The wild rumors started circulating soon after the intelligence agent turned salmonero uttered the phrase “threat to national security.” It was said that the crazy gringo planned a nuclear waste dump, a second Israel, an illegal gold mine, an Argentine military outpost. He believed in zero population growth, in one-world governments, in the idea that trees were more important than human lives. He was a socialist, a Zionist, a fascist, a CIA agent, a foreign infiltrator, an ecoterrorist. Tompkins found himself besieged by a bewildering and potent mixture of right-wingers, leftists, nationalists, the military, industrialists, xenophobes, neo-Nazis, the president’s cabinet, and even the Catholic church, all incensed by the American interloper and his dangerous ideas. He was warned that his phone was tapped. He received death threats. Landowners previously receptive to his offers to buy them out became skittish. Military helicopters and jets buzzed his farmhouse in Reñihue, sometimes as low as 100 feet, rattling the windows, spooking the animals, scaring the boys and girls in the school the Tompkinses had built for their park employees’ children. When Tompkins complained, Chile’s minister of the interior snapped, “This is our national territory and airspace, not Tompkins’s. The government is not harassing him; it is only making sure the laws are obeyed.” There hadn’t been such tumult over troublesome Americans arriving and buying property in Patagonia since 1901, when Robert Leroy Parker and Harry Alonzo Longabaugh—better known as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—settled down for a few years as gentlemen ranchers just across the Argentine border from Pumalin. Butch and Sundance, it was said, got a much warmer welcome when they came to town, at least until the Pinkerton men showed up.
Tompkins tried to joke about the sudden notoriety: “Hey, Kris, we have to get to work on that tunnel through the Andes,” and the two of them would laugh. But it wore on him. Most of Chile’s old-growth forests were gone. He now owned a substantial portion of what was left, including the single largest forest of alerce trees in the world. He was trying to save something important, and he had been sure that good intentions—the value and beauty of what he was trying to accomplish—would speak for themselves. Through the filter of his sense of image-making, trained at Esprit, Tompkins saw his idea as something that sold itself. “It is pretty hard for a country to turn down a gift of 300,000 hectares,” he would say.
The problem was the isolation and lack of population that made his conservation project possible in the first place: Very few people had firsthand knowledge of what he was doing. Most Chileans literally could not see, touch, or feel the park in progress. That left only an increasingly dark, negative portrait of Tompkins painted by the press, priests, and politicians to fill the void. Soon the controversy jeopardized his application to have the government designate his land a tax-exempt nature sanctuary; without this designation he could not realize his dream of donating Pumalin as a national park.
Aware of his peril, he did what he knew best: He went to work on his image. He began holding town meetings in the towns nearest Pumalin—Puerto Montt and Chaiten—and speaking to environmental groups and student organizations at regional universities. He put together a slide show of his land and the work underway to build a world-class park, his painstaking restoration of damaged lands, the organic farms being run by and for Chileans—without tunnels, nuclear waste, or Israeli spies. Gradually, some of the locals were assuaged. College students grew particularly enamored of Tompkins and his conservation message, hanging on his words and his explanation of deep ecology, though there was a bittersweet aspect to their expressions of gratitude for his good works. One college senior commented, “What you are doing in Patagonia is so important. But I can’t help but wish it had been a Chilean with this vision, rather than a foreigner. We should have been able to do this ourselves.”
But town meetings could only go so far. Nationally, Tompkins faced a difficult battle. Chile had only just emerged from the long, tyrannical, violent rule of the dictator Augusto Pinochet, who had been supported for years by the United States’ meddling and intrigue—part of the reason that the rich and influential Tompkins was greeted with suspicion and paranoia. This was compounded by Pumalin Park’s location, which happened to be both strategic and vulnerable to attack. Chile is the longest, narrowest nation in the world, and so its defense is a tactical nightmare—Pinochet had spent much of his rule stoking paranoia about the threat of invasion. The country is 265 miles across at its widest point, and the narrowest section, in Region X,1 is a mere sixty miles from the Pacific coast to the border of Argentina, which has long had rocky relations with Chile.2 This geographic wasp waist also happens to lie within the heart of Doug Tompkins’s land. The gringo with the tourist visa really did slice the country in two. “Imagine if I went to the U.S. as a tourist, bought land from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico in Florida, and said you can’t travel across it by road,” observed one of Tompkins’s most vociferous critics, the Chilean national senator Antonio Horvath, an engineer, a staunch friend to the salmon industry, and an advocate of aggressive development in Patagonia. “They would throw me out. Well, that’s what Tompkins is doing.”
