[P2P-F] Fwd: The Entrepreneur Who Wants to Save Paradise - The Atlantic

Wed Sep 17 08:41:02 CEST 2014

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: David Week (Assai) <dew at assai.com.au>
Date: Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 4:06 AM
Subject: The Entrepreneur Who Wants to Save Paradise - The Atlantic
To: Michael Bier <michael.bier at chl.org.au>, Michel Bauwens <
michel at p2pfoundation.net>

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/09/the-entrepreneur-who-wants-to-save-paradise/380116/

The Entrepreneur Who Wants to Save Paradise

Artilio Sanchez is a rancher in a remote region of Patagonia, the alluring
land in the south of Chile and Argentina. To reach the end of the nearest
dirt road, he has to row a small boat across a glacial river and then ride
his horse for two hours. One recent morning, he sipped maté, a South
American tea, and leaned against the wood-stove of his cabin. Conversation
turned to what everyone in Patagonia is talking about: Conservación
Patagonica, the latest addition to the world’s largest private conservation
project. When I mentioned the man behind all these parks, American
billionaire Douglas Tompkins, Sanchez scoffed, asking whether Tompkins was
“the guy who’s breeding lions.”

Just a little to the north, Guido Vargas stared out his kitchen window. “He
wants the water,” Vargas told me. “There’s more freshwater here than
anywhere else in the world. They’re going to ship it to China.”

Later, in a town right on the border of one of Tompkins’s parks, Raquel
Sepuilveda stood outside the post office. “I knew the valley when it was
productive, and now it’s dead,” she said. “Now it’s the future refuge for
the Jews. It’s the promised land for them.”

Fifteen years ago, in the June 1999 issue of *The Atlantic*, William
Langewiesche wrote
<http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/06/eden-a-gated-community/304919/>
about Tompkins’s first major venture into conservation in Chile, describing
both Tompkins’s idealistic vision and the infamy that had already shrouded
him. The hostility only has only grown as his conservation empire has
expanded. Rumors now range from the conspiratorial to the phantasmagorical:
Tompkins is creating a second Israel in South America; he is siphoning off
the world’s last freshwater resources for other American millionaires; he
is building bunkers for a pending nuclear war.

No one seems to believe what Doug Tompkins and his wife, Kris, are actually
doing: They have purchased enough land in Chile and Argentina to equal an
area the size of nearly two Rhode Islands, and they plan to donate these
ice-coated peaks, red-rock canyons, and coastal volcanoes to the respective
governments in the form of national parks. They have protected more land
than any other private individuals in history.

In the United States, Tompkins’s name is rarely recognized until it is
linked to one of the two apparel companies he founded: Esprit and The North
Face. In Chile, however, mentioning his name can bring rage to the faces of
even the most apolitical people. Kris’s name is less recognized and less
reviled in the region, even though she is her husband’s partner in his
conservation work. Before she became a full-time philanthropist, she made
her own fortune as CEO of the outdoor apparel company Patagonia. Since
leaving their industry jobs, the Tompkinses have started a host of
organizations aimed at protecting the wild: The Foundation for Deep
Ecology, Conservación Patagonica, Fundación Pumalín, Fundación Yendegaia,
The Conservation Land Trust, and Tompkins Conservation.

In 2004, Conservación Patagonica acquired the Chacabuco Valley and has
since been turning it into what the Tompkinses call the Future Patagonia
National Park. It is this 178,000-acre plot of land that everyone in the
region is now talking about. Once they bought it, the Tompkinses began
their efforts to restore the land to the state it was in before humans
exploited it. They sold almost all the 30,000 sheep and 3,800 cows that
came with the property. They built several large stone buildings with wide,
divided-light windows and pitched copper roofs. Their employees and
volunteers removed more than 400 miles of fencing and pulled plant after
plant of invasive species out of the ground.

Meanwhile, gauchos and locals in town puzzled at the couple’s desire to
build stone mansions and bring back wild species. Tompkins’s tendency to
drop out of the sky in his small red and white plane and his insistence
that all guests and employees take their shoes off inside his buildings
only added to the mystery. Few in neighboring towns were quick to trust
their eccentric new neighbor—the organic farmer, the WASPy backpacker, the
amateur architect, the billionaire entrepreneur, the high-school dropout,
the former ski racer, the grizzled mountaineer, the bold whitewater
kayaker, the daring bush pilot, the audacious land-grabber, the radical
environmentalist, the would-be savior of the Patagonian wilds—Douglas
Tompkins.
Animals of Aysén: A horse grazes next to the Lago General Carrera, the
second-largest lake in South America; llama-like guanacos wander through
the Chacabuco Valley

