in centuries. This corridor, Tompkins came to believe, is a model for other countries, including the United States, where he would help launch and fund a similar effort called the Wildlands Project. Misiones is now home to the largest intact southern Atlantic rain forest, attracting biologists from all over the world to conduct research in one of the most humid environments on earth—there is, literally, no dry season there.
El Piñalito is protected by one warden and a green-minded neighbor. They try to keep poachers in check, but even with laws protecting the green corridor’s flora and fauna, illegal logging and hunting continue, and the fate of the South Atlantic rain forest remains uncertain: More than 90 percent of its once continent-wide, international reach has been destroyed during the past century. But Tompkins’s landholdings have provided a check on the destruction.
Tompkins, the incessant control freak who spent three meetings fretting over which salt and pepper shakers were right for his new Caffe Esprit, could not have tolerated this lack of control over the fate of El Piñalito if it had been his project alone. Although he was happy to help such a worthy preservation effort, he decided that his future conservation plans would be focused on lands and designs over which he could exert more complete control—be it choosing which whole forest to preserve, or choosing which font to use on a hiking trail sign. In that sense, the fashion world and the environmentalist world seemed very similar to Doug Tompkins: No detail is small. His next and biggest project would be a reflection of his uncompromising aesthetic—on a collision course with the very different sensibilities of a newly prosperous Chile, where economic development had become a virtual religion and the tradition of conservation philanthropy barely existed outside Tompkins’s property line.
Pumalin Park, named for the area’s native pumas, started with the 18,000 acres he purchased in the Reñihue valley, that beautiful broken-down ranch with the stunning view of the fjord and its impossibly blue waters, and a snowcapped volcano framed by the front window of the ranch house. He had a homestead reachable only by boat or plane: paradise to a man who felt most alive bivouacking on an icy ledge or stretched out beneath a velvet night sky, stars wheeling overhead, no city lights to dim the view of the galactic canvas. Next Tompkins added another 24,000 adjacent acres, at first with the simple idea of setting it all aside and keeping it safe from logging and mineral exploitation—a tiny slice of Patagonia he could keep pristine forever, the perfect retirement spot.
But his ambitions became larger and grander, as in every one of his earlier endeavors, from climbing and kayaking to fashion. There had always been the drive to expand: new markets, stores, restaurants. Why not buy more land, save more land? Why not build a world-class park, unlike any in the country—any in the world? He began sketching what his ideal nature preserve would look like: the trails, the infrastructure, the nursery for endangered plants. He dreamed of creating model organic farms on the periphery of the preserve to serve three purposes—to teach the locals sustainable agriculture and thus discourage poaching and slash-and-burn growing, to make the park’s food supply self-sustaining, and to use the farms as ranger stations and wardens’ quarters. The park would be as environmentally benign as he could make it. Tompkins had been to parks all over the world—the good, the bad, and the indifferent—and every one of them had some flaw, some oversight, some bureaucratic bungling that ruined the experience, damaged nature, or cluttered vistas that should have been naked and free of man’s imprint. Doug Tompkins knew he could do better, and his mixture of altruism, ego, and ambition produced Pumalin Park, both model and monument.
He began snapping up one broken-down farm and ranch after another, sad relics of a grander past, now gone to seed. The crassest of farming practices had been allowed on many of the properties—whole swaths of forests had been burned to make room for crops or grazing. Sometimes the fires would burn out of control and consume immense tracts; the vivid, blackened scars were still visible. Overgrazing badly damaged the lowlands; topsoil was reduced to dust in the summer and to barren mud when the weather was wet, as it often was: Reñihue gets eighteen feet of rain a year. (By contrast, the United States’ wettest forest, at Olympic National Park, gets only half that much rainfall; and the wettest U.S. city—Mobile, not Seattle, which actually isn’t even close—gets five and a half feet of rain in an average year.)
Much of the land Tompkins bought had already changed hands in a wave of speculation during the mid-to late 1970s, when the dictator Augusto Pinochet spoke of developing the mostly wild and unsettled south. He vowed to build a road from the Chilean port city of Puerto Montt to the very end of the world at Tierra del Fuego, promising new settlements, industry, hydropower—and plenty of opportunities to make money. The Carretera Austral—the Southern Highway—had long been a national dream, a sign of modernity and man’s victory over nature, in a country that Pinochet had taken on a headlong course into privatization, foreign investment, and supply-side economic reform. But the terrain proved immensely difficult, the road proved enormously expensive, and several coastal portions of the Carretera Austral were never built. Three main legs of the route remained covered by ferry trips lasting as long as twelve hours, instead of by asphalt. Tompkins’s Reñihue property was adjacent to one such leg, a sixty-mile gap where the terrain was the most rugged and the span between the ocean and the mountainous border with Argentina was narrowest.
