CHAPTER 9
RECLAIMING NATURE
on a cool, sunny afternoon in late january 2018, a president and a philanthropist met in Chile’s southern Patagonia region to sign into existence a massive new network of national parks.
The signing ceremony took place on the recovering grasslands of the windswept Chacabuco Valley, which the American philanthropist Kristine Tompkins’s conservation nonprofit had worked to restore after purchasing the land from a private landowner in 2004. Over the past century, the Chilean government had granted the enormous valley for initial settlement to a company that promised to exploit it, taken it back and handed it to local workers in a cooperative reform, and then taken it back once again to auction it off to a private landowner. Through the twists and turns, eighty years of ranching and reshuffle after reshuffle had left the valley’s natural ecosystems and wildlife damaged and struggling. But the same land power that had painted a target on this environment could also be used to protect it from harm.
With the stroke of a pen, Chilean president Michelle Bachelet accepted Tompkins Conservation’s donation of some 200,000 acres of land spanning the Chacabuco Valley and several other smaller properties. The Bachelet government agreed to combine these lands with two adjacent publicly owned protected areas to form Patagonia National Park, with a size of over 700,000 acres of land. At the same ceremony, Bachelet expanded two other national parks and created two more. Kris Tompkins, a former CEO of the outdoor apparel company Patagonia, and her late husband, North Face founder and philanthropist Doug Tompkins, had played a role in fostering all of these natural spaces through strategic land purchases and conservation efforts.
“This is not only an unprecedented effort of preservation,” Bachelet remarked to the gathering of government officials, conservationists, and philanthropists as a group of guanacos (an animal closely related to alpacas) grazed in the valley behind her. “It is an invitation to imagine other forms to use our land. To create other economic activities. To use natural resources in a way that does not exhaust them. To have sustainable development—the only stable economic development in the long term.… The path to creating the network of national parks shows us what we have, who we are, and what we can achieve.”
Kris Tompkins declared that the creation of the parks affirmed “the conviction that it is possible to leave future generations a world where they can prosper and where all species have the space and security to prosper.” It marked the fulfillment of a dream she first had in April 1994 as she was lying in a tent in the eastern Chacabuco Valley for the first time. When I spoke with her in 2023, she recalled the conversation she and Doug had had then as they puzzled over how to restore the natural landscape in what they saw as “one of the jewels of the country.”1
The parks deal was the culmination of decades of involvement in land conservation in Chile for Doug and Kris Tompkins. They had begun purchasing land in southern Chile for the purpose of conservation in the early 1990s. Initially, they kept their intentions to themselves, but gradually they began talking about their goals in a more public fashion. Their approach was reminiscent of what John D. Rockefeller Jr. had done in Wyoming when he had set about helping to create and expand the Grand Teton National Park, purchasing and patching together a disparate set of ranchlands surrounding the region’s iconic mountains. With the support of several other donors, the couple and their nonprofits, later combined into Tompkins Conservation, acquired roughly 1 million acres over several decades. The aim was to piece together contiguous lands that could be stitched into bigger protected parklands. Some of these lands were lightly used or nearly abandoned, leaving their ecosystems nearly intact. Others, including the Chacabuco Valley, had suffered extensive degradation.
Tompkins Conservation donated its massive collection of properties to Chile in several rounds. One month after the January ceremony, they handed over 700,000 acres of land to form Pumalín Douglas Tompkins National Park. “National parks, monuments and other public lands,” Kris wrote just after the first donation, “remind us that regardless of race, economic standing or citizenship, we all depend on a healthy planet for our survival.”2
It was the largest public-private partnership in land restoration and conservation that the world has ever seen. By working together, the philanthropists and Chile’s government accomplished a conservation feat that neither could have accomplished alone. Marcelo Mena, the minister of the environment who had worked to convert the land deal into law, called it “the most important ecological act of this century” and told me that “it changes the destiny and identity of Chile moving forward toward one of conservation.”3
It has enormous consequences for the environment. From 2014 to 2018, Chile went from protecting just 4 percent of its land and sea area to protecting 36 percent.4 Vast areas of pristine land are now destined for preservation. An estimated 900 million tons of carbon will remain naturally sequestered in the soils and plant life of these parks. And expansive landscapes that had been degraded through land settlement policy and heavy human use are now recovering, embracing the return of nature and its wild beauty.
Population growth and the increasing demand for land and food over the past several centuries have driven human societies to eliminate large swaths of wilderness and replace them with farmland, housing, and urban developments.
Evidence of the harm this has caused is all around us. Consider the western plains of the United States. In the span of a few decades beginning in the late 1800s, a tidal wave of homesteaders seeking land in the prairies uprooted one of the largest grasslands on earth, home to millions of buffalo, antelope, birds, and other species. Many species were driven to near extinction, and the American West today is now a heavily fertilized blanket of monocropped fields crisscrossed by roads and dotted by mere pockets of native habitats. Settlers seeking land for ranching and logging in Brazil have likewise gnawed away at the Amazon rainforest. Millions of acres of virgin rainforest have been clear-cut in the past half century, destroying ecosystems and severely damaging the forest’s ability to serve as a carbon trap for the world. There are hundreds of similar stories spanning countries across the world.
As societies around the globe now struggle against climate change, the enormity of reckoning with past harms can boggle the mind. Entirely reversing resource and biodiversity losses in the American prairies or Brazilian Amazon seems wholly unrealistic, and the human population is far larger than it was a century ago, making land reclamation impractical. Rural poverty and the desire for a comfortable life in developing countries makes sustainable environmental practices difficult to enact and maintain when they are bound to conflict with much-needed short-term economic growth.
At the same time, there is an explosion of creativity and investment in attempts to conserve and protect land and remaining resources and to improve them for future generations. Some of these efforts are proving more promising than initially anticipated. This chapter tells the story of how two countries, Chile and Spain, have managed to make advances in protecting and even restoring the environment through land conservation. They have done so by flipping the polarity of land power to achieve completely different goals from those pursued in the past. Land power has in a sense been used against itself, to return the land to its natural state of simply land.
