Buy now, and save! Preserving South American wilderness--by buying it up.

• Author: Zeller, Frank
• Position: Philanthropists who buy national parks in order to save them (new project

The U.S. millionaire couple Douglas and Kris Tompkins have just donated two new national parks to Chile and Argentina. So why do so many people there wish they would just go home?

The answer is a complex blend of anti-American sentiment, local vested interests, and a cultural opinion gap on ecological philanthropy, the practice of buying up wilderness in order to save it. Local critics have vilified the couple as super-rich gringos who have joined Patagonia's land scramble along with other big-name foreigners, such as Ted Turner, George Soros, and Silvester Stallone. As Doug and Kris Tompkins have created 11 wilderness parks covering more than 800,000 hectares, they have been accused of being American spies, buzzed by Chilean Air Force jets, and even threatened with death.

Their story illustrates some of the successes and pitfalls of the buy/restore/conserve approach to saving wildlands, which has quietly grown into a multi-billion-dollar movement. As two of the movement's pioneers, they have learned an old lesson: how trying to do good can sometimes make enemies.

AFFJORDABLES

"I bought the first piece of land almost whimsically, because it was so cheap and so beautiful," said a tanned, silver-haired Doug Tompkins, speaking in the airy loft of his organization's local headquarters at Puerto Montt in southern Chile. "That's where it all started."

During his business career, Tompkins created the outdoor 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-long nature enthusiast, rock climber, white-water kayaker, pilot, and one-time Olympic skier, Doug Tompkins had repeatedly visited the rugged fjords of southern Chile since the 1960s and fallen in love with them. In 1989 the couple threw it all in, sold their corporate interests, and moved from San Francisco to the isolated region to live a simple lifestyle without electricity and in harmony with nature.

It is easy to see why the place so enchanted them. Densely forested slopes plunge from snow-capped volcanic peaks into icy waters. The mist-shrouded old-growth rainforest receives 6,000 millimeters of rain per year and shelters giant alerce trees that were already a thousand years old when Jesus walked the Earth. Once a common species, similar to the California redwood, the alerce has almost been logged into extinction.

To Doug Tompkins, this extinction crisis is the central problem facing the planet and humanity, and the struggle to preserve biodiversity is the primary concern, "the point upon which everything turns." In the early 1990s he started the non-profit Foundation for Deep Ecology to promote the ideas of Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess. Naess's philosophy opposes all "mega-technology," from nuclear power plants to television sets and even wind turbines, and calls for a dismantling of the "techno-industrial society." (Tompkins uses computers and pilots small planes to and from his projects in Chile and Argentina, but is unapologetic. He calls this a "strategic embrace" of technology in his life's singular mission over the past 15 years to save pristine nature.)

"We have distanced ourselves from nature," he said. "We think we can put it in a glass box and live above it. We have placed human cleverness above the wisdom of nature." (1) The millionaire activist considers other charitable efforts, such as the fight against poverty, illiteracy, or child labor, secondary to preserving biodiversity. "There's not going to be any social justice on a dead planet," he remarked wrily. Hence his decision to put his money where his mouth was and buy up pristine, species-rich wild land--lots of it.

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Doug Tompkins first dabbled in land conservation in 1979, creating the redwood-studded Esprit Park on a San Francisco city block. In 1990, he helped Britain's Cat Survival Trust buy 10,000 acres of rainforest in Misiones, Argentina, now El Pinalito Provincial Park. But the couple started their land purchase campaign in earnest in 1992 with a semi-abandoned ranch in the Chilean province of Palena. Adding parcels of land from hard-up or absentee owners over the years, they turned it into Parque Pumalin, the Yosemite-sized crown jewel of their holdings. They spent more 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 the Andes through their organizations, the Conservation Land Trust and Conservacion Patagonica. They would buy old farms, rip out the fences and other man-made structures, and let the battered fauna and flora recover from agricultural use, often intense overgrazing. In Argentina, they recently gave US$1.7 million to the Fundacion Vida Silvestre Argentina to buy Monte Leon, a 63,000-hectare sheep farm near Rio Gallegos. The local group donated it in turn to the cash-strapped national parks service. Monte Leon is now the country's first marine national park, protecting elephant seals and Magellanic penguins.

The Tompkinses also bought lands in Argentina's subtropical northern state of Corrientes, in the Esteros del Ibera wetlands, which may be even more species-rich than Brazil's legendary Pantanal. Of the 30,000 hectares they hold there, 70 percent is reserved for conservation and ecotourism. The couple would like to reintroduce the anteater, pampas deer, and even jaguars.

In another recent milestone, Doug Tompkins joined Chilean President Ricardo Lagos to inaugurate the Corcovado National Park in...