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WORLD•WATCHWORLD•WATCHVolume 18, Number 4 Vision for a Sustainable World July/August 2005Volume 18, Number 4 Vision for a Sustainable World July/August 2005

BUY NOW, AND SaVE!Preserving South American Wilderness–by Buying It Up

By Frank Zeller

BUY NOW, AND SaVE!Preserving South American Wilderness–by Buying It Up

By Frank Zeller

July/August 2005 | WORLD•WATCH 25

he U.S. millionaire couple Douglas and Kris Tompkinshave just donated two new national parks to Chile andArgentina. So why do so many people there wish theywould just go home?

The answer is a complex blend of anti-American senti-ment, local vested interests, and a cultural opinion gap onecological philanthropy, the practice of buying up wildernessin order to save it. Local critics have vilified the couple assuper-rich gringos who have joined Patagonia’s land scram-ble along with other big-name foreigners, such as Ted Turner,George Soros, and Silvester Stallone. As Doug and Kris Tomp-kins have created 11 wilderness parks covering more than800,000 hectares, they have been accused of being Americanspies, buzzed by Chilean Air Force jets, and even threatenedwith death.

Their story illustrates some of the successes and pitfalls ofthe buy/restore/conserve approach to saving wildlands, whichhas quietly grown into a multi-billion-dollar movement. Astwo of the movement’s pioneers, they have learned an oldlesson: how trying to do good can sometimes make enemies.

affjordables“I bought the first piece of land almost whimsically, becauseit was so cheap and so beautiful,” said a tanned, silver-hairedDoug Tompkins, speaking in the airy loft of his organiza-tion’s local headquarters at Puerto Montt in southern Chile.“That’s where it all started.”

During his business career, Tompkins created the out-door clothing and equipment giant The North Face and co-founded the fashion chain Esprit. Kris Tompkins, his wife,was the CEO of outdoor-wear maker Patagonia. A life-longnature enthusiast, rock climber, white-water kayaker, pilot,and one-time Olympic skier, Doug Tompkins had repeatedlyvisited the rugged fjords of southern Chile since the 1960s andfallen in love with them. In 1989 the couple threw it all in, soldtheir corporate interests, and moved from San Francisco to theisolated region to live a simple lifestyle without electricityand in harmony with nature.

It is easy to see why the place so enchanted them. Denselyforested slopes plunge from snow-capped volcanic peaks intoicy waters. The mist-shrouded old-growth rainforest receives6,000 millimeters of rain per year and shelters giant alercetrees that were already a thousand years old when Jesus walkedthe Earth. Once a common species, similar to the Californiaredwood, the alerce has almost been logged into extinction.

To Doug Tompkins, this extinction crisis is the centralproblem facing the planet and humanity, and the struggle topreserve biodiversity is the primary concern,“the point uponwhich everything turns.” In the early 1990s he started thenon-profit Foundation for Deep Ecology to promote the ideasof Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess. Naess’s philosophyopposes all “mega-technology,” from nuclear power plants totelevision sets and even wind turbines, and calls for a dis-

mantling of the “techno-industrial society.” (Tompkins usescomputers and pilots small planes to and from his projects inChile and Argentina, but is unapologetic. He calls this a “strate-gic embrace” of technology in his life’s singular mission overthe past 15 years to save pristine nature.)

“We have distanced ourselves from nature,” he said. “Wethink we can put it in a glass box and live above it. We haveplaced human cleverness above the wisdom of nature.”The millionaire activist considers other charitable efforts,such as the fight against poverty, illiteracy, or child labor, sec-ondary to preserving biodiversity.“There’s not going to be anysocial justice on a dead planet,” he remarked wrily. Hence hisdecision to put his money where his mouth was and buy uppristine, species-richwild land—lots of it.