In Chile, two American philanthropists, Doug and Kris Tompkins, started by buying up large swaths of land for preservation in the 1990s. They then struck an unprecedented land deal with the Chilean government to turn that land into national parks if Chile would contribute more land and protect it. The partnership forged a sprawling new series of national parks that are protecting natural habitats and restoring damaged ecosystems on formerly settled lands at a large scale through a program of “rewilding.”
Decades earlier, in Spain, an ambitious government program of land settlement after the country’s civil war began converting arid and swampy areas into farmland through irrigation and drainage projects. As the program crept into one of Europe’s largest marshlands, threatening bird and marine habitats, environmental activists organized to halt the damage and reverse some of it. The World Wildlife Fund and Spain’s Doñana National Park were born out of these efforts, and they left a legacy of environmental activism both in Spain and abroad.
Land conservation efforts in this vein are a different kind of land reshuffling than the settler, tiller, cooperative, and collective reforms that dominated over the past several centuries. If anything, they are like a reverse settler reform in that they take humans off the land or encourage them to tread far more lightly on it. However, as in Chile and Spain, they do not necessarily hand these lands back to indigenous communities that previously inhabited them. Those communities may have been entirely destroyed or removed elsewhere, and if they still exist, they are at most invited as partners to steward the land rather than to physically return to it.
Reclaiming and restoring the natural environment through land conservation requires overwhelming any local land power. Existing landowners have to be coaxed, bought, or badgered out. In their place a new conception of that power is installed, fused with state power and the notion of landholding vested in the nation as collective patrimony. The environmental ills of personalized land power are substituted for the broader environmental and climate interests of society as a whole. Like all types of land reshuffling, these reforms lock in a new trajectory far different from the extractive, environmentally disruptive path of the past.
CHILE’S CONSERVATION TURN
Chile’s Patagonia region is a stunning natural gem, studded by volcanoes and fjords, vast primary forests and grasslands, and a wealth of unique animal and plant species, all crowned by rugged snow-tipped mountains. Spanning the southern third of the country, it is home to dozens of unique forest and grassland ecosystems. And it contains some of the richest land in South America in terms of carbon storage, making it a critical resource in the fight against global climate change.5
Central Patagonia, home to many of the new national parks the Tompkinses were involved in, remained largely unexplored and unsettled by outsiders into the late 1800s owing to its remote and rugged nature. Within the Chacabuco Valley of what is now Patagonia National Park and the surrounding areas, the indigenous Tehuelche (Aónikenk) people had lived for millennia as hunter-gatherers, following the movement of guanacos and transiting the dry, cold, windy valley.
Outsider interest in the area increased when Chile almost went to war with Argentina in 1902 over a border dispute in Patagonia. At issue was the dividing line between the two countries, which had been described in an 1881 border treaty but remained ambiguous: interpretations diverged in central Patagonia over whether it was the line of highest mountains dividing the Atlantic and Pacific watersheds, or instead the drainage basins, that marked the delimitation.
The dispute and fears over cross-border encroachment drove the Chilean government to craft a policy of land settlement aimed at the area in order to populate and secure the Chilean side. It also viewed the region as a new frontier for resource extraction and production. The government began doling out enormous ranching and logging concessions over publicly owned lands on attractive leasing terms to entrepreneurs who in return promised to encourage broader settlement, build infrastructure, and produce for growing domestic markets.6
One of the largest land concessions in the Patagonia region went to a business association known as the Sociedad Explotadora del Baker in 1904. It incorporated the entire Baker River basin, spanning some ninety miles from north to south and running from the southern shore of Lake General Carrera, which saddles the border between Chile and Argentina, out to the Pacific Ocean. The Chacabuco Valley is one of the offshoots of the Baker River within the broader river basin.
One of the earliest descriptions of the area before it became a target of settlement comes from the diary of William Norris, whom the Baker business had hired to scout the area for suitability to logging and ranching. On his first sojourn to the region in 1905, Norris called it “beautiful country covered with forests and grasslands.” “When we first entered the Baker country,” he wrote, “we saw plenty of guanaco and ostrich in the open valleys.… Of pumas there must have been plenty when we first arrived.… There is a very fine specimen of mountain deer called ‘huemul,’ but as there is so much cover they are seldom seen.”7 Over the next few years Norris drove thousands of sheep and cattle into the area through a pass in the Andes Mountains leading from Argentina. Norris did not encounter Tehuelches, and there are no historical accounts of European explorers meeting Tehuelches in the valley. By the early 1900s most of them lived farther south, perhaps because of dwindling numbers from earlier European contact.
The Sociedad Explotadora del Baker foundered in subsequent years and another business group, the Sociedad Hobbs y Compañía, organized to explore ranching possibilities in the concession area. As Hobbs sought to draw in more participants to develop different areas of the concession, it reached out to a business group called Bridges and Reynolds, whose associates had successfully managed large land concessions at the southern tip of Chile’s Tierra del Fuego. The group nominated Lucas Bridges to explore the Chacabuco Valley area. Bridges’s father was a British immigrant who had founded an Anglican mission in Tierra del Fuego.
Lucas Bridges traveled on horseback and on foot through arduous and lawless parts of Patagonia for several weeks to the Chacabuco Valley in 1916. He recounted in his journal from the trip that he thought it would be “very difficult and expensive” to fulfill the government’s mandate to open up a new route to a port through the valley or along the Baker River. “Nonetheless,” he wrote, “that place with its abundant streams, sheltered and verdant valleys, and pleasant climate and my passion for adventures, were irresistible to me.”8
Bridges set up an initial ranching operation in the north of the valley and built houses for the workers and administrators at the valley’s windswept eastern entrance in the steppe, close to the border with Argentina. But he quickly moved on before it was well established, first to fight in World War I for Great Britain and then to settle in Rhodesia. Hobbs’s company struggled with personnel turnover and financial difficulties in the intervening years. In 1921, it again reached out to Bridges, and he returned to the Chacabuco Valley.