Before his days of Cessnas and large-scale conservation, Tompkins dropped
out of high school and never went to college. In his late teens, he joined
the Sierra Club and wandered west. He rock-climbed around Northern
California, and was once picked up hitchhiking at Lake Tahoe by a woman,
Susie, who became his wife that same year. His adventures took him south
before his big move: He is now credited with being the first to paddle down
21 previously undescended rivers in Chile. His most famous journey south
was material for the documentary *Mountain of Storms*, in which he drove a
Ford van from California to Argentinean Patagonia with the Funhogs, a group
of climbers that included the founder of the Patagonia clothing company,
Yvon Chouinard. The Funhogs headed toward, and eventually climbed, Fitzroy,
a mountain that had been climbed only twice before and whose silhouette is
now the Patagonia company’s logo.

Between his traveling, climbing, skiing, and surfing adventures, Tompkins
sold outdoor gear through a small company he and a friend had created, The
North Face. The Grateful Dead played live at the shop’s 1966 opening in San
Francisco. A Bob Dylan poster hung in the display window. Tompkins sold the
company two years later for $50,000 and eventually joined his then-wife in
the fashion industry with the company that would become Esprit. His
environmentalism remained strong throughout his years in the fashion world.
He and Susie brought Esprit employees on rafting trips to listen to
lectures by Earth First! activists.

Tompkins’s conservation ethic expanded significantly in the 1970s and ’80s,
during what his foundation describes as a “self-guided immersion in
ecological literature.” With no college degree, he took a literary journey
through the works of writers like Wendell Berry, Edward Abbey, Robinson
Jeffers, John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, and Gary Snyder. The
Tompkinses often cite one particular Berry passage, which challenges the
notion that human needs should come first: “We must change our lives, so
that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is
good for the world will be good for us.”

The work of Arne Naess especially engaged Tompkins. Naess was a Norwegian
philosopher most famous for first coining the term “deep ecology” at a talk
in 1972 and in a paper the following year. The “deep” refers to the “deep
questioning” the “deep ecology” movement advocates. Unlike the kind of
environmentalism that supports technical fixes and “business as usual,”
deep ecologists hope to challenge values and practices in
society—especially the overuse of technology and the fixation with economic
growth.

Over a decade after Naess first uttered the term, he and another writer,
George Sessions, celebrated John Muir’s birthday by camping in Death
Valley, California. During this trip, they encoded the beliefs of deep
ecology in eight principles. These central tenets declare that humans have
no right to reduce the richness and diversity of life forms except to
satisfy emphatically *vital *needs. They state that the human population
must decrease for the well-being and flourishing of the nonhuman world.
They also state the need for a shift in basic economic, technological, and
ideological structures in order to reduce the human interference in the
nonhuman world. The final principle states that “those who subscribe to the
foregoing points have an obligation directly or indirectly to try to
implement the necessary changes.”

Tompkins was so influenced by these ideas that, by the late 1980s, he had
come to believe that the consumer culture he had helped promote with The
North Face and Esprit was contributing to the environmental destruction he
hoped to fight. He decided to implement what he saw as the necessary
changes. Tompkins sold his stake in Esprit for an estimated $125 million
and resolved to, as he puts it, “stop selling people things they don’t
need.”

Tompkins moved to a small farm on one of his first park projects in Chile:
Parque Pumalín. Unlike the yellow, rolling hills of low brush in the
Chacabuco Valley, Pumalín covers 715,000 acres of dense and wet forest,
carved by deep fjords, with mountains that drop steeply to the sea and
islands that splatter across the surrounding bay.

While living in Pumalín, he often flew to another small farm he had
purchased to the south of it. It is one of his and Kris’s “agricultural
restoration projects,” where they repair and redesign degraded farms,
building organic ones in their place to offer a model for neighboring
farmers to emulate. During one such effort in the early 1990s, a visiting
friend, Peter Buckley, the former CEO of Esprit who has since founded a
variety of environmental activist organizations, came along. They soared
together over the coast from the farm back to Pumalín, and as they flew
over the lake-dotted coastline, navigating over a colossal snow-covered
volcano, Volcán Corcovado, Buckley exclaimed at the beauty. Tompkins asked
Buckley, “Why don’t we buy that place?” Buckley looked down at the Tic Toc
river winding into the sea below and replied, “Why not?”