Doug Tompkinsfirst dabbled in landconservation in 1979,creating the redwood-studded Esprit Park ona San Francisco cityblock. In 1990, hehelped Britain’s CatSurvival Trust buy10,000 acres of rainfor-est in Misiones,Argentina, now ElPiñalito ProvincialPark. But the couplestarted their land pur-chase campaign inearnest in 1992 with asemi-abandoned ranchin the Chilean provinceof Palena. Addingparcels of land fromhard-up or absenteeowners over the years, they turned it into Parque Pumalín, theYosemite-sized crown jewel of their holdings. They spentmore than US$30 million on the project.

Since then they have used their own money and others’donations to purchase many more areas on both sides of theAndes through their organizations, the Conservation LandTrust and Conservación Patagónica. They would buy old farms,rip out the fences and other man-made structures, and let thebattered fauna and flora recover from agricultural use, oftenintense overgrazing. In Argentina, they recently gave US$1.7million to the Fundación Vida Silvestre Argentina to buy MonteLeon, a 63,000-hectare sheep farm near Rio Gallegos. The localgroup donated it in turn to the cash-strapped national parksservice. Monte Leon is now the country’s first marine nationalpark, protecting elephant seals and Magellanic penguins.

The Tompkinses also bought lands in Argentina’s sub-tropical northern state of Corrientes, in the Esteros del Iberá

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Industrial cultures, in which contact with nature is increasingly restricted,have created worldviews that marginalize nature as a set of economic,and sometimes aesthetic, resources. Tompkins’ worldview is different—in part, apparently, because he sees the planet as mortally wounded.

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wetlands, which may be even more species-rich than Brazil’slegendary Pantanal. Of the 30,000 hectares they hold there, 70percent is reserved for conservation and ecotourism. The cou-ple would like to reintroduce the anteater, pampas deer, andeven jaguars.

In another recent milestone, Doug Tompkins joinedChilean President Ricardo Lagos to inaugurate the CorcovadoNational Park in mid-January. About one-third of the area, orsome 85,000 hectares, were a gift from Tompkins. The rest waspublic and military-owned land. The Tompkins property atPumalín remains a showcase for the couple’s efforts and theirhome for much of the year, but at the end of their lives theyhope to donate Pumalín, too, to the Chilean state.

Trouble in ParadiseAll seemingly praiseworthy intentions. Yet for many yearsDoug and Kris Tompkinses’ eco-philanthropy earned themnothing but trouble and turned them into near-pariahs intheir new chosen home.

The Catholic Church and Chile’s former president,Eduardo Frei, attacked the Pumalín project repeatedly, claim-ing the couple had evicted peasants and blocked traffic along

the region’s onlyroad-and-ferrylifeline, the Car-retera Austral.They vehementlydeny the charges:“Most of the own-ers were absenteeowners who werehappy to sell,” saidDoug Tompkins.“It took us a lot of time to findsome of them.”

Yet the hatecampaign against

the outsiders had some popular appeal in a region where U.S.involvement has often meant CIA-backed coups and supportfor right-wing dictators such as Chile’s Augusto Pinochet. Inscreaming newspaper headlines and on websites, the couplewere accused of dark motives and sinister schemes, some ofthem ridiculous: to replace local cattle with American buffalo,to corner the world granite market, to establish a new Zion-ist state.

“You’ve got a lot of nutcases out there,” said Tompkins.“Couple that with a sensationalist press and stir in some ultra-nationalism… Some of it was real ‘black-helicopter’ stuff. Wetreated it as a kind of sport. We didn’t bother responding tothe 90 percent that were wackos. But some of them providedus with a platform for debate. They gave us a microphone.”

Tompkins touches on the problem in his report The Con-

servation Land Trust: The First Ten Years: “Most of the reasonsfor the opposition stem from the unusual nature of a proj-ect of this type, since the Chilean culture has not seen thiskind of wildlands philanthropy before. Developers, espe-cially politicians anxious to populate, grow, and ‘develop’ theleast hospitable areas of the south Chilean fjord lands, wereparticularly hostile to a project of conservation and ecolog-ically benign tourist development. Nonetheless, it should beremembered that a project of this size in any country wouldarouse opposition from military, resource extraction, andinfrastructure development forces, plus a touch of xeno-phobia and the inevitable misinformation that surroundscontroversial projects.”