Horvath’s analogy struck a raw nerve in many Chileans, but not because it provides a compelling argument against conservation and for national security—even Horvath admits Pumalin is so rugged that no army could pass through it. Horvath’s argument resonates because Chileans believe it highlights American hypocrisy. It’s not hard to imagine the nationalistic outrage and calls for protective legislation if a foreign version of Tompkins suddenly appeared in the United States. Just picture an outspoken foreign critic of industry, the global economy, and conservative politics, who bought up immense and beautiful swaths of Colorado or Utah or Georgia—then said no to roads, cars, ATVs, hunting, and development, all in the name of saving the environment. How long would it take the U.S. Congress to start investigating? For politicians to start condemning? Why, then, Horvath demanded, should Chile behave any differently?
By the time controversy enveloped Tompkins, Pinochet was out as president, but one aspect of his rule remained gospel in Chile and was embraced across party lines: his pro-growth, free-market policies, which relentlessly emphasized development, exports, aggressive extraction of Chile’s natural resources, and deregulation as the best path to prosperity. In 1995, the newly elected president, Eduardo Frei, made it clear those policies would continue in the newly democratic Chile. No environmental or conservation project, Frei promised, would get in the way of economic growth—and certainly no foreign environmentalist named Doug Tompkins, whose philosophy of local economies, less consumption, and less extraction was anathema to the Chilean outlook. The new president of Chile used the worst term he could to describe an American in their midst: He called Tompkins arrogante. Arrogant.
In the United States, Tompkins is revered in conservation and environmentalist circles; Henry Paulson, the former chairman of the Nature Conservancy and secretary of the treasury during President George W. Bush’s final two years in office, would later say of Doug and Kris Tompkins: “I know of no two people anywhere that have so completely and totally dedicated their lives, their energy, their talent, their money to the cause of conservation. And they get important, tangible results.” In Chile, the news media seemed to seek out only the farthest-right critics of environmentalism to comment on Tompkins. An activist from a conservative think tank, the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, told one Chilean newspaper that Tompkins’s philosophy of deep ecology was “antihuman and pits human rights and progress against the rights of nature.” He painted deep ecology as a radical, dangerous fringe idea that sees human life as essentially worthless, that wants mankind to return to the Stone Age, and that has even inspired ecoterrorism in the United States, elevating environmentalism to a kind of antihuman religion.
This dark view of deep ecology gained considerable traction in the battle against Tompkins, even though—or perhaps because—the criticism was dishonest in tone and substance. As a philosophical ideal, Tompkins’s deep ecology “platform” is hardly the stuff of a terrorist screed. Its most significant pronouncements, though couched in terms of morality rather than science, are in line with the sorts of responses scientists say the battle against mass extinction and global warming demands, and are in keeping with current understanding of the world’s ability (or inability) to sustain current levels of food, energy consumption, and population. The problem is that as a practical matter, this eight-point platform—written by the founder of deep ecology, Arne Naess, and the environmentalist George Sessions; and published in 1993 by Doug Tompkins in Clearcut: The Tragedy of Industrial Forestry—is deeply disturbing to those who would deny the existence of anything like an impending environmental disaster, or who wish only to maintain the status quo, or who, like the Catholic church, view criticism of human overpopulation as potentially “antilife.” And it happened that the long-planned Clearcut, a collection of stunning and horrifying photographs and stories of industrial harvesting of forests, was published just as Tompkins’s image problems in Chile became acute. One Chilean archbishop read about the platform and called Tompkins an “anti-Christian pagan,” and other prelates soon took up the call.