When Pinochet’s promised road and accompanying development never materialized in the remote and sparsely populated region, tenant ranchers and farmers ended up occupying most of the larger investment properties, while a scattering of small plots supported a relatively few hardy souls scraping out a living in dirt-floored poverty. Tompkins began flying his Cessna over the area, looking for parcels to buy, landing on broad pastures to chat with the locals, sometimes making an offer on the spot if the owner was present. At home, a large wall map marked his growing holdings. He bought another 75,000 acres, followed by a huge purchase of a 445,000-acre holding from foreign owners, and additional buys from Chilean absentee owners. He also collected dozens of smaller properties, measured in hundreds of acres or less, from subsistence farmers and squatters. Even if some of the small landowners didn’t have legal title, Tompkins figured it was easiest just to offer them all money, or to offer a land swap to areas more suited to farming outside his planned park.
To help with this task, Tompkins hired a young river guide he knew from his white-water rafting adventures, Jib Ellison, who would paddle out to remote plots of land that could be reached only by river travel, then negotiate deals. A few years earlier, Ellison had led Tompkins, Tom Brokaw, Patagonia’s Yvon Chouinard, the writer and former Green Beret medic Doug Peacock, and the climber and filmmaker Rick Ridgeway—a group of outdoorsmen who called themselves the Do Boys, successors to the Funhogs—on a wild float through the vast Bikin River watershed in the Russian Far East. They reached the area only after one of the Do Boys bribed an Aeroflot helicopter crew to fly four hours off-course, then drop them in the wilderness, where tribesmen fed them a stewpot of moose liver and steak in exchange for Brokaw’s fifth of Scotch before sending them onward.
On the strength of being able to lead that bunch safely through the steppe, Ellison became Tompkins’s jungle emissary. Ellison, in turn, was steeped in the visionary zeal of Doug and Kris Tompkins. The eco baron’s influence cannot be underestimated: Two years later, Ellison returned to the United States, where he eventually started his own green consultancy, BluSkye, whose first client was the biggest company in the world, Wal-Mart. Ellison, the river guide who helped Doug Tompkins save pieces of the Patagonian rain forest, became one of the main forces behind Wal-Mart’s groundbreaking initiative to go green, an effort aimed at making the big box retailer, the products it sells, and its thousands of suppliers more sustainable while lessening their contribution to global warming.
By the time Ellison left, Tompkins had accumulated more than 700,000 acres, enough to make a park as big, as varied, and as spectacular as Yosemite—perhaps more spectacular, a place of snowcapped mountains, volcanoes, more than seventy lakes, rivers meandering and torrential, waterfalls, cliffs, dense forests, rocky seacoasts, and rookeries of sea lions, seals, and penguins. Each new trail, each new journey through their latest purchase, brought something else to take Doug’s and Kris’s breath away.
Few of the small landowners and squatters who lived in the area were entranced with this vision of a grand park for Patagonia, but they nevertheless sold to Tompkins, happy to get out of their rainy, difficult, marginal existence. A minority would not sell, however. Some of them were unwilling to give up their familiar lives and land; others were suspicious of Tompkins’s offers; still others felt threatened. Some thought he was trying to cheat them somehow, because this was Chile, where 40 percent of the people then lived below the poverty line and even when Pinochet left the presidency in 1990, the old elites who supported him still had power. The locals felt as a matter of history and principle that rich people were always trying to cheat them. Some were willing to sell at first, when they assumed Tompkins was going to cut down the forest or build something real, but when he spoke of leaving everything to nature and then giving the land to the Chilean people, they started thinking he was a liar or crazy or had some other hidden plan, because in their experience no one gave away something for nothing. As Tompkins began to assert new controls over his land—stopping the slash-and-burn farming practices, chasing away poachers and illegal loggers, ending illegal but long-tolerated grazing—resentment of the new gringo land baron and his tree-hugging ways began to simmer. Where Tompkins saw in the forests and fjords of Patagonia beauty under siege and in need of rescue, his neighbors often saw the rain forest as their enemy, a relentless foe that had to be beaten back and used up as a path to prosperity and a matter of survival. It had always been that way, it was the history of man, and few had any interest in joining Tompkins in his crusade against that ancient aspect of human behavior.