Reenergized on the project, Bridges attracted Chilean and European settlers to the area to work at the property. At a frenetic pace and with a daring that shocked even his workers, he surveyed local rivers, dynamited mountainsides to build bridges, and forged a route to transport and warehouse products. Then in the course of the 1920s he ramped up the size of the sheep herd in Chacabuco to 70,000 animals.9 The sheep were used for wool for domestic and foreign markets as well as for domestic meat consumption. Eventually, a small neighboring town called Cochrane sprouted up with most of its inhabitants working for Bridges. Bridges had successfully driven settlement in the area and established new economic activity on the land that settlers took part in.
Bridges did not carefully keep track of the local environment and ecology. But it is evident from the size of his operation as well as his descriptions of some of the ranch’s activities that the local environment paid a toll. Bridges tore up native steppe grasslands to plant hay for the sheep, exposing the young, thin glacial soils of the valley to erosion and the riverbeds and wetlands to heaps of silt. He fenced in what had previously been open natural areas, carving up habitats of species such as guanacos, rheas, foxes, deer, and pumas. And he ordered workers to cut down primary old growth forest to harvest wood for building bridges, housing, and barns and to serve as fuel for heat. The massive herds of sheep trampled native bunch grasses; eroded soils that take thousands of years to build up in the cold, dry climate; and crowded out endemic animal life. The only way to turn a profit on land characterized by poor soils for agriculture and limitations on the regrowth of grasses for grazing animals was with large-scale ranching. Within a decade, Bridges’s myopic campaign to develop a massive ranch to serve Chilean markets had severely compromised the rich natural environment. By the time of the 1943 census, the Chacabuco Valley estate, run by the refashioned business association Sociedad Valle Chacabuco under the name Lago Bertrand, was divided up into forty-eight fenced sections and had nearly 75,000 sheep and 400 cattle.10
The Chilean government’s encouragement of land settlement and economic development in the area also extended beyond Bridges’s operation, with similar consequences for the natural environment. Other independent land settlers came to the area both within the Chacabuco Valley and outside it, in part with the promise of gaining ownership over land through a settler-type reform. They dedicated themselves to ranching, exploiting the forests, and engaging in small-scale agriculture.11
The Chacabuco Valley land concession, the basis of today’s Patagonia National Park, 1945. (Credit: Rewilding Chile.)
Many settlers clear-cut or burned the forests to open up their land and, in accordance with government guidelines, to assert ownership through use. “The culture [of settlers] was never one oriented toward protecting the environment,” one inhabitant of the town of Cochrane, just outside the Chacabuco Valley, recently put it. “In the past there was a very aggressive relationship [with nature] because they had to adapt and survive.”12 The soils of the region eroded and desertified, eliminating wildlife, altering plant communities, and even changing the course of rivers. One town at the base of the Aysén River, Puerto Aysén, had to be moved three times as the river changed course as a result of environmental interruptions.
Bridges hired some settlers but at times battled with others and with politicians over control of the land within his state concession. Consequently, the land he managed waxed and waned in size, at times reaching nearly half a million acres, but always centered on roughly 200,000 acres spanning all of the Chacabuco Valley and some of its immediate surroundings.13
the broader chilean economy shifted dramatically in the late 1800s and early 1900s over the course of the Chacabuco’s settlement and conversion into extensive ranchland. Expanding international trade and growing urban centers increased agricultural demand. The amount of land used for agriculture doubled from 1875 to 1930 as the farming frontier expanded.14 But access to that land was starkly unequal. In 1928, less than 3 percent of the largest landholders in the country controlled 80 percent of the arable land.15 A landlord-peasant system of landholding prevailed, with a large portion of the rural population toiling as dependent workers for large landowners. In these conditions, peasants had few freedoms.
Political reforms that gave greater voice to these workers eventually generated pressure for land reallocation. The election of Eduardo Frei to the presidency in 1964 was a game changer. Frei quickly set to reshuffling land by purchasing large estates from private landholders for reallocation among workers. A few years later, in 1967, Congress passed a new law empowering the state to acquire private land for reallocation through expropriation and to recall state-owned land for the same purpose.
Frei pressed ahead with this agenda, and his successor, Salvador Allende, doubled down on it. By 1973, when Allende was toppled in a reactionary military coup, nearly 6,000 estates covering 25 million acres of land had been reallocated among roughly 54,000 peasant households.16 The reform enveloped the better part of all the agricultural land in the country. The government fashioned most of these former estates into worker cooperatives in a classic style of cooperative reform. Hoping to ensure continuity of production, the government retained formal ownership of the land.
The cooperative reform enveloped the Chacabuco Valley and other land concessions in the Patagonia region. The government withdrew its leasing concession in the valley from several of Bridges’s business partners who had continued ranching operations after Bridges died in 1949. It put the land into the hands of interested men from the broader region who had farming experience but no land of their own. The government eventually forged a cooperative from twenty-two families and oversaw its functioning through the national land agency while retaining official ownership of the land.17 Meanwhile, the government also designated two national reserves out of lands bordering the cooperative that would eventually be incorporated into Patagonia Park.
The land agency gave the new cooperative sheep and cattle it had purchased from Bridges’s partners when it withdrew the concession, and it also built them houses. In return, families had to make regular payments to the agency in order to build capital in these investments and make them their own. One former cooperative member, Luisa Galindo, told me that families had “hoped that the land would eventually become ours too.”18 She recounted how the cooperative had split the valley and surrounding mountains into sectors, one for each family, and everyone seasonally contributed to collective tasks such as shearing the sheep and tending portions of the herds in various pockets of the valley and its offshoots.