So what is this fearsome belief system? The deep ecology platform, as published in Clearcut, states:
The third plank in the platform is the primary source of controversy, from which all the other ideas in the platform (and objections to them) emanate: the notion that humans have no inherent, absolute right to exploit and lay waste to nature. Philosophically it’s hard to argue against this proposition, because its opposite would hold that humans ought to feel free to pollute, destroy, and drive species to extinction even when such action is not vital, but simply more convenient or profitable. As a practical matter, however, this third plank flies in the face of human history, religious teachings about man’s earthly dominion dating back to the Old Testament and beyond, and the way we live today. The related notion that there are too many people in the world (a scientifically uncontroversial position) generates similar expressions of horror; Tompkins’s opponents falsely argued that it meant deep ecologists advocate mass abortions, mandatory birth control, forced sterilizations, and worse. And the idea that quality of life need not be seen as a measure of how much money or property a person has (which is how standard of living is currently measured) baffled and alarmed many people, as did the statement that the future needed to be “deeply different from the present.” Critics said this added up to something no one should accept: a Luddite view of the world, a turning back of the clock, and an end to progress.
Caught off guard by the vehement opposition to a donated park worth $35 million, Tompkins responded to his critics unevenly. The “image director” at times compounded his image problems with angry diatribes that tended to create more sympathy for his opponents than for himself: “All we are trying to do is make a sizable national park in an area that is largely untouched, and suddenly I find myself embroiled in a tremendous debate over abortion…. It’s outrageous. The idea of having wild areas for their own sake is incomprehensible here.” Such outbursts were gleefully reported in the press. Pundits at Chile’s two leading conservative daily newspapers—El Mercurio and La Tercera—were only too happy to paint him as an American bully right out of central casting. Meanwhile, few defenders were willing to side with the foreigner who found Chileans incapable of comprehending his generosity. His picture on a front page was enough to increase newspaper sales, and the papers always seemed to choose an unflattering photo, a craggy face frowning beneath a halo of gray hair and a black beret.
But when he could suppress his inner CEO and his impatience with Chile’s chaotic democratic process, Tompkins was able to reach out more effectively. He discussed his beliefs with mayors, city councilmen, provincial governors, business leaders—and even the salmon farmers. Week after week, he took groups of legislators and government officials up in his Cessna, the bush pilot showing off his lands, his forest restoration work, the organic farms owned by local residents who had swapped their old, worn-out plots for new, more productive farms ringing the new park. Tompkins supplied these residents with seed and assistance, and gave them work as park wardens as well, so they could offer directions to visitors in remote areas of Pumalin, and stay on the lookout for the constant problem of illegal logging of the valuable alerce trees. Tompkins would dip below the clouds and see someone working a field, and he’d abruptly bank and descend, the legislators gripping their chairs as he bumped to a stop on a grassy pasture so the legislators could talk to the farmers themselves. Yes, yes, it was true, the farmers would say, they were doing better now than they had ever done before. We worried at first about Tompkins and his park, but he has treated us fairly. The legislators knew that not everyone was so happy, so they would ask pointed questions, hoping for a chink in the armor, some hint that something was amiss, but the farmers would shrug, smile, and shake their heads. One said, “Look. We have food, a house, good land. My son is going to school now—he has a future, instead of fighting, fighting just to stay alive. Why do you want to find something wrong with that? For us, it is good.”
What could the legislators do but nod and shake hands and pile back in the plane so Tompkins could swoop over another valley and point out the native plant nursery, part of his project “Alerce 3000”—in which he is planting a new forest’s worth of the rare, long-lived alerce trees, row after row. They are so slow in their growth—just a few inches a year—that the project will begin to mature only in the year 3000, he told them. The Chileans didn’t know what to make of this soft-spoken yet forceful man then in his late fifties, fit and confident at the plane’s controls, part PR man, part philosopher, part tour guide, part mountain man, part millionaire, and part madman. Who laid plans for the year 3000? As legislators, they could barely agree on plans for the next fiscal year. Then they listened as Tompkins explained that all the fuss over deep ecology was nonsense: The point of the platform was that it is self-evidently wrong to destroy life and nature except when there is no other choice. It is foolhardy, he would say, to choose coal over solar, global over local, dirty over clean, when environmental and climate disasters are fast approaching. Any population scientist, geographer, nutrition expert, or relief agency in the world would agree that there are more people than the earth can sustain—out of the 6.7 billion, on any given day, one-third are living in poverty, one-fifth have no access to clean drinking water, 12 percent are starving to death. But, of course, Tompkins would soothe, we all know that if population is to be reduced, if society is to be transformed, it can come only over the course of many decades, perhaps centuries. “I want to raise the consciousness of the world,” he said.
It all sounded so reasonable that the visitors invariably walked off the little plane impressed, less angry, less concerned about the wilder allegations against Tompkins—though not necessarily converted.
In March 1995, a day after his fifty-second birthday and despite efforts to reach out to his critics, Tompkins picked up the paper at his town home in Puerto Montt and read a breathless account of how conservative legislators from Valparaiso—the Patagonian city where he hoped to buy the last 30,000-acre piece of land to complete Pumalin Park—had returned from their fact-finding mission to denounce him in the halls of the congress as a dangerous interloper. Despite testimonials to the contrary, they claimed he had been pushing farmers and indigenous people off their lands, threatening them with lawsuits and property disputes if they refused to sell. Now Tompkins would be summoned to the Chilean senate to explain himself. The “republic” of Tompkins needed to be reined in.
Tompkins responded by presenting a slide show and question-and-answer session in Valparaiso in the days before his Senate appearance. Slide after slide, drawn from his book Clearcut, showed devastated forests and scarred lands throughout North America. Then the slide show switched to aerial views of ravaged Chilean forests: trees reduced to logs, logs reduced to enormous oceans of wood chips, the hills stripped bare, roads cut through forests like ugly wounds. The implication was that the threat came not from Tompkins but from the politicians and companies that wanted to do to South America what had already been done in the north. The slides from Clearcut were contrasted with images of the startlingly blue lakes and fjords of Reñihue, the alerces of Pumalin, the dense green landscapes. “This is special,” he told the gathering. “It is one of the last virgin reservoirs of the world and I intend to see it preserved.” He promised he would soon publish a Chilean version of Clearcut. At the same time, he underwrote several other environmental book projects in Chile while doling out more than $30 million in grants to Chilean environmental organizations—raising their profile and clout, and establishing a viable conservation lobby for the first time in Chilean history. “The truth will be told,” he promised.
“Douglas’s biggest problem is that he has become part of a soap opera, fed by envy, one of our great national pastimes,” the botanist Adriana Hoffman told the press—one of the few voices in Chile speaking out for him back then, when it was a risky thing to do. “Doug Tompkins is doing the country and the planet a favor…. Thank God someone is exercising stewardship to preserve a little bit of what is left of the world’s frontier forest.”
Tompkins dutifully traveled to Santiago and met with legislators on the left and right, government ministers and bureaucrats, and presidential aides, once again explaining his land purchases, his philosophy, and his goals. He produced documents to show that he had paid small landowners market value or more for the land, even when the residents lacked clear title, and that most of his land had been purchased from large companies and foreign investors. Early on, Tompkins had fired several employees for bullying some of the squatters, and he had taken his boat out and visited them personally, apologizing and offering to pay for real estate attorneys to get their land titles in order, so that they could choose to sell or stay as they saw fit. The current crop of about a dozen small landowners who had recently complained to the legislators were actually squatters on land next to Tompkins’s holdings, illegally occupying small farms spread across 74,000 acres owned by the Catholic University of Valparaiso. The university had been trying for years to evict the squatters, and although it was true that Tompkins was negotiating to buy the land from the school, he said he had nothing to do with the attempted evictions.
Instead of placating his most ardent opponents, this explanation both incensed them and provided a new line of attack. Now the right-wing Independent Democratic Union Party demanded that the Chilean government petition the university and, if necessary, the Vatican, to prevent Tompkins from buying the land owned by the Catholic University. The party wanted a full investigation of the deep ecology movement and its promotion of a “world of less people.” They had heard stories, the legislators reported, of couples working on Tompkins’s properties who had been asked not to have children. Was the school in Caleta preaching zero population growth and the idea that human life was no better than animal life? The left-leaning Christian Democratic Party soon joined the call, and a congressional committee was appointed to conduct yet another investigation and visit to the Pumalin area, to see if Tompkins was promoting the “radical” idea that women had complete control of their bodies, including a right to birth control or abortions. “All this is totally incompatible with Chilean legislation,” one legislator, Sergio Elgueta, thundered. They neglected to mention that the school at Pumalin was supervised by inspectors from the Chilean education ministry, who had approved the curriculum as conforming to national standards.