They eventually bought 208,000 acres in 1994, adding more a few years
later. Much of the land surrounding theirs was federally owned. In 2004,
Tompkins suggested to Chile’s then-president, Ricardo Lagos, that the
Chilean government donate this federal land, along with Tompkins’s private
land, and join the areas. Those 726,000 acres now comprise Corcovado,
Chile’s sixth-largest national park.
A footbridge in the Pumalín park

One of Pumalín’s entrances is now in the town of Amarillo, where a few park
rangers like Erwin Gonzalez are readying the park for turnover to the
Chilean government. Gonzalez is a young man from Santiago with jeans and
rubber boots who gave me a tour of the park in his pick-up truck. We
started in town, where the Tompkinses have engaged in what the park
materials call “Village Beautification.”

“Every detail you see on the houses was designed by Tompkins,” Gonzalez
explained, pointing at a lacy maroon trim decorating the roof of a small
A-frame house.

These “beautified” houses don’t belong to Tompkins. Amarillo simply happens
to be a town at the entrance to Pumalín, so Tompkins has made a point of
beautifying it. Through his work, one house made out of a shipping
container with a chimney jutting out of its front window became a
yellow-painted cottage with a white picket fence, a white entry porch, and
white gingerbread fretwork. Tompkins has also beautified the homes of the
neighbors, as well as the town’s gas station, school, supermarket, and bus
shelters.

“The people were a little hesitant,” Gonzalez told me. “A gringo shows up
and tells us our town is ugly? But now it’s going well.”

As Gonzalez indicated, Tompkins has taken many of the decisions about the
design of these renovations into his own hands—the patterns of the houses’
trim, the colors of their fences.

“We ask, but it’s a little guided,” Gonzalez said, explaining their process
with each home-owner. “‘How about we do these colors? These will make it
beautiful. Does that sound good to you?’”

Gonzalez drove us out of town and into the park. He pointed out different
campsites and parking lots amid the wet forest, explaining Tompkins’s
process: Tompkins would draw a sketch of what he imagined for each aspect
of the park—from the bends in the trails and roads to the arrangement of a
campsite’s picnic tables and benches. Gonzalez and his colleagues would
then build as fast as they could according to these drawings. Tompkins
would later return to see his ideas embodied and give his stamp of approval
or rejection. Rejection, in this case, might mean that Gonzalez and the
other rangers had to scrap the progress they’d made and begun building anew.

Like many of Tompkins’s employees, the executive director of Conservación
Patagonica, Nadine Lehner, once described this obsessiveness to me.

“That’s the thing about Tompkins,” she said. “He’s an abstract thinker, but
he also brings it down to ‘Where should the toilet paper go?’ with a sense
that that really matters.”

Gonzalez drove through the moss-cloaked forest for a couple of hours before
taking the road that led us out of the park and back to town. The strip of
pavement ribboned across an open field of grass below the cloud-feathered
hills. On the side of the road sat Tompkins’s tiny plane.

Gonzalez stopped the car, jumped out, and picked up a carton of gasoline
that one of the workers had littered on the grass.

“Doug would get mad,” he explained as he shut the car door.

Gonzalez mentioned that Tompkins often dropped out of the sky without
warning—he had just been there on Monday. We walked into the office, and
found Tompkins staring at his computer at one of the desks.

Tompkins is a slight man with wisps of white hair, bushy gray eyebrows, and
deep-set dark eyes. He is smaller than I had previously imagined, and has a
softer voice; I found myself whispering. When I asked him to speak with me
about his various organizations, Tompkins became impatient and told me, “We
have a website, you know.”

But when I told him I was interested in deep ecology and wanted to know the
roots of his conservation work, his eyes brightened, and he leaned back in
his chair, launching into what would prove to be a long discussion about
humanity’s “collision course” with nature.

He began with an apocalyptic vision. “We’ll be here on a sand dune with
Norwegian rats and cockroaches,” he told me, beginning eye contact that
rarely broke for the next hour. “Those seem to be the creatures that can
survive, which isn’t ideal.”
A trail in the Pumalín park; a small rowboat on the Baker River

On the desk in front of us, the screensaver on Tompkins’s MacBook cycled
through aerial shots of ice-coated mountains and twisting fjords and
rivers, close-ups of birds and hikers in rubber boots.

“We’re not believers in the myth of progress,” he continued, his lecture
unfolding without pause. “This requires systemic analysis and gives us an
entirely different view of development. It’s common sense that the world
has gone awfully wrong. We need a major rethink of what development means.”