Cooperative families faced a steep learning curve at the start. The land agency lacked expertise in administering the ranch, as did many of the beneficiaries, and some departed to be replaced by others. But things settled in and families built a life there. They sought to care for their herds of sheep and cattle and grew them successfully following many of the standard ranching practices of the time. But those practices put more pressure on the already damaged soils and grasses. Families also drew from the southern beech forests to build fences and heat their homes, converted parts of the steppe into fields to grow vegetables for household consumption, and hired bounty hunters to cull the puma population that preyed on sheep.19
The challenges grew within just a few years. In 1973, General Augusto Pinochet toppled Salvador Allende in a military coup and set about reversing the land reallocation program. The government began dismantling cooperatives as it sought to forge a more capitalist economy and stoke economic growth. It returned some cooperative land to former landowners and auctioned off other lands to private parties promising to put them into production. With the land agency overseeing cooperatives operating under new military administrators, the members of the cooperative in the Chacabuco Valley lived in something of a purgatory, awaiting their fate while continuing to work the land.20 The prospect of owning the land faded, fostering poor land stewardship. Some cooperative members abruptly withdrew, taking their investments in animals and infrastructure with them.
Eventually, in the early 1980s, the military government forced remaining cooperative workers off the land. It sold the property at auction to a Chilean entrepreneur of Belgian descent named François de Smet. The de Smet family, fleeing the ruins of Europe after World War II, had arrived in an area north of the Chacabuco Valley in 1949 seeking the promise of frontier land from the Chilean government. Starting from scratch, the family had begun by farming and harvesting timber.21 Just over thirty years later they were now able to purchase the Chacabuco Valley.
The environmental toll of the cooperative era and the poorly managed transition became clear as soon as the de Smets entered Chacabuco Valley. When I spoke with Charlie de Smet, who began administering the valley in 1981, he told me, “We received a very disordered and deteriorated property, in terms of the land and soils, the houses, and the machinery.”22 Cooperative members had taken, sold, or eaten most of the remaining sheep and cattle and stripped valuable parts of the ranching infrastructure that they felt they rightfully owned. The de Smets had to start over again, rebuilding infrastructure and purchasing livestock for the ranch.
The de Smets grew their new herd to nearly 30,000 sheep and cattle, and the ranch came to serve as home to several dozen families who helped to run it. It was the main employer for people living in the neighboring town of Cochrane. Some of the workers the de Smets hired had been inscribed in the former cooperative. Workers often viewed the valley as their home and saw its identity as inextricably tied to ranching. The ranch shipped wool and sheep to Chile’s populated central valley and to international markets. It also sold meat locally.23
The de Smets managed smaller herds than in the time of Lucas Bridges and paid greater attention to sustainability. They rotated animals across different patches of land to avoid exhausting the pastureland. In the summer they pushed their herds out of the valley into the surrounding hills and mountains to graze so that the bottom valley could rest, and then they brought animals back to it during the winter months. And they tried to rehabilitate endangered deer populations and steward guanaco populations.24
Despite these improvements, the damaged natural landscape struggled to recuperate without a rest from endless extraction. The imperatives of running a ranch that could support the family and employ members of the local community generated tensions with the environment. The large herds of sheep continued to trample on and uproot the delicate steppe grasslands, both in the valley floor and in higher elevation basins and valley offshoots. In contrast to the native guanaco, which graze grasses and leave their roots intact, livestock tear at them and uproot portions. Cattle grazing in the beech forests at higher elevations stripped saplings from the understory, compromising forest health. Fences also interrupted habitats. Many native animals and plants remained under pressure or were crowded out of the valley, and several invasive plant species thrived.
In 2012, recalling her first visit to the valley in the mid-1990s in vivid terms, Kris Tompkins wrote, “When I drove through the Chacabuco Valley for the first time, I saw the extra-high ‘guanaco fences’ designed to keep these first-rate jumpers out of the best bottom grasslands, which were reserved for the cattle on the estancia. My eyes glazed over looking out on the tens of thousands of sheep grazing the bunch grasses up and down the valley. The grasses looked patchy and dead. Nothing left for wildlife. Previously one of the most biologically rich areas of Patagonia, the Chacabuco Valley was a sea of sheep and cattle.”25
It was something she had seen in plenty of other places previously. “I come from a ranching family,” she later told me, “and it’s a story that’s played out around the world. Generally speaking, livestock are put on the land too heavily, the management system is rudimentary, and the grasses get overgrazed. In the case of Patagonian grasslands, it only took 100 years and they were completely decimated.”26 Kris and her husband Doug would upturn the fate of the Chacabuco Valley once they began their massive conservation project.
kris tompkins was the first CEO of Patagonia Inc. and helped build the company into a leading outdoor gear and clothing brand. Doug Tompkins founded the outdoor gear company North Face and cofounded the Esprit clothing company. He first traveled to Patagonia in the 1960s for climbing and mountaineering. The two married in 1993 and settled on leaving their roles in business and dedicating themselves instead to conservation efforts.
The Tompkinses’ land conservation efforts began in Chile in the 1990s with what would become Pumalín Douglas Tompkins National Park. Through his nonprofit foundation, which subsequently grew and became Tompkins Conservation, Doug Tompkins purchased roughly half a million acres of land between 1991 and 1994 in central Patagonia, mostly from private absentee landowners. The punishing landscape had made the land nearly impossible to settle. The area is covered with temperate rainforest, fjords, and towering mountains, and it is home to one of the largest remaining populations of the rare alerce tree, a relative of the redwood. The Tompkinses expanded the protected territory to over 700,000 acres over the course of the next fifteen years and moved to a property next to it. Meanwhile, Tompkins Conservation made other enormous land purchases in the area, including a 200,000-acre parcel that would form the basis of the nearby Corcovado National Park.27
These immense private land purchases by an outsider started to turn heads in a country where conservation philanthropy was virtually unknown. Conspiracy theories arose that played into various racist tropes and national and local fears, including the notions that Doug Tompkins was trying to create a Jewish territory, a CIA base, or a nuclear waste dump in Patagonia. Politicians and the military called the land acquisitions at Pumalín—which ran from the ocean to Argentina, effectively cutting the country in half—a national security threat. They also worried that he might block important national infrastructure projects from running through the area.
While rumors swirled, Tompkins Conservation approached the government with an unusual proposal: to turn the large plot in the Corcovado area over to the Chilean government if it would form a national park from that land and adjacent federal land. Both the president and the military ultimately endorsed the idea, creating Corcovado National Park in 2005. The government also declared Pumalín a nature sanctuary, increasing its protections.
Kris Tompkins’s conservation nonprofit purchased the Chacabuco Valley Estate as these negotiations with the government played out. This purchase again raised eyebrows across the country. And it met with stiff opposition from many locals, whose livelihoods and histories were deeply intertwined with ranching in the valley. Generations of locals had worked in various capacities for the ranch in the valley across the many changes in ownership. Some were even born there. They considered the land and the ranch as part of their identity and held tight the history and narrative of their forebears as pioneers. Locals also resented feeling excluded from the transformation of the land and feared the erosion of their cultural practices by an influx of outsiders. The opposition was not uniform, however. Many younger people supported the conservation goals for the area, as did people who stood to gain from ecotourism.28
By the time Kris Tompkins’s nonprofit signed the purchase of the Chacabuco Valley, the natural landscape was severely compromised. Eighty years of grazing massive herds of sheep and cattle on the delicate grasslands had left a trail of damaged grasses, invasive species, and entirely barren patches of land suffering soil erosion. Hundreds of miles of fencing crisscrossed the valley and limited the natural range of wild animals, especially the iconic guanacos. Some animal species, such as the South American ostrich (also known as the rhea), had nearly been driven to local extinction. And hunting had dramatically thinned the number of pumas. As the ecosystem’s top predator, pumas played a critical role in eliminating weak animals, keeping animal disease at bay. The remains of puma prey also provided food for other birds and animals.
The Tompkinses and their conservation organizations nonetheless saw enormous potential to restore the valley’s natural ecosystem. They set about rehabilitating and “rewilding” the Chacabuco Valley after purchasing the estate and its vast sheep herds in 2004. The team wound down the ranching operation and sold off the sheep over the course of several years. With the help of volunteers, they tore out some 400 miles of fencing in order to reopen the valley to the free movement of native animals. A restoration ecologist then collected soil samples across the valley and developed a plan to reseed damaged grasslands by planting native grasses and to root out invasive species. And the group took measures to protect and enhance the populations of predators, including pumas and foxes, as well as endangered animals such as the rhea and a threatened species of deer.
Within a decade, the valley’s natural environment started to thrive as it had for millennia prior to land settlement and ranching. Native grasses sprouted up in the valleys and patched up eroded areas in the delicate steppe, breathing in carbon from the air along the way. Pumas, guanacos, rheas, deer, and dozens of other species both large and small began roaming freely without the confines of fences, and their populations grew in number. There are still plenty of remnants from the former ranching era, such as fenceposts, shepherd huts in the mountains, and vehicle tracks to different sectors of the valley. Portions of the grassland and forest are still struggling to reestablish themselves and will require considerably more time to do so. But gazing across the expanse of the Chacabuco Valley from above, it is increasingly hard to detect many of the human imprints that marked it so deeply for a century.
As the Chacabuco Valley started to recover, the Tompkinses began working with the Chilean government to secure its protected status in perpetuity. They formulated a bold plan to donate more than 1 million acres of the land they had amassed for preservation if the Chilean government would agree to commit additional public land and to turn the combined areas into a network of national parks in Patagonia. In 2015, shortly before Doug Tompkins died in a tragic kayaking accident, he presented the proposal to Chile’s president, Michelle Bachelet.
The complex proposal described a project that would require political leadership as well as government coordination and resources to carry out. Identifying, designating, and protecting such a vast collection of lands that had been subject to settlement and business concessions for a century was an enormous task. And it required shifting the vision of development in Patagonia from extractive and intensive land use industries, such as logging and ranching, to ecotourism and sustainability.
The Bachelet government recognized and shared this vision and worked vociferously to bring it to life. As Bachelet put it in a reflection on the creation of the new parks, “The key is to create conditions for our citizens to live in a high-quality environment and have sustainable development opportunities.”29 In the end, her government more than met the Tompkinses’ proposal. It contributed over 9 million acres of land for preservation and created a series of new national parks, including Patagonia Park, while expanding several others. It drastically expanded the range of Chile’s national park system while extending protections over rare plants, animals, and entire ecosystems.
The Chilean government took over control and administration of the park lands in 2018, supported by conservation foundations affiliated with the Tompkinses. Since that time, Chile’s parks have become an increasing attraction for visitors both near and far who seek solace, beauty, and adventure in the natural environment, all rooted in the preservation of land and its protection from wide-scale human transformation in a world where that is becoming increasingly rare. “It represents a new future for Chile,” reflected the former minister of the environment who worked to secure the parks deal. “And it has enhanced the spirit of collaboration among government bodies in the service of ecological conservation.”30 This episode shows how a turn in land power in support of sustainability can set countries on a new path to protecting the environment.
WILD SPAIN
In 1961, as Chile’s Chacabuco Valley was under intensive ranching, the Netherlands’ Prince Bernhard, the inaugural president of the newly formed World Wildlife Fund, sent a letter to Spanish leader General Francisco Franco as part of one of the organization’s first conservation efforts. A rising Spanish naturalist named José Antonio Valverde had actually penned the letter. Valverde had fallen in love with a sprawling series of marshlands and dunes known as Doñana, a delta region on Spain’s southwestern coast where the Guadalquivir River spills into the ocean. The letter’s request was bold and simple: “to create a reserve for wild birds in the Guadalquivir marshes.”31
Nearly a decade prior, in 1952, a bird enthusiast and heir to the fortune of Spain’s famed González Byass winery, Mauricio González-Gordon, had invited the zoologist Francisco Bernis and Valverde, a student of Bernis at the time, to examine and track birds on his property in the heart of Doñana. Bernis and Valverde were deeply moved by what they encountered: vast wetlands and dunes teeming with bird and sea life, “true national monuments” of wildlife that inspired awe and reflected beauty.32 Because the Doñana wetlands are located at the intersection of the European and African continents, they serve as a critical breeding ground and stopover point for millions of migratory birds. They are also home to a wide diversity of marine and terrestrial animal life, including the endangered Iberian lynx, and contain many hundreds of species of native flora.