Yet, Tompkins said, the educational element of his proj-ects has gone some way toward changing local attitudes inChile. “Today many people come up to me and thank me forwhat I did,” he said. “They say that, had it not been for theseprojects, they would have never thought about conservation.”

Pumalín Park now attracts some 10,000 visitors a year, 80percent of them Chileans. The free-access park has campingand “rustic luxury” cabins, a crafts shop, and a restaurant fea-turing organic food grown on the park’s own farms. Hikingtrails lead through the cold, wet cathedral forest and the 98 per-cent of the park that remains wilderness. Judging by the com-mentaries in the visitors’ book, most who come are delighted.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Tompkins hashad some success. One Chilean legislator and businessman,Sebastián Piñera, has just bought a large slice of land onnearby Chiloé Island and asked the Tompkinses for tips onmanaging it as a reserve.

roots of eco-philanthropyTompkins noted that the idea of eco-philanthropy is not new.Chile’s world-famous Torres del Paine National Park, for exam-ple, was created largely from properties donated by an Italianlandholder. In the United States, too, every national park wasat least partly created with private help, said Tom Butler, whoedited the now-defunct Wild Earth magazine and is currentlyworking on a book project for Tompkins. “Without the pen-nies of Depression-era Knoxville schoolchildren and a five-mil-lion-dollar donation from John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the GreatSmokey Mountains National Park would not exist,” he said.

Or consider Percival Baxter, the governor of the U.S. stateof Maine. Baxter, unable to convince his state legislature to buythe 1,575-meter Mount Katahdin and set it aside for publicuse, bought nearly 81,000 hectares himself over 32 years to cre-ate Baxter State Park.

Eco-philanthropy has almost always faced similar hurdlesof local distrust and hostility, said Butler. When Rockefeller inthe 1920s bought 14,000 hectares from hard-up Wyomingranchers in the valley of Jackson Hole at the base of the Tetonrange for some US$1.4 million, many local ranchers and busi-nessmen feared a park would destroy the local economy

Douglas and Kris Tompkins in Puerto Montt.

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and tax base.“The battle overGrand TetonNational Parkwas one of thelongest in conser-vation history,”said Butler.“Localpoliticians vilifiedRockefeller as arich Easternerwho was conspir-ing with the parkservice to takeaway their land.”

Congress des-ignated a smallnational park in

1929 encompassing just the mountains, but park opponentsblocked expansion into the valley for years. Eventually tiringof the costs involved in holding the lands he had hoped to giveto the National Park Service, Rockefeller sent PresidentFranklin Delano Roosevelt a letter expressing dismay that hewould have to sell the property to any suitable buyer. Rooseveltwas spurred to designate the area a national monument,including Jackson Hole. In 1950, after the politics finallycooled down and the area became a tourist mecca, PresidentHarry Truman signed a bill merging the original 1929 parkwith the 1943 Grand Teton National Monument to form the126,000-hectare Grand Teton National Park.

private preservationThe tradition of privately funded land conservation seems tohave undergone a revival since the 1990s, a period in whichgroups such as Conservation International and The NatureConservancy have become the largest and most powerfulenvironmental players. Especially during the heady days of theU.S. high-tech boom, a new breed of relatively young Pacific-coast entrepreneur-philanthropists emerged, challenging theestablished U.S.-east-coast foundations in spending power.

For example, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 2001gave US$261 million to Conservation International to researchand buy up biodiversity hotspots, the “environmental emer-gency rooms of our planet.” The same year, the Gordon andBetty Moore Foundation also sponsored the Los Amigos Pro-ject in Peru, in which the Amazon Conservation Associationsigned an agreement with the Peruvian government for along-term, permanently renewable “conservation concession.”The deal protects a 138,000-hectare expanse of virgin rain-forest in the Madre de Dios river valley and creates a biolog-ical corridor that links Manu National Park, perhaps the mostspecies-rich area on Earth, with the Tambopata ReservedZone and other jungles in neighboring Bolivia.

