When Kris told their mutual friend Jerry Mander she was planning to take up Doug’s offer and visit him for twelve days in his remote cabin in Chilean Patagonia, Mander laughed and told her, “No one can last twelve days in a cabin with Doug Tompkins.”
Kris ignored the advice. “I decided, what the hell? Go. Just go. No expectations.”
Arriving in the cabin in rain-swept Patagonia, Kris wondered what she’d done to her life. When Doug asked how she was doing, Kris spilled her guts. “How do you think I am doing! I’ve just dropped an atomic bomb into my life.”
Doug took it all in and then asked, “Can I tell people you are my girlfriend?”
Neither of them ever looked back. With Doug, Kris felt like she’d found her authentic self. It was if her other life was a facsimile. Fighting for nature with this intense and brilliant partner felt right. Doug’s friends were stunned. “She opened him up a lot. And yeah, he was completely different after he met Kris, that’s for sure,” said Chouinard. “He was more bombastic before. He was, It is my way or no way. He would argue everything, didn’t see anyone else’s viewpoints. A lot of people did not get along with him because he was too self-centered and too sure his opinion was the only one. She was able to control him and really change him around.”
Kristine McDivitt and Douglas Tompkins were married in San Francisco at a simple ceremony in the San Francisco City Hall in 1994. As witnesses, Doug brought Jerry Mander, the progressive PR pro he’d worked with since the early Grateful Dead concert at his North Face store, along with his wife, Elizabeth. After the wedding champagne, they went home to finish designing a book, then held a meeting with Earth First! founder Dave Foreman, whom they’d left alone for a couple of hours while they slipped out for the low-key wedding ceremony.
Later, in the remote cabin that was now their base in the wilds of Patagonia, Kris found herself scrubbing the mold off apple trees, reading by candlelight, and deciphering Spanish language maps of the region. They only had electricity for a few hours at night when the generators were fired up, and the rains pounded day after day on the roof of their home. Despite all predictions that she would feel claustrophobic and trapped, Kris felt protected. The home felt like a nest. “The transformation of Doug when they fell in love and Kris joined him down there, he was really happy; he felt strengthened by Kris,” said friend Peter Buckley. “I think he had just that much more capacity to do what he wanted to be doing. Kris was the perfect complement to his skills. Doug was just missing that gene for hospitality and taking care of people. They pushed each other, and Kris was fiercely supportive of and loyal to Doug. And she would stand up to him. He could be kind of rough or a curmudgeon. And Kris would call him on his bullshit.”
Together in their remote farm, so far off the grid that they used CB radios to talk and rainwater to shower, Doug and Kris launched a relationship overflowing with enthusiasm and a sense that they had stumbled on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. They had a mangled farm surrounded by hundreds of thousands of acres of wildlands, and a desire to change the world. What would they paint on this half-million-acre canvas?
Chapter 11
Salmon Wars
National parks have a lot of benefits. One is, they get people out into nature. They are a form of social equity, as they belong to everyone. Parks provide to all citizens a chance to renew the spirit in a stressful world. Parklands provide a place for reflection and contemplation. Each time a new park is created anywhere in the world, it will help society understand the deep necessity to share the planet with other creatures, and preserve biodiversity.
—DOUG TOMPKINS
Living on their rainy farm, Kris and Doug often invited Yvon and Malinda Chouinard down to explore their new homestead. One morning, Doug and Yvon went kayaking in the bay near a sea lion rookery on a rocky outcropping an hour’s paddle away. Doug rowed up to what looked like a floating log five feet long and semisubmerged in the coastal estuary. When he got closer, Tompkins was struck by a foul odor, then a bitter understanding. Bloated and filled with air, the “log” was a dead sea lion. Inspecting the carcass, Doug probed his fingers into the fur until he located a puncture wound—a smooth entry hole. He suspected it was from a high-caliber bullet, since the salmon farmers were known to hire sharpshooters to drill a bullet into the animals when they came up for air. It was part of their brutal strategy to keep the sea lions from eating their prized salmon.
Tompkins hauled the unwieldy carcass over the bow of his kayak and, balancing his rancid cargo, rowed toward Fiordo Blanco, a salmon farm granted a concession on land, together with the rights to install an industrial salmon farming operation in the fjord, in the middle of what Doug assumed was his front yard. “He throws that dead seal on one of their boats and he says, I got a reward for anybody with any information on who killed this seal,” said Yvon.
Using his cash to pry out the truth, Tompkins offered one million Chilean pesos for information about the sea lion killings. “It’s two times anybody’s annual salary. So, it was war,” said Imhoff, the environmental desk manager who worked with Tompkins at Esprit. “He was putting his money out there and he was fighting for the critters, for the creatures of the world. And for that, I give him all the credit in the world. But he paid for it.” Without realizing, Tompkins had just fired the first salvo in what was soon to be an undeclared war with some of Chile’s most reactionary forces. Some of whom worked for the salmon industry.