Bernis and Valverde learned about grave threats to Doñana’s landscape during their visit. The natural ecosystems of the area had suffered gradual degradation for several hundred years after the Spanish monarchy granted the land to the local nobility for settlement, and it had become a famed hunting reserve. But the fascist government that arose from the ashes of Spain’s civil war in the 1930s posed an unprecedented hazard. Political and economic pressures led General Franco to embark on a campaign to convert underused land around the country into productive areas.
As part of that campaign, the Spanish government had approved an ambitious reforestation plan in the western part of Doñana. It aimed to convert sandy areas and bits of marshland into vast plantations of pine and eucalyptus to produce paper pulp and a material similar to rubber at a time when the country was isolated from the international arena and global markets. Millions of trees that tapped into Doñana’s critical underground aquifer were planted at the western fringes of Doñana in 1952 and 1953.33 At the same time, the government was building an irrigation canal in Doñana’s eastern marshes to support a settler reform in the area, and it had begun draining tens of thousands of acres of ecologically sensitive marshlands. Bernis penned a letter to Franco, which González-Gordón delivered, begging him “to protect the Coto [Doñana] from its imminent industrialization.”34 The petition fell on deaf ears, and development began closing in at the edges of Doñana.
Valverde’s trip with Bernis marked the start of his obsession with the Doñana area. He dreamed of turning it into a bird preserve. Valverde returned to Doñana several times in the ensuing years, most prominently as part of a “Doñana Expedition” lasting for several weeks in 1957. That trip included some of Europe’s most renowned naturalists, ornithologists, and nature photographers. The team filmed a documentary titled Wild Spain that showed Doñana to the public at a mass scale for the first time. He also toured scientific conferences in Europe to spread awareness about the importance of the Guadalquivir marshes to bird migration routes.
In 1961, a group of the Doñana Expedition members formed the World Wildlife Fund (WWF, now the World Wide Fund for Nature) with the aim of protecting nature around the globe. One of its first objectives was to protect the Doñana by raising funds to purchase land there for conservation.35 Valverde led the effort, crowdsourcing funds for an initial land purchase in Doñana.
When General Franco received the letter from Prince Bernhard in 1961, he was looking for opportunities to reduce the country’s international isolation. He turned to Spain’s main scientific body, the Higher Council of Scientific Research, to consider the request. In an ironic twist of fate, the council’s head sought out the leading expert on Doñana to craft a response, someone he admired and had professionally encouraged previously—Valverde himself. Without Franco’s knowledge, Valverde gleefully responded to his own letter on behalf of Spain: “From Spain we are completely in agreement with that lofty initiative.”36
After some negotiation, in 1963 the World Wildlife Fund, with additional support from Franco’s government, purchased just under 17,000 acres of the property that Mauricio González-Gordón owned along with two other families. Franco’s government and the WWF put Valverde in charge of administering it as a biological reserve. Encroachment on the marshes nonetheless continued in the next several years as most of the left bank of the Guadalquivir was turned into farmland.
The WWF and Valverde continued their efforts to expand and protect the Doñana reserve. They raised funds to purchase additional properties over the next several years and beat back a government attempt to exploit the heart of Doñana by building a mammoth dam at the southern end of the marshes. And in 1969 they achieved what few had thought possible: the declaration of Doñana as a national park covering 86,000 acres of land. Subsequent legislation in 1978, just after Spain’s transition to democracy, expanded the national park to nearly 126,000 acres. And in 1989 the government of Andalusia designated an additional buffer area, larger than the park itself, as a reserved natural area intended to protect the national park from neighboring local settlements.
Today Doñana National Park and associated nature reserve areas form the largest biological reserve in all of Europe. Doñana is also Europe’s largest marshland. Many portions of the marshes in the broader Doñana area that existed seventy-five years ago were swallowed up by land settlement and industrial projects, and what remains is under threat as a result of climate change and the water demands and pollution of nearby farms, tourist resorts, and mines. But environmental protections and restoration have also advanced in recent decades. The remaining portions of the original Doñana landscape stand as one of Europe’s last great natural gems. And the fight to preserve Doñana’s land helped to spark an environmental movement that has achieved protections on lands across the country and beyond, and that has forestalled dozens of initiatives that would have resulted in major damage to the land and the natural and human life it sustains.
the doñana area formed at the end of the last glacial period as glaciers melted and sea levels rose, creating a series of marshes, lagoons, estuaries, and ponds on the southwest coast of Spain where the Guadalquivir River runs into the Atlantic Ocean and forms a delta. The area progressively filled with sand and silt from the tides and currents of the Atlantic Ocean and the Guadalquivir River. Shifting dunes and tidal bars along the coast protect the inland wetlands and hem them in.
Humans have inhabited and traversed the Doñana region for thousands of years. Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, and other civilizations left traces in the area. But fundamental alterations to the landscape and the natural resources it hosted did not occur until the Spanish Crown recaptured the territory from the Moors and began granting it out in an exclusive type of settler reform to local nobility. In the late 1400s, the third Duke of Medina Sidonia introduced deer to the area for hunting, drove out wolves, began grazing cattle in parts of the marshes, and started to harvest forested areas around the wetlands. This lineage of dukes largely held the land into the 1800s and slowly transformed it through hunting, ranching, and the introduction of pine trees for forestry purposes.37 Eventually other nobles and wealthy elites came to buy up or lease parts of the area, and in the early 1900s Spain’s king hunted frequently in Doñana, accompanied by royal guests.
Hunting, forestry, and limited ranching degraded parts of the marshland habitats and altered marine and terrestrial ecosystems. An experiment in draining and diking a northern section of the marshes in the 1920s and 1930s directly destroyed marshland but was initially rather limited. An existential threat to Doñana’s natural environment only emerged when a fascist government came to power in Spain in 1939 and sought to convert the area into land suitable for agriculture and logging through large-scale irrigation works and forest plantations.
Spain in the 1930s was a preindustrial society of haves and have-nots. Half the workforce labored in agriculture, and a large portion of it as wage laborers without their own farms. In southern Spain, where landlessness was most acute, the top 1 percent of large landowners together held more than half the land.38 This stark inequality fueled strikes and land invasions in the countryside and generated enormous pressure for the reallocation of private land to the poor. A highly controversial, predominantly tiller-style reform began in 1936 following an electoral win by the left, but it quickly crumbled as a coup threw the country into civil war.39 Three years of bitter partisan warfare and atrocities followed until General Francisco Franco and his nationalist forces crushed the left and secured their hold on power.
Firmly allied to large landowners, Franco sought to alleviate land pressure on their estates and avoid a rerun of the civil war. He also sought to increase food production in a country reeling from the twin forces of civil war and the Great Depression, and now marginalized on the European stage just as World War II was breaking out. The plan was simple: put more land into agricultural production. Inspired by programs such as Mussolini’s efforts to drain Italy’s swamps and recover agricultural land, Franco’s government aimed to irrigate arid lands and to drain marshes and swamps in order to make them suitable for farming. It would then build new farming villages in these areas and relocate agricultural workers to them.
The government purchased portions of private farms for settlement and repurposed some national lands and farmlands owned by municipalities, paving the way for a blend of settler- and tiller-style reforms. From the 1940s to the 1970s, the government created almost 300 new villages and built more than 30,000 houses. It built dams and channels, dug irrigation ditches, and constructed infrastructure such as roads and power lines. The program came to encompass nearly 2.5 million acres of land.40
The Doñana region became one of the government’s targets for land conversion through this program. Engineers, agronomists, and military men envisioned transforming the area into farmland by draining the swamps and installing infrastructure. They were encouraged by an experiment by a private company in the northern fringes of the Doñana region that had built dikes and dug drainage channels in the 1920s and 1930s and had eventually begun cultivating rice.
Construction on the Lower Guadalquivir Canal began in 1940 with the intent of eventually draining the swamps on the left bank of the river and bringing fresh water to the area in order to wash the salts from the land and make it more suitable for farming. It was a massive and labor-intensive effort that took more than twenty years to complete. The project eventually became known as the Prisoner’s Canal, because it relied heavily on the labor of thousands of political prisoners from Spain’s civil war and its aftermath.41
Bernis and Valverde embarked on their fateful trip to Doñana as the canal progressed and the government began draining portions of Doñana’s marshes. The government declared the transformation of marsh areas into cropland a major national interest shortly after their visit in 1955. At the same time, it began constructing the first new town in the area. It built ten towns from scratch on the left bank in the swamp and on its outskirts over the course of the next decade and constructed over 1,000 homes for new settlers.42 These towns and their agricultural fields eventually swallowed the entirety of the marshes on the left bank of the Guadalquivir, which made up roughly one-third of the marshland in the Doñana area. In place of the marshes arose neatly arrayed fields of rice, cereals, legumes, and vegetables.
The result was severe loss of the natural ecosystems in the Doñana area. Nearly 185,000 acres of marshland were converted into agricultural land.43 This was roughly the same size as the Chacabuco Valley that Tompkins Conservation donated to Chile for Patagonia National Park. It was an immediate blow to bird nesting grounds along with fish, reptile, amphibian, and insect populations. Damage to the remaining natural ecosystems was also severe. Farmers began dumping pesticides on their crops, including DDT, that trickled into the broader water system and compromised bird populations and health. Soil erosion associated with intensive agricultural use increased sedimentation in the marshes, disturbing habitats and the natural flooding cycles.
Meanwhile, the threat from reforestation was brewing on the other side of the Doñana. Millions of pine and eucalyptus trees were planted in sandy areas and on portions of marshland at the western edges of the area in 1952 and 1953. The plantations, especially of eucalyptus, sucked up vast quantities of water from underground aquifers, desiccating the neighboring marshland habitats. Human activity was destroying the Doñana from both sides.
Focused instead on development, Franco visited the area in 1953 to supervise the reforestation progress. He also visited Mauricio González-Gordón’s property in Doñana, where he had hunted years earlier. In contrast to Bernis and Valverde’s visit the previous year to examine and inquire about bird life and the natural ecosystems, Franco had a more self-interested query that stemmed from one of his few hobbies: “Are the plantations good for hunting?” Not long after the visit, González-Gordón paid a visit to Franco to answer that question with a letter written by Bernis but signed by González-Gordón. It described the threats that the reforestation project posed to Doñana’s natural environment—and to its use as a hunting ground.44 A decade later, following the birth of the World Wildlife Fund and the activism of Valverde, Bernis, and other naturalists, a piece of González-Gordón’s property formed the kernel of what would become Doñana National Park.
protections of the natural landscape and its ecosystems at Doñana sought to dial back the damage wrought by the prior settler reforms in and around the park. The government bought out the private landowners within the national park’s boundaries. It banned hunting and agriculture within the park, placed strict limitations on grazing for the remaining cattle, and uprooted invasive species such as eucalyptus trees. These conservation steps enabled damaged habitats and threatened species to regenerate. Tight regulations were imposed on hunting, fishing, and agriculture in the buffer areas of the park.