The legislators also expressed grave concerns about the fate of 150 workers whose livelihoods depended on the Fiordos Blancos salmon farm operating in the waters of Reñihue Fjord. Workers there complained that Tompkins had closed an access road through his property, leaving them no direct commute to work. Worse still, the farm operators threatened to shut down entirely if Tompkins won the court injunction he was seeking against them—everyone would be laid off. The implication was that Tompkins was being unreasonable and uncaring, and the legislators suggested that the appropriate solution to such outrages would be to regulate—perhaps ban—large land purchases by foreigners when important national interests were at stake. When they introduced legislation to accomplish this goal, the regulations they proposed would have posed no obstacles to foreigners who wanted to buy large tracts for logging or mining; only land purchases for conservation would be closely regulated under their proposal.
Again, Tompkins appeared to counter the attacks. A road through the park had been closed; that was true, Tompkins said. However, he wasn’t trying to interfere with workers’ commutes; he was blocking salmon farm workers from disposing of waste, including beheaded sea lions, at an illegal dump they had created without permission on the Reñihue property. That was one of the reasons a provincial judge had issued a preliminary injunction against the salmon farm—to protect Tompkins and his land. Tompkins also pointed out that the manager who had first raised the concern about Pumalin Park and national security had been thoroughly discredited. He had been named in court filings as a member of one of Pinochet’s death squads and was alleged to have been an accomplice in the kidnapping and murder of a United Nations diplomat. Finally, Tompkins pointed to evidence that the legislators on the right and the left who were most vociferous in their attacks on the park, who had raised the allegations of promoting abortion and of bullying landowners, and who wanted to legislate against foreign eco barons, were part owners of the same salmon farm that had been dumping on Tompkins’s land and slaughtering sea lions.
With those revelations, the very public attacks on Tompkins in the Chilean congress suddenly became too “sensitive” to be discussed in public, and were passed on to a presidential blue-ribbon commission for further study. Tompkins, meanwhile, strengthened his hand, creating a Chilean foundation, run by Chileans, to take ownership of Pumalin Park. He persuaded the respected bishop of Ancud in Patagonia, Monsignor Juan Luis Ysern, to become president of the new foundation’s board, in order to blunt the notion that Tompkins was promoting an anti-life, anti-Catholic message. Ysern said he had been leery of Tompkins, his project, and his philosophy, but had come to “wholeheartedly support” the park plan and conservation efforts. He dismissed the allegations about Tompkins as propaganda and prejudice. “It doesn’t happen every day that a rich man should invest without seeking his own personal wealth,” Ysern said. Tompkins scored another victory when he won his court case against Fiordos Blancos, whose owners promptly sold out to a large Canadian-owned company with a far better environmental record.
But just as the blue-ribbon commission prepared to dismiss the allegations against Tompkins and recommend that Pumalin receive status as a sanctuary, President Frei bowed to pressure from Chile’s powerful military and right-wing politicians by blocking the sale of the 74,000-acre tract owned by the Catholic University of Valparaiso, long prized by Tompkins. The university had been prepared to accept Tompkins’s offer of $1.7 million for the land. The parcel, known as Rancho Huinay, consisted of virginal rain forest that had never been logged, except for a few cuts and burns by the small band of squatters, and Tompkins needed it to complete his master plan for Pumalin, as it provided the missing link joining the southern and northern ends of the vast park. Now, the president decided, the government of Chile would buy Rancho Huinay instead, and then determine what balance of conservation and development would be appropriate. No sanctuary status would be granted to Tompkins. And waiting in the wings was Chile’s most powerful energy company, Endesa, which had a different vision for Patagonia, one of massive dams, hydroelectric stations, and thousands of miles of transmission towers carrying power generated in the wilds to the urban centers in the north. Chile’s rapid growth had led to an energy crisis, and the head of Endesa, José Yuraszek, had the president’s ear. He wanted a “Yuraszek Park” in place of Pumalin, where he could bulldoze and develop at will. Tompkins’s foes were ecstatic. Instead of Tompkins slicing Chile in two, the opposition had sliced his park in two—the north and south halves of Pumalin would never be contiguous. “I have been beaten up by the government for wanting to invest millions of dollars in a project the country really needs,” a disheartened Tompkins complained at a press conference in July 1995. He might just close off the lands and keep them private, he vowed, if that was what it took to save the last wild places in Patagonia.
But if Tompkins’s harshest critics were satisfied, others decried President Frei’s decision to overrule his own blue-ribbon commission. Ricardo Lagos, who was the minister of public works and a leading candidate to succeed Frei, railed against a government that had no problem welcoming foreign investors who exploited Chile’s resources, yet mistreated the only one who wanted to preserve valuable resources. Major media in the United States began to take notice, then—The New York Times, the Washington Post, and others3 brought news of the Tompkinses’ conservation efforts and the controversy to an American audience wider than the environmental community that had long cheered them on. Soon the U.S. ambassador to Chile and the House minority leader Dick Gephardt intervened, making it clear that pending trade talks between the two countries could be jeopardized if it seemed the rights of Americans in Chile were being trampled. Suddenly the “threat” that Tompkins and his deep ecology posed to Chile seemed hardly worth talking about; President Frei put his plan to buy the Huinay property on hold and reopened negotiations with Tompkins on the fate of Pumalin, eventually promising, in 1997, to introduce legislation to make Pumalin a protected sanctuary.
Four more years passed, and the promised legislation did not see the light of day. Although the government had backed off, the university refused to sell Huinay to Tompkins and in 2001 instead sold it to the energy company Endesa. Endesa vowed to preserve the land’s natural beauty, but Tompkins and his Chilean allies saw it as a beachhead in a war over the future of Patagonia’s rain forest. Tompkins called a press conference to say he finally was pulling the plug on donating Pumalin Park to Chile. He would keep the land private and turn his attention and money elsewhere.
“I am fed up with waiting,” he told the newspaper La Tercera in August 2001. “I have better things to do with my life.”
In truth, Doug and Kris Tompkins had not been waiting at all—they had simply shifted their attention to other conservation efforts designed to preserve equally important wildlands, but in locations less likely to provoke nationalistic emotions and protests. For better or worse, the landscape of Pumalin occupied mental territory that, to Chileans, was spiritually akin to Americans’ perceptions of California a century ago. Tompkins had bought up a big piece of Chile’s “California dream”—its “Patagonia dream.” That he was trying to save it didn’t matter. What mattered was that it was their dream. But there were plenty of other places in Chile—and in other, lesser-known areas of Patagonia—that presented golden opportunities for conservationists.
So, by the time a newspaper interviewer was hearing how weary the Tompkinses had grown of the endless fight over Pumalin, Doug and Kris were well into a spree of buying land and creating parks that was unprecedented in the conservation history of any country.
First, with Doug’s former trampoline instructor and Esprit partner, Peter Buckley, they purchased 208,000 acres of coastal cypress forest south of Pumalin, and created two spectacular wildlife and nature preserves: Corcovado and Tic Toc. Shortly before the purchase, Tompkins had flown Buckley up and down the Patagonian coast, pointing at one magnificent vista after another. “That’s for sale. That’s for sale,” Tompkins would shout, veering the Cessna toward a snowcapped volcano. “And that one with the glacier and river, that’s for sale, too.” Buckley called Tompkins his “crazed real estate agent,” but one gorgeous, green slice of forest and blue water caught his eye for a homestead, and he was happy to buy up the much larger land around it to donate. “You couldn’t say no to Doug,” he says. “And I have a hell of a lot more money than I’ll ever need. Why not do something good with it, something that lasts?”
There was no controversy in this region: Unlike Pumalin, the land at Corcovado had been unoccupied since the 1930s, when the cypress forests had been severely overcut to make vineyard stakes for the wine country near Santiago. The land and climate had been too hard, and the few settlers were long gone. Sixty years later, the second-growth cypress trees were coming in strong, and what remained of the original forest still represented some of the largest stands of old-growth cypress left in Chile. This land was quietly awarded the status of nature sanctuary that still eluded Pumalin, and Tompkins floated the suggestion that, combined with 500,000 neighboring acres controlled by the Chilean military, it would make an amazing national park. The government seemed to agree, and began laying plans for just such a park, as if the enmity and conflict still going on at Pumalin did not exist.
Through their Conservation Land Trust foundation, the Tompkinses next purchased 6,000 acres of evergreen forest in the Melimoyu Preserve on Isla Magadelena, south of Corcovado and adjacent to a seldom visited, poorly maintained existing national park that they hoped to improve. Another 65,000 acres of virgin island forest off the coast of Tierra del Fuego were purchased to form the Cabo Leon Preserve, which the Tompkinses donated to a private Chilean conservation group they supported, the Yendegaia Foundation, run by their old friend Adriana Hoffman. Another 100,000 acres, along the old disputed waters of the Beagle Channel, were purchased with Buckley and a few other investors when a large parcel of coastal mountain forest went on the market as the owner, a convicted drug dealer, desperately tried to pay his legal bills. This Yendegaia preserve, also entrusted to Hoffman’s foundation, is home to dozens of endangered plant and animal species, and forms an important land bridge between two existing national parks—part of Tompkins’s strategy to ease the extinction crisis in Patagonia by establishing wildlife corridors that span the region. All the properties represented unique landscapes and habitats, and all had been in danger of being mined or logged into oblivion if left unprotected.
The Tompkinses next added to their portfolio three huge parks and preserves in Argentina. The first was the 450,000-acre Estero del Ibera in Corrientes, Argentina, part of the cloud forest in the northwest of the country. Much of the land they ended up preserving in Corrientes was to have been cleared and remade into a giant industrial tree farm of nonnative pines, a practice that Tompkins loathed, because planting nonnative species frequently introduced new parasites, insects, and diseases, ultimately damaging habitats and hastening extinctions throughout whole regions. Tompkins had bought the land out from under the timber company at the Argentine government’s invitation, a very different experience for him and a relief from the thorny relations with Chile’s leaders. The nature preserve of wetlands and steppe that the Tompkinses established there is home to the endangered maned wolf, the capybara (the world’s largest rodent—a 140-pound cousin to the guinea pig), the endangered pampas deer, the giant anteater, the crowned eagle, the tapir, and more than 360 species of birds.
To the south, the 37,000-acre El Rincon preserve of glacier-fed streams and badly overgrazed sheep and cattle lands is being gradually restored by the Tompkinses. They sold off the livestock herds after purchasing this Andean foothill property, in the shadow of one of Patagonia’s great peaks, San Lorenzo. With the grasslands restored, biologists believe the endangered huemul deer will repopulate the area, spreading from an adjacent national park where they have been making a comeback in recent years.
As they accumulated land and conservation projects, the Tompkinses built a staff of nearly 100 laborers, biologists, veterinarians, farmers, lawyers, rangers, administrators, and others, supplemented by crews of student volunteers and ecotourists from the United States, who sign on for working vacations at the Tompkinses’ properties, restoring ranch property back to its original, unfenced wild state.
The jewel of the Tompkinses’ purchases in Argentina is the 155,000-acre Monte Leon, the nation’s first coastal national park. Kris Tompkins took the lead on this project, purchasing one of Patagonia’s most historic sheep ranches, selling off the livestock, establishing a wildlife preserve, then donating it to the Argentine national park system—with no objections from left, right, or center. Monte Leon, with its thirty-one miles of beachfront, encompasses one of the last completely wild coastlines outside Antarctica. It provides a home to more than 65,000 mating pairs of Magellanic penguins and important nesting grounds for giant cormorants, and its inland steppe is home to large populations of pumas, rheas, foxes, and the wild llama species known as the guanaco.
Kris Tompkins’s personal favorite of their many projects—her version of Doug’s Pumalin, her “opportunity of a lifetime”—came in the form of a 173,000-acre, badly overgrazed Chilean sheep ranch near the Argentine border, Estancia Valle Chacabuco. Well north of Reñihue and once the largest working ranch in Chile, Chacabuco is a diverse and biologically rich landscape, dominated by the grasslands and steppe that Kris loved from the moment she first visited Patagonia—a type of Chilean landscape unrepresented in existing parks and preserves. Acquiring Chacabuco had been the number one priority of Chilean national park officials for thirty years, but either the owners wouldn’t sell or the cash-strapped park service couldn’t afford to buy. The Tompkinses had a good relationship with the Chilean parks officials, but given the charged political climate and the Pumalin controversies, they rarely could work openly together. But Chacabuco would be different. Kris and Doug, with additional financing from Yvon Chouinard, beat out a “Stop Tompkins” business consortium made up of Chilean timber and energy companies, including the Tompkinses’ old adversary, Endesa. Their last-minute bid for $10 million won the day, even as the anti-Tompkins forces were gloating in the newspapers that same morning about winning the property from its Belgian owner so they could develop rather than preserve it.
Through her separate Chilean-based foundation, Conservación Patagonica, Kris Tompkins launched a nine-year plan to restore the worn-out land. She sold off the sheep and assembled an army of volunteers from her old company, Patagonia, as well as crews of ecotourists who began coming to Chacabuco to live in rustic cabins and work hard, paying handsomely for the privilege of ripping out 500 miles of fences so that wildlife can roam free. The Chilean government, again in contrast to the acrimonious dealings over Pumalin, has agreed to merge existing military-controlled lands with the Chacabuco ranch property, which the Tompkinses will donate once their restoration work is complete. The final result will be a 650,000-acre Patagonia National Park. This region has a long history of tourism along with ranching, and so the idea of a park was far more welcome there than in Pumalin’s forests—and the fact that Kris Tompkins, rather than Doug, was the point person for the park undoubtedly helped as well.
The new park will be of a size and scope that will rival America’s Grand Tetons National Park. Every biome and habitat in Chile is present—grasslands, foothills, mountains, desert, steppe, riparian areas, lakes, rivers, wetlands, and old-growth forests. Most of the original species are still present, including the huemul deer, though many such species must be nurtured back from the brink of extinction through careful tracking, assisted breeding programs, and rewilding. Biologists from Chilean, European, and American universities have come to the area to study the endangered huemul; others are attempting to tag and track pumas to see how they behave without sheep to prey on. The region has been sheep-farmed for more than a century, so the herds’ absence offers a unique opportunity to study how nature will respond. Kris Tompkins is leading a committee charged with developing a master plan for the park. There are a million things left to do, she says, thousands of invasive nonnative plant species must be removed, years of work lie ahead—and she sounds like a kid on her way to Disneyland every time the subject of Patagonia National Park comes up. “Just another two hundred miles of fence to go,” she said brightly after returning from a horseback ride across the ranch.
“There’s nothing I’ve ever done that’s more important,” she says. “We are protecting the things we love.”
By 2005, Doug and Kris Tompkins had acquired more than 2 million acres for conservation in Chile and Argentina, and they continued to hunt for more—and to battle over land already in hand.
Pumalin Park remains the centerpiece, the most beautiful, the most remote, and the most troublesome. Finally, in 2005, with a new president in place—Tompkins’s former supporter, Richard Lagos—and a new environmental chief, Adrianna Hoffman, Pumalin was granted the long-promised status of nature sanctuary. The park by then was open to the public, and on track for eventual donation to the people of Chile, or to become a permanent land trust. The controversy and distrust faded and Tompkins’s stock rose in Chilean public opinion polls as visitors poured into his parks.
The relief was short-lived, however. A few months after Pumalin became a sanctuary, a consortium of power companies led by Endesa announced a huge new project—four enormous dams on Patagonia’s two largest and most wild rivers, the Pascua and the Baker, as part of a large-scale hydroelectric project to provide power for development to the north. If the project is carried out as proposed, thousands of acres of virgin forestland will be flooded, and even more will have to be cut down for service roads, substations, and power transmission lines.
There were several routes that the power lines and roads could take, some of them far less destructive than others. The proposal Endesa favored, perhaps unsurprisingly, runs right through the heart of Pumalin Park.
“I’m in the fight of my life,” Tompkins said in 2008, and it’s hard to tell, as he speaks, whether he is angry or excited at the prospect.