At one point, Tompkins’s eyes drifted behind me. He switched from English
to Spanish mid-sentence in order to advise one of the office employees
hanging a framed picture of a puma in one corner of the office.

“A little bit higher,” Tompkins said. “And I think that color is off.”

The framed picture came down.

“Look at how fast technology is developing,” he said. “Everyone says,
‘They’ll think of something. They’ll think of something to solve every
crisis, they’ll solve waste with something. It’ll be digital and fly
through the air.’”

He paused and asked if I had a cell phone. I nodded sheepishly, my only
participation during Tompkins’s hour-long lecture.

“I don’t have a cell phone because I know how horrible it is,” he said.
“Using your cell phone is like putting your head in a microwave every day.

“What are they going to do now that the economy and everyone is addicted to
and dependent on technology?” he continued. According to Tompkins, Steve
Jobs had believed in the myth of progress and used to publish ad campaigns
with a long list of the reasons why computers were going to revolutionize
the world. When Jobs would come over to Tompkins’s house for dinner,
Tompkins would tell him that his campaign had mentioned only 5 percent of
what computers were doing—he’d forgotten to mention the other 95 percent
that encompassed the harm they caused.

“It’s like God,” Tompkins said. “When they’re growing up, if you tell kids
God exists, they believe it. It’s the same with the techno-cultural
society. They believe in it—that it’s the road to paradise, that there are
no limits.”

He raised his eyebrows, deepening the lines in his forehead.

“A lot of people, in your generation in particular, are starting to see
where it’s going. The organic food movement, the Occupy movement—they’re
all trying to pull the brakes. The environmental and social-justice
movements, less so. They still want progress so they can spread the wealth
around after,” he said.

He placed particularly skeptical emphasis on the word “progress.”
A gaucho named Leonardo stands outside his home in Valle Colonia.

While many of the region’s gauchos live in simple one-room wood cabins in
the forests, the Tompkinses have built their new park infrastructure in
stone. These large stone buildings have stirred particular unrest and
suspicion around the Chacabuco Valley. When I challenged the regional
rumors about the Valley—especially that Tompkins was building a second
Jewish homeland—people would lift their eyebrows and ask, “Well, if he’s
building a park, why does he need such fancy houses?”

While in Cochrane, the town nearest to the Valley, I met a café owner,
Teresa Catalan. We started talking about the Valley, and she found pictures
of the stone buildings on Google Images to show me.

“See?” she said, looking from me to the screen. “It bothers me that they
call it the Patagonia Park because there’s no Patagonian identity in it.
You see the buildings and it looks like you’re in London! It’s the same in
Amarillo—what they did to the houses there. It’s not Patagonian. It looks
like you’re in Germany.”

A young lawyer who worked at the park for several years, Josefina Ruiz,
called the park “an island” in Aysén, the region where it is situated.

“How can you have someone who talks about localism—he’s invited to
universities to talk about the local economy—and he wouldn’t be recognized
in Cochrane?” she said, talking about Tompkins. “He never goes to the
supermarket there. He comes in on his little plane and goes to his house,
then goes to Santiago and stays in a hotel, then leaves.”

The local distrust is largely fueled by the sensitivity of the place where
the new park sits. In its ranching days, the Valley was home to the third
largest sheep ranch in Chile. It was Belgian-owned, but it employed
numerous Chilean workers; the town of Cochrane originally formed to house
families who had moved there. After Tompkins bought the land, the exodus of
sheep and cows from the Valley caused bitter resentment. Conservación
Patagonica has employed plenty of locals, but the work of weeding invasive
plants and removing fences doesn’t tap into the same sense of regional
identity as shearing sheep and running cattle.

This past October, resentment toward the new Tompkins park gave way to
resistance: Ranchers from neighboring towns protested by the façade of the
stone restaurant in the Valley. They drove their trucks onto the grassy
front yard, barbecued several lambs over an open fire, and shouted into
megaphones about gringos in general and the Tompkinses in particular. They
wore wool sweaters, leather boots, and ubiquitous gaucho-style berets
called *boinas*. Tompkins never showed his face, but the ranchers stood
their ground on his all day. Stickers on trucks depicted a silhouetted
gaucho in a woolen poncho riding on horseback below snow-topped mountains
and vivid blue skies, evoking the romantic landscape the protestors call
home, full of granite spires and teal lakes, renowned for its winds and
frequently referred to as the end of the world. Several posters read, Patagonia
Sin Tompkins, or Patagonia Without Tompkins.
“Patagonia Without Tompkins” stickers on trucks in Cochrane

Weeks after the protest, the group that organized it, La Voz de la
Patagonia, held a bingo fundraiser in town. During the event, one of the
Voz organizers began a Powerpoint presentation at the front of the room and
read aloud the group’s seven objectives*. *Children continued screaming and
running around the room, adults continued talking and demanding empanadas
from the flushed women in the kitchen. No one seemed to care about the
group’s goals.