With José Antonio Valverde’s guidance and political finesse, the government also built a landmark biological station at Doñana that Valverde stepped in to run. It came to manage two reserve areas within the park that are solely devoted to wildlife conservation and scientific research on ecology, biological diversity, and the impacts of development and climate change on the environment. The station started monitoring water quality in Doñana for heavy metals, pesticides, and other contaminants.
Environmental protections in Doñana increased further after its declaration as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994 and in the wake of a 1998 mining disaster that unleashed millions of tons of toxic waste in rivers and marshes upstream from Doñana, destroying bird habitats and killing an enormous number of fish. Environmental groups, including the WWF, along with the Spanish government, the European Union, and even corporate donors, stepped up conservation and restoration efforts.45 In 2005, the government began a marsh restoration project. It reverted several thousand acres of converted agricultural land back into marshland in the northern part of Doñana and annexed them to the national park in 2006. It also reconnected parts of the marshes to the river that had been blocked off from them by walls built in the 1980s and that had reduced the flow of sediments into the marsh, enabling the return of amphibians, reptiles, and fish.46 The government more recently started making major investments to limit water extraction from the aquifers on which the wetlands, as well major agricultural interests, depend. And the provincial government of Andalusia expanded the natural buffer area around the park in 2016. Today some 30 percent of the Doñana region’s wetlands have status as protected natural areas.47
One of the greatest legacies of land conservation in Doñana for the environment actually extends beyond its boundaries. The fight to save Doñana’s natural landscape birthed one of the world’s premier organizations for wilderness preservation and sparked environmental activism across Spain and internationally. Groups like the Spanish Ornithological Society (SEO Birdlife), which Valverde helped to found, Spain’s branch of the WWF, Spain’s branch of Greenpeace, Ecologists in Action (Ecologístas en Acción), and other groups all organize to protect environmentally sensitive Spanish territory threatened by development initiatives. While they have various roots, all have been propelled by the fight against ongoing environmental damage wrought by a myopic focus on development and industrialization that Franco crystallized in areas such as Doñana but that carried on well past his rule. These groups have time and again halted extensions of Franco’s vision to manipulate the natural environment in the service of economic development. One recent example is the shuttering of the Ebro River Transfer, a herculean plan to build a network of dams and pipes to transfer water out of the Ebro river system in the north of Spain into four other river systems hundreds of miles away.
Today a sea of greenhouses under white plastic sheets extend as far as the eye can see to the northwest of Doñana. The sheets cover the area’s billion-dollar strawberry, raspberry, and blueberry industry that feeds Europe’s insatiable berry appetite. These berries are the new eucalyptus trees for Doñana: their growers draw vast quantities of water from the aquifer that feeds Doñana, a considerable portion of it illegally.48 That puts water resources for the marshes at risk. Local water authorities troll the area in search of illegal wells that are overdrawing water resources, but so far they have been no match for the powerful industry.
The fact that Doñana has become progressively encircled by agricultural and industrial activity over the past seventy-five years puts it in peril. In addition to episodic threats such as the 1998 mining disaster, and the water-hungry berry industry, other intensive agricultural use at the edges of the park and the neighboring Matalascañas beach resort are placing major stresses on the water supplies on which local ecosystems rely. The settlements on the left bank of the Guadalquivir that the Franco government created in the 1950s and 1960s, for instance, are now hot spots for environmental violations in the area.49
Water inputs to the Doñana are now half of what they were in the 1960s, and one-fifth of what occurred naturally before modifications to the river systems that feed it.50 Climate change further exacerbates this problem. In the summer of 2022, the last permanent freshwater lagoon in the park temporarily dried up as temperatures soared and a multiyear drought continued.
Precarious as it is, the heart of Doñana nonetheless remains an unrivaled natural area and critical wildlife sanctuary. And it serves as a monument to the idea that humans can repurpose land to reclaim and protect the natural environment. Other natural areas of Spain suffered more than the Doñana area under the Franco government as it transformed the landscape through land settlement. For instance, while it was building the Lower Guadalquivir Canal and new farming settlements in the marshes of the Doñana, it was also building a series of dams and new towns in the Upper Ebro Valley at the foot of the Pyrenees Mountains. While the projects opened up more land for agriculture, they also severely compromised the environment. Agriculture on the new farmlands increased the salinity of local soils and introduced a wave of chemicals and pesticides that poisoned watersheds. The dams and reservoirs also drastically reduced the sediment flowing out to the ecologically rich but sensitive Ebro Delta, weakening it against rising seas and storms and putting bird and sea-life habitats at even graver risk than in Doñana. The government now spends millions of euros annually to truck sediment from the Upper Ebro River to the coast to try to stabilize it and prevent the Mediterranean Sea from running far upstream and washing over the delta.
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humans and the natural environment coevolved for millennia before people started to destroy it. Indigenous peoples in particular are well versed in stewarding natural areas across the globe in ways that preserve biodiversity and natural resources and that respect the environment. Humans can also develop more environmentally friendly practices on private land. Those practices can range from homeowners sowing native plants in their yards in support of pollinators to farmers adopting organic and regenerative agriculture that restores soils and watersheds rather than depleting them.
Governments and their land policies play a critical role in encouraging sustainable practices through regulations, subsidies and other incentives, and protections. The Conservation Reserve Program in the United States, for example, a program under the US Department of Agriculture, provides funding for agricultural producers to take environmentally sensitive lands out of production and undertake active restoration and conservation measures. Government agencies can also contract with private landowners for conservation easements that provide environmental protections for land. Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources runs a program along these lines as it seeks to restore native prairies.
Land use regulations and sustainable management practices will have increasing importance as growing populations continue to place pressure on natural resources and landscapes. They are weaker and messier tools than the creation of parklands, are more subject to reversals, and often have a greater effect on slowing the degradation of the natural environment than on restoring it to its more robust and complete prior state. Humans have yet to harness the willpower and to master the art and science of reconstructing whole ecosystems at a large scale. But if climate change and the extinction crisis are to be slowed or reversed, land has to be put to work for conservation across the globe, and fast.