There have been other wildland purchases in the region,several of them facilitated by the Wildlife Conservation Soci-ety (WCS), which runs the Bronx Zoo and works in 53 nationsacross Africa, Asia, and the Americas. New York philanthro-pist Michael Steinhardt, for example, recently bought the twowesternmost islands of the Falklands and donated them to theSociety, said the group’s senior conservationist, Bill Conway.Steinhardt’s purchase “returned the islands to their rightfulowners,” thousands of penguins and the world’s largest pop-ulation of black-browed albatrosses, said Conway, who hashelped set up adozen reserves inSouth America.

In September2004, the invest-ment banking andsecurities firmGoldman Sachsbecame anotherregional philan-thropist when itdonated to theWCS a Rhode-Island-sized chunkof wilderness onChile’s wild andwind-blown Tierra del Fuego. The bank came into the275,000-hectare property in the rugged far south of Chile in2002 via a seemingly routine acquisition of a portfolio ofloans, one of which was secured by these lands.

“I think the resurgence of eco-philanthropy is the biggest,most interesting story in conservation over the last decade,”saidTom Butler.“As the traditional advocacy groups, like the SierraClub and Greenpeace, have somewhat waned in influence,there has been an explosion in land trusts. Groups like TheNature Conservancy are now the 800-pound gorillas of theenvironmental movement. Just buying a piece of imperiledland is much faster than working to change hearts and minds.”

By chance, a Nature Conservancy member from Chicagowas visiting Pumalín Park earlier this year, sea-kayaking withhis teenage son. He was happy to discuss the huge NGO’squiet, low-profile, and results-driven approach to conservation.

“We are science-based, pragmatic, and unsentimental,”said Harry Drucker, a real estate financier who volunteers 40hours per week for the group and has worked on conserva-tion projects in Mexico, China, and Brazil. “All we care aboutis biodiversity. Our mission is: ‘To preserve the plants, ani-mals, and natural communities that represent the diversityof life on Earth by protecting the lands and waters they needto survive.’ That means we might buy an ugly swamp.We work with whatever method suits a particular project. Wewill work with governments and business. In order to pro-tect an area, or to create a buffer zone around a wildernessarea, we might actually pay people to go away. It’s very

In the new Corcovado National Park, Chile.

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unromantic, very pragmatic, but it works.”Since 1951, The Nature Conservancy has protected nearly

47 million hectares around the world. Part of the secret, saidDrucker, is to be low-key: “There are a lot of things we do thatyou won’t see on our website.” Although he supports Green-peace and appreciates their political work, he argued that“Greenpeace could never do some of the things we do.”

Duke University’s Dr. John Terborgh agreed that eco-phi-lanthropy should complement, not replace, traditional advo-cacy-based conservation efforts.“Rescuing nature will require

both methods, asit does here in theU.S., where thenational govern-ment has no pro-active program forconserving biodi-versity,” Terborghsaid in an e-mailinterview. “Advo-cacy can be effec-tive in securingprotection forlarge tracts of gov-

ernment-owned wilderness, but it rarely succeeds when pri-vate lands are involved because governments do not want tospend the money to acquire title. The two approaches to con-servation are complementary. Both need to be promoted.”

The biggest challenge in buying and saving wildernessland now is to ensure it remains protected in perpetuity, saidthe WCS’s Conway. “The problem that we have with all suchdonations from private individuals is to make provisions forthem to be protected long after their deaths. I don’t think weshould have a large area that is dependent on someone’scoronary arteries.”

A national park boundary is only as good as the political willto protect it, he said, citing the current dispute between sharkfishers and national parks authorities around Ecuador’s Gala-pagos Islands.“If you can’t protect even the Galapagos Islands,you have a very serious problem,”he said.“We have 10 or 11 per-cent of the world’s land mass protected—but only on paper.”

Land trusts and eco-baronsEco-philanthropy appears to be an especially American trend.In the United States, the number of land trusts grew to 1,400during the 1990s. Among them, these private, non-profitgroups have protected 260,000 square kilometers of wild andgreen areas, according to the Land Trust Alliance (LTA).“Thishas democratized private conservation investment,” said TomButler. “One need not be a Rockefeller or Mellon to help buyand save land.”

Land trusts buy farmlands, woodlands, and urban greenspaces and accept tax-deductible property donations, as well

as conservation easements (legal commitments not to developan area). Easements, popular in wills, protected over 10 mil-lion hectares between 1990 and 2000.

U.S. land trusts now protect over 200,000 hectares peryear, says the LTA. But they are running a race against time,because four times that amount of U.S. land is still being lostto development every year. “At this rate,” warns the Alliance,“we have about 20 years to protect our most cherished land-scapes before they will be lost forever.”

Some wealthy environmentalists prefer to take mattersinto their own hands rather than rely on the often bureaucraticworkings of land trusts. “From the perspective of the donor,it’s more entrepreneurial,” said Butler. “It’s the most directand immediately fulfilling form of conservation action foran individual of means used to moving quickly in business.”

One of them is southern entrepreneur M.C. Davis, whobought about 16,000 hectares (40,000 acres) a few years agonear Santa Rosa Beach in the Florida Panhandle for US$50million. It’s the largest private conservation tract east of theMississippi River. Dubbed Nokuse Plantation for a NativeAmerican word meaning black bear, the land has been usedfor agriculture and logging and will have to be restored to itsoriginal longleaf and wiregrass ecosystem.

“Forty thousand acres is not that large,” Davis toldEcoFlorida magazine in an interview (the reserve is now up to53,000 acres, or about 21,000 hectares). “But the key is that itjoins up about a million acres. That’s why I chose that par-ticular area.” The land will serve as a wildlife corridor to con-nect an Air Force base that is home to 60 of the endangeredblack bears with the Northwest Florida Water ManagementDistrict land along the Choctawhatchee River.

Asked about the future of such private conservation efforts,Davis said,“I think we’ll see more and more of it… I hope thiswill gain the magnitude that, back in the ’20s and ’30s, edu-cation got from a number of private businesspeople who recy-cled their wealth back into educational institutions, and Ihope that this will happen in the world of conservation.”

Another major U.S. eco-philanthropist active in recentyears is Roxanne Quimby, who founded Burt’s Bees, a com-pany that grew from a kitchen-stove operation into a nearlyUS$50 million-per-year business making natural and envi-ronment-friendly personal-care products. Then, a few yearsago, she sold 80 percent of the company to New York private-equity firm AEA Investors for more than US$175 million.Quimby used the money to buy up wildlands and is nowMaine’s second largest landowner, with about 16,000 hectares.She plans to donate it all to help create a proposed MaineWoods National Park that could one day span 1.3 millionhectares of the Great North Woods and shelter the eastern tim-ber wolf, Canada lynx, and Atlantic salmon.

Outside of the Americas, the cash-for-nature approachdoes not seem to have taken off very well. Tom Butler, in ayear’s research, found almost no such projects in Africa orAsia. He blames the lack of political stability or the absence of

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firm and enforceable property laws in many countries.John Terborgh, of the Duke Center for Tropical Conser-

vation, agreed that “buying land is simply not a practicaloption in a lot of places. In many of the countries we includeunder the term ‘Third World,’ property rights are tenuous atbest. Moreover, in many Third World countries, wildlandsremain the exclusive or near-exclusive domain of the state. Pri-vate ownership is not an option.”Adding to the difficulty is that“most ‘First World’ philanthropists have little knowledge orpersonal experience of Third World countries and, knowingabout social and institutional instabilities, shy away frommaking long-term commitments. There are few people onthis planet like Doug and Kris [Tompkins] who take up full-time residence in the environment they want to save andbecome integrated into the local social and political scene.”