At one point, though, a picture of the protest held in the Valley flashed
across the screen. Immediately, the room filled with energy, attention, and
applause. Clearly, attendees could rally behind an anti-Tompkins campaign.
Applause broke out again whenever Tompkins-related goals arose. Some of
these popular group objectives were “Reject the massive purchases of land
by foreigners,” “Reject conservation on productive land,” and “Request the
state to restore the ranch in the Chacabuco Valley to the children of the
Baker [River] as a productive livestock area.” This last goal garnered the
most fervent applause.

While most attendees were there to halt the gringo land grab and bring
sheep back to the Valley, the leaders of La Voz had a few other goals in
mind for the group. The objectives ignored by the crowd contained thinly
veiled support of the controversial HidroAysén—a massive five-dam project
that the Chilean government had suspended
<http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2012/06/dam-project-chile-patagonia-suspended.html>
in 2012 after massive nationwide protests. One objective read, “Support all
private investment that means development for our people”; another touted
“permanent benefits for the region if HidroAysén, or other hydroelectric or
mining projects, go through in those places.”

When La Voz first began in 2013, it was more up front about its agenda: It
originally had “hydroelectricity and development” as a subtitle on one of
its stickers. The sticker, which featured a poncho-clad, silhouetted
gaucho, evolved to read, “La Voz de la Patagonia: Intervening for Our Aysén
Heritage.” In its effort to win support, HidroAysén has created local radio
programs, grants and scholarships for students and small businesses, and
door-to-door campaigns. The company funded a celebratory “day of the sheep.”

Since Tompkins is locally loathed, HidroAysén supported La Voz when it
began presenting itself as a popular uprising against his conservation
work. After that, La Voz gained momentum more quickly. After only a month
or two in existence, the group collected 1,000 signatures of support.
(Around 3,000 people live in Cochrane.)

Many Voz supporters I met were, in fact, against the dams; they believed
that the group’s focus was Tompkins, and denied HidroAysén’s influence on
the organization. Some of those people were against Tompkins for the same
reasons they were against HidroAysén: Both were outsiders. “To me, they’re
the same,” said Marcos Millahonu, a young man from Cochrane who attended
the Voz protest in the Valley. “They are both private parties with private
interests. One doesn’t want the dams because it’d interfere with his
property, and the other wants to build dams to make money.”

The public relations director of HidroAysén, María Irene Soto, is a
middle-aged woman with wrists adorned in bracelets and eyes lined in kohl.
I have met her on two occasions. Both times, she began by reciting the
details of the dams. She talked about the small size of the floods, the
mere handful of families who would be displaced, and best of all, the fact
that the dam would last 500 years. Then, she steered our conversation
toward Tompkins, saying that the only reason there was such massive local,
national, and international resistance to the dams was because one rich
gringo had singlehandedly financed the campaign against the project.

“The people don’t like Tompkins,” she said. “And the people can’t defend
themselves because he’s very powerful.” Hearing her speak, one would hardly
have guessed that she represented a largely Italian and Spanish-owned
energy company whose multi-billion dollar dam project would have halted two
wild rivers and sent the energy they generated more than 1,000 miles to the
north, leaving none of it in the region. (The Chilean government ultimately
rejected the proposal this summer.)

“It’s hard to fight with Tompkins,” she continued, shaking her head.
“There’s no way.”

On María’s Twitter account, she has a picture of the president of La Voz,
Carlos Olivares, sitting by a woodstove and looking at the group’s book of
signatures. I met Olivares in Cochrane’s plaza a few days after the bingo
fundraiser. He is a balding, sturdy man with a straightforward quality that
kept his gait quick and his conversation to the point. He insisted that he
was vocalizing the needs of the people, especially the gauchos—representing
those who could not represent themselves. He described the Valley as the
most fertile land in the region, emphasizing that it wasn’t fair for so
many other gauchos to have to scrape by on ranches high in the mountains
where grass hardly grew when the Valley was left “unused.” Carlos doesn’t
want the land to be gazed at; he wants it to be grazed.

-- 
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