His critics would later complain that Tompkins operated in secret, gobbling up land without revealing his plans, and this charge, amplified in Chilean media reports, helped spawn more resentment and doubts about his motives, as well as suspicion of what was always described as his “radical” philosophy of deep ecology. His philosophy was not said to be green, liberal, progressive, or even extreme; it was said to be “radical,” a term equivalent to “subversive” in Chile. There were times under Pinochet’s dictatorship—which had only just ended when Tompkins made his first purchase at Reñihue—when a Chilean deemed politically subversive faced a potential prison sentence, or worse. This was not lighthearted or constructive criticism.
Although the perception of secrecy and hidden motives persists to this day, attaining the status of conventional wisdom, it seems Tompkins did not operate all that quietly after the initial land purchase of his homestead ranch. He admits he did hope to avoid driving up real estate prices by striking as many deals as he could as quickly as he could. And he kept his plans for the park vague at first, because the notion of a foreign land investor choosing not to exploit natural resources was unprecedented in Chile at the time. But when Tompkins started buying up large tracts of land in 1991, he met with the Chilean minister of land management and the minister’s staff to explain his interest in conservation in Patagonia. Tompkins received explicit permission (though none was legally required at the time) to invest $25 million in land and forest preservation. He also met with the governor of Palena Province, where Reñihue (and the future park) were located, to explain his interest in preserving the ancient alerce forests and the surrounding lands. The following year, Tompkins appeared on national television on a prime-time news show to explain his plans in even greater depth. He has cited this early openness about his plans many times as evidence of his “transparency,” but the information has had little or no effect on public opinion or on the media’s narratives that portrayed his purchases as quiet, secret, or part of a hidden agenda.
Kris, meanwhile, had begun organizing the small community of workers who had gradually been assembling at Reñihue to create the new park. There were teachers to hire for the workers’ children, park concessions to plan and organize, campgrounds and infrastructure to build—all told, a decade-long array of tasks to create a park of this magnitude. Kris, like Doug, also remained constantly on the prowl for new land acquisitions, though her interest gravitated toward the grasslands habitats that first entranced her. Pumalin would not be their only big project in Patagonia. But it would remain Doug’s personal favorite.
Much of Pumalin Park was intended to be remote and remain in its original wild state. The closest city to the park’s northern boundary is Puerto Montt, 130 miles to the north, and a twelve-hour ferry ride down the Corcovado Gulf on Chile’s southern Pacific coast. The Tompkinses’ house is within the park. Nearby, at the ferry landing on the southern shore of the fjord, they built an ecotourism complex and welcoming center, Caleta, designed by Doug. A showcase for modern park design, the wooden buildings were constructed from naturally fallen trees and deadwood harvested from his lands. Local arts and crafts were sold in the park store; organic honey was sold from the organic beekeeping operation Tompkins set up inside Pumalin; a restaurant featured foods grown at organic farms on the park’s periphery. There were campgrounds, lodges, a schoolhouse for staffers’ children, an information center, and a series of trails into the southern section of the park and to the sea lion rookery. Caleta became the model for the entire park infrastructure, putting parks elsewhere in Chile—and in the United States, for that matter—to shame, a selling point for local visitors and international tourists alike.
At first, none of this generated much controversy, attention, or interest. For decades, Chile’s philosophy on foreign investment had been to welcome any and all, with few or no restrictions. Perhaps that was where the later allegations of secrecy really came from—not from any particular silence on Tompkins’s part, but because no one really took notice. Foreigners were buying up land in Chile all the time, some of them with conservation in mind, too: George Soros, Luciano Benetton, Ted Turner. It was impossible to keep track. Tompkins, after all, was creating jobs and helping build tourism in the area, and more than 90 percent of his mountainous, densely forested land was too rugged for real development anyway.
But there were a few unwritten rules for foreign investors, and Tompkins broke a big one when he criticized and then sued a powerful Chilean salmon farmer in 1994. And that was when the “secret” of Tompkins’s conservation efforts entered the public consciousness, and the inevitable conflict took root between his zero-development conservation ethic and the long-held Chilean dream of a million-strong force of settlers taming Patagonia, much as the old West had been tamed in America, marching down a Southern Highway that never seemed to get built. It was not a realistic dream, but its romantic appeal ran deep.
It started, as most of Tompkins’s ideas and conflicts usually begin, out in nature. Tompkins liked to kayak the frigid waters of Reñihue for daily exercise and to explore his property’s untamed vistas—different every day, and yet always the same, vital, quiet, alive in an elemental sense that he felt San Francisco and Millbrook could never be. One day while paddling his kayak he spotted a sea lion carcass, then another, their heads severed. Just about every day after that, he saw more, vile and unnatural. Soon the beaches in the area were littered with the bodies, along with trash, toxic waste, and dead fish, despoiling the land Tompkins was so painstakingly restoring. Furious, he began asking around and watching the salmon operation in the waters near Reñihue, and he soon determined the salmoneros’ security guards, all heavily armed, were killing the animals en masse to keep them from feasting on the penned fish. They’d shoot the marine mammals in the skull, then behead them to avoid leaving ballistics evidence behind. This gruesome practice assumed someone would eventually investigate the killings, but that had never happened, at least before Tompkins began agitating. Chilean laws protected the endangered sea lion, he complained, but there was virtually no enforcement. Chile’s scant environmental laws and its version of the United States’ environmental protection agency were either advisory or unfunded and toothless. So Tompkins took matters in his own hands and offered a reward for anyone with information about the dumping and sea lion massacres. Tompkins had gone to war specifically with the Fiordos Blancos salmon company, which operated a sizable salmon farm right off the Reñihue coast, but he also complained publicly of the environmental devastation inflicted by all salmon farming operations, an open secret few cared to acknowledge.
However legitimate his claims might have been—and the Chilean courts soon awarded an injunction against Fiordos Blancos in an initial finding that Tompkins’s case was sound—the public perception was different. What local residents and legislators saw was a rich foreigner bullying a homegrown industry that Chileans looked on with pride, and that supplied much-needed jobs in an otherwise economically depressed region. It was as if a foreign investor had bought up half of Nebraska, then started complaining that corn produced through industrial agriculture was bad for the environment and harmful to Americans’ health. He might have valid arguments, but the locals would still want to see him run out of town on a rail.
Chile, of course, has no native Atlantic salmon—the fish is an exotic species anywhere below the equator, and in any case Chile is a Pacific Ocean country. But the vast coastal landscape of Patagonia, Chile’s relatively toothless environmental regulations, and the country’s welcoming policy toward just about any foreign investment made it a natural magnet for businesses interested in copying Norway’s successful salmon farming industry. Chilean salmon farming was just beginning a period of phenomenal growth when Tompkins began his salvo. Within ten years, it would be Chile’s number two export (behind only copper), a $1.5 billion business employing 17,000 Chileans and a crucial part of the economy—not to mention the main reason Wal-Mart can sell cheap salmon. Unfortunately, salmon farming, particularly as it has been practiced in Chile, is one of the most environmentally destructive forms of aquaculture ever conceived, packing many thousands of fish into crowded pens, doused with pervasive quantities of antibiotics that contaminate all sea life in the area, where the ocean floor becomes thickly coated with a miasma of uneaten fish meal and fecal waste. These salmon farms create vast dead zones in the ocean where nothing can live, and they produce salmon so anemic and unnatural that their pale flesh had to be artificially colored to make them marketable. Tompkins didn’t limit his attack to the ecological harm the farms caused; he also openly argued that the salmon operations made no sense economically. Salmon farms consumed far more usable protein than they produced, by as much as a factor of four, according to some studies. It was the ultimate in unsustainable production, Tompkins argued. Such farms could exist only because the companies were allowed to operate with complete disregard for the costly environmental damage they wrought.
But Tompkins overplayed his hand: Being correct was not the same as winning. Salmon farming had created 100 times more jobs in Patagonia than his park-building programs could ever hope to generate. Political and popular support for the industry was huge. The argument for conservation, for deep ecology, could not match the reality of jobs and money in a country where 30 to 40 percent of the citizens were living on less than ninety dollars a month.
The general manager of the salmon farm, Patricio Quilhot, formerly a colonel in Pinochet’s feared secret service agency DINA,1 refused to settle the matter out of court, even on the straightforward issue of polluting and dumping on Tompkins’s land. Instead Quilhot fought back, and he knew exactly where to land a punishing blow: He lashed out at Tompkins’s land purchases and park plans, calling him a threat to national security.
In a country insecure about its borders, its precarious democracy, and its place in the world, there were few more serious allegations that could be leveled against a foreigner—and Quilhot’s claim, made in 1994, was quickly echoed by his allies in the military, the government, industry, and the media. The official investigations of Tompkins that followed were inevitable: His picture became a fixture over ominous headlines in the daily papers, as legislators debated everything from withholding tax breaks from donors of parklands to expropriating Tompkins’s lands outright.
“The country is divided into two and the guilty part is a North American who doesn’t even live in this country,” fumed Qué Pasa, a conservative weekly in the capital city, Santiago. “His objective is, to say the least, dark, covering a vast territory from mountains to sea.”
And so Doug Tompkins and Chile began a decade-long war over a most unusual question: whether the multimillionaire would be allowed to create Chile’s greatest national park and then give it away.