For now, Terborgh said, private ownership of conservationlands is only an attractive option in emerging middle-incomenations like Chile and Argentina, as well as Costa Rica, Mex-ico, and parts of Brazil.“One hopes that more and more coun-tries will eventually join these ranks.”

Patagonia land rush Doug and Kris Tompkins have several well-known neighborsin the Southern Cone of South America. One is media mag-nate Ted Turner, who is also the largest private landholder inthe United States. His 600,000 hectares there, much of it onthe eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, serve both envi-ronmental and commercial goals, such as buffalo ranching.

The Atlanta billionaire has set up the Turner EndangeredSpecies Fund, which since 1997 has worked to respond to theextinction crisis,“one of humanity’s most pressing problems.”The Fund has projects in Argentina and Mexico as well as inthe United States. Turner ran into some controversy inArgentina, where he now owns some 32,000 hectares, includ-ing La Primavera Ranch on the trout-rich Traful River nearBariloche. It provides a habitat for the endangered huemul, orAndean Mountain deer. Residents in this resort town have attimes blockaded the access road to the airport where richoutsiders park their private jets. Protests against “foreignersbuying up Patagonia” have been common in the local press.

In fact, more than 300 foreigners now own tracts of landaround Bariloche and in the Patagonian steppes to the south,a vast, wind-blown wilderness made famous by the writingsof Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin. The buy-up began whendecades of overgrazing and falling international wool pricesdrove many sheep farmers off the land here. Then in the 1990sArgentine President Carlos Menem ended restrictions on for-eign ownership, opening the doors to outside buyers. Thesell-off accelerated with the country’s deep economic crisis in2002, when land prices dropped as low as US$250 per hectare.The list of big-name foreigners reported to have holdings inPatagonia includes actors Sharon Stone and Christopher Lam-bert and financier-philanthropist George Soros.

Argentina’s largest land-holders are Italian fashion tycoonsLuciano and Carlo Benetton, though their sheep farms aim tofeed the clothing company with merino wool rather than savethe Earth. They own five estancias in Argentina, totaling morethan 800,000 hectares. The designer-millionaires got theirown taste of local opposition when an ugly land dispute withlocal Mapuche Indians flared into an international scandal lastyear. The Benettons were attacked in an activist campaigndubbed “United Colors of Land Grab.”

“Luciano could have handled that better,” said Tompkins,who is on a first-name basis with Benetton, Turner, and someof his other famous neighbors. He wishes they, too, wouldjust set their land aside, letnature take over, and dedicatetheir lives to saving the planet.

A self-described “pessimistwith hope,” Tompkins said hesees many environmental bat-tles being won while the war isbeing lost. “Conservation tac-tics are always a firefighting andstopgap methodology,” he oncewrote. “One does what onecan.” Still, he continues with hiswork.“We are just living a shortperiod of time—what elsewould you do?”

Then, sitting in his PuertoMontt office, he paused andmentioned an idea that broughta sparkle to his eyes: “What ifthe 10,000 richest people in theworld would do what I did? BillGates, Warren Buffet, the Sultanof Brunei, the Saudi princes—they could change the entireworld. It would just be unbelievable.”

They might take inspiration from another project, CostaRica’s private Bosque Eterno de los Niños, a 22,000-hectarereserve bordering the Monteverde Cloud Forest BiologicalReserve. The “Children’s Rainforest” was created with dona-tions from children around the world, who have collectedcans, sold cookies, or asked their parents for birthday cashpresents to buy a hectare of rainforest for US$250 each.

What started in 1987 with a nine-year-old boy’s questionin a small primary school classroom in rural Sweden is nowthe largest private reserve in Central America.

Frank Zeller is a journalist with a special interest in nature andecology. He has lived in and reported from Europe, the Ameri-cas, and the Asia-Pacific region and now lives in Hong Kong.

For more information about issues raised in this story, visitwww.worldwatch.org/ww/patagonia/.

Vodudahue River, Pumalín Park.

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