Under Chilean law, the navy controlled certain rights to the shoreline. Owners of the Fiordo Blanco salmon hatchery were able to get government permits to build pens offshore as well as a beachhead operations center on land. Lit up at night with klieg lights like a high school football stadium, the salmon farm was noisy, smelly, and dirty. Dump trucks began depositing salmon guts, salmon heads, and miscellaneous offal on Doug and Kris’s property.
The odor, the mess, and the grotesque nature of 60,000 pounds of salmon remains dumped at sea and washing ashore sent Tompkins on the legal warpath. Tompkins called Pedro Pablo Gutierrez. Not only was Gutierrez his attorney who had helped on the original paperwork to purchase Reñihue but he also functioned as the Spanish equivalent of consigliere. As a young partner at Carey & Carey, the law firm negotiating the most important and prestigious foreign investment projects, Gutierrez worked in the same offices as those who managed the family fortunes of the dozen or so families that dominated the narrow Chilean economic landscape. Under insistence from Tompkins, he filed a lawsuit against the salmon farm, citing the Chilean constitutional guarantee to live in an environment free of pollution.
Back at Reñihue farm, Tompkins ordered his team to padlock the fences along the roads, thus marooning the salmon farmers on the tip of the peninsula. Despite the run-ins with Tompkins and local fishermen and a long list of labor violations at their processing plants, the farmed-salmon business brought a welcome dose of steady, year-round work to the region. Jobs in the area were generally low wage and often seasonal.
When Tompkins declared that he opposed all the salmon operations, he was anything but subtle. He rattled off a dozen reasons to implement a moratorium on salmon farming concessions, especially as practiced at Fiordo Blanco. These rustic operations left his pristine bays bobbing with plastics and the coastline littered with tarps, Styrofoam, and abandoned buoys. And then there was his critique of the fish—engorged creatures manufactured down to the specific pink hues of their inner tissue, which came from dyes added to the salmon food pellets. Like a homeowner choosing the color for a bathroom wall, salmon producers in Chile selected their favorite shade of pink from a half-dozen options, ranging from the fiery glow of a sunset to a more subtle grapefruit tone. Ocean activists were appalled that the mighty salmon had migrated so far down the food chain, and they derided farmed salmon as “chicken of the sea” and a mash of mushy protein no tastier than “oatmeal with gills.”
Marine biologists warned that overcrowded salmon pens were prime breeding grounds for epidemics, including the ISA
virus and an invasion of parasites that munched away the outer layer of the fish in what looked like an attack by piranha but was actually a locust-like plague known as “sea lice.” The industry responded to the outbreak by effectively marinating the live fish in antibiotics. Tests showed that Chilean salmon held thousands of times more antibiotics per pound than salmon farmed in Scotland or Norway.
As annual revenue from the salmon industry jumped into the hundreds of millions of dollars, pristine lakes in Patagonia were smothered by salmon feces, and oxygen levels in the lakes plummeted. The ensuing public outrage kicked the salmon operations out of the lakes and back into sheltered ocean bays. Soon these bays began to die off. The industry denied the damage. Tompkins bought a remote control underwater robot and hired a pilot to conduct an undersea survey. The submarine-like craft documented the damage. Foot after linear foot of uneaten salmon food, salmon feces, and garbage completely altered the ocean floor. “They did an environmental assessment,” said Chouinard. “And their conclusion was that it was a dead zone—there was nothing alive down there. And that was because of the salmon farm.”
* * *
I heard once from a Canadian fish farmer in our fjord in Chile that he could give a shit (his words!) about the outbreak of viruses that would leave some survivors who had a genetic disposition to resist the disease and that they would use those fish’s genes to produce the GMO fish that his company was developing. I knew I was in front of evil, cold evil at that. It was a critical moment for me from an ethical point of view, that cemented a resolve in my own mind about the whole human project, and I never forgot that. The guy was cold-blooded serious and never had a trace of regret that wild salmon would be gone, just as long as it suited his business objectives. He did not need to tell me that without wild salmon, fish farming markets would be the only ones left.
—DOUG TOMPKINS
* * *
The escaped salmon were also an environmental hazard as they went on a conquest of southern Chile—invading local rivers and streams, devouring the larvae and eggs of native species, and rapidly establishing themselves as apex exterminators. So many salmon were escaping from pens that traditional fishermen in the region netted more and more of this surprisingly valuable invader with flesh the color of a tangerine. Salmon even flung themselves across roadways near Puerto Montt. Drivers watched agog as ten-pound salmon swam, leapt, and flopped across a flooded street in a misguided migration. But these were not wild salmon, argued the Chilean salmon association, they were fugitives and runaways.
Using a law designed to allow ranchers to reclaim lost cattle, the association drafted laws to prosecute and punish local fishermen who attempted to sell any salmon, whether caught in a river or in the open ocean. In a controversial effort to strangle competition against their monopoly, salmon producers fought to make the artisanal sale of noncompany fillets illegal. The lobby group argued that as all “wild” salmon came from company stock, the producers therefore maintained and owned the rights to all their offspring. Thus, a black market for salmon emerged. Drably dressed, middle-aged men started to troll Puerto Montt, their Styrofoam coolers of “illegal fish” atop weak-wheeled hand trollies. Zigzagging through the downtown, they half-whispered their street-dealer pitch—“salmon, salmon, fresh salmon.”
Despite pressure from Tompkins, the security force from Fiordo Blanco continued sniping at sea lions in a futile campaign to dissuade the hyper-persistent animals from breaking and entering. Tompkins did not realize that his submarine patrols and “reward poster” had ignited a firestorm of opposition, or that Rene Patricio Quilhot, an employee of the salmon farm, was a retired army colonel and ranking member of the DINA, General Pinochet’s secret police. Accused of killing a Spanish diplomat and torturing others during the dictatorship, Quilhot maintained connections to the military and intelligence service in Santiago. Like Tompkins, he’d settled at the ends of the Earth in rural Patagonia. Unlike Tompkins, Quilhot owned a phone. He made some calls. Quilhot and Fiordo Blanco wanted el gringo off their back.
It wasn’t long before the powers from the central government in Santiago set up a special committee. Although it was never so stated, their mission was clear: convert the life of Doug Tompkins into a bureaucratic hell. They began to torture him with the small levers of power operated from inside key government ministries, what the French disparage as the petit bureaucrate. “After that, we started having constant friction with the most powerful people in Chile, the owners of these industries,” said Carolina Morgado, a whitewater rafting operator Tompkins had hired as his personal assistant to implement his conservation strategies. “In the offices we had in Puerto Montt,” she recollected, “we got graffiti that said ‘Muerte a Tompkins’—Death to Tompkins.”
Fueled by a pliant right-wing press in Santiago, a cauldron of rumors was unleashed against the Tompkinses. Miguel Serrano, a Chilean novelist and a loud Nazi sympathizer, organized leafletting campaigns in southern Chile with flyers announcing that Kris and Doug Tompkins were secretly planning a Jewish homeland, even though they were both raised as Anglicans. Then a rumor spread that Doug was bringing in bison. American buffalo would soon be marauding in herds and replacing the cows. So many calls came into their office denigrating Doug Tompkins as a “dirty Jew” that the receptionist took to screaming, “He’s not a Jew, he’s a shrew!” alluding to his stingy nature and using the Chilean phrase “No es judio! Es jodido!”
Others suggested Señor Tompkins was looking for land to bury nuclear waste for the US. Or was he breeding a super mountain lion that would wipe out cattle, sheep, and even a way of life? “I wanted to be out of the limelight; instead I got sucked right into it,” said Tompkins. “If your project is big, it’s automatically controversial. I was advised to have public relations people running things, but I don’t believe that’s a good solution. That puts a layer between you and reality. It doesn’t give the public a genuine impression of who you are. I should have taken two months of total-immersion Spanish. I was not as articulate as I could have been in the Chilean media.”
The smears against Tompkins followed the ideological vein pushed by Chile’s neoliberal president, Eduardo Frei. Son of a former president, young Frei didn’t follow in his father’s footsteps right away. First, he became a hydraulic engineer. Critics joked that when Frei looked at a pristine river he saw flowing electricity. As president, Eduardo Frei was determined to open up southern Chile’s vast resources to billion-dollar schemes. He supported destroying native forest lands in order to replant with more commercial eucalyptus and pine. He supported damming pristine rivers to power a huge aluminum smelter. Projects such as these were not seen as billion-dollar boondoggles but rather as signs of progress. The Frei government’s prodevelopment agenda courted international investment and sought to distance the country from the shadow of the Pinochet human rights abuses while maintaining key tenets of the dictator’s free-market orthodoxy.
With spray-painted death threats coming from Nazi kooks and government officials eager to take down his conservation plans, the harassment campaign against Tompkins picked up. Doug and Kris consulted with Gutierrez, their lawyer, who had a clear understanding of power politics in the government. They decided to hire a retired detective from the Chilean PDI, the Chilean equivalent of the FBI. Gutierrez reported that the detective had found tidbits of a plot. “There was a plan to plant drugs in Doug’s apartment in Puerto Montt and then to have a police raid on the apartment. And to say, Oh, we have discovered drugs and this explains everything. Mr. Tompkins is a drug dealer.”
The next step of the plan entailed expelling Tompkins from Chile. Problem solved. But Gabriel Guerra Mondragon, the ambassador of the United States to Chile, raised hell. He emphasized to the Chileans that Tompkins had invested in Chile and followed the rules of the game. He had brought the money through the approved capital routes and invested accordingly. Any insinuations that Mr. Tompkins was a drug dealer were ridiculous.
Suspicious breaches of pri
vate information about Tompkins then leaked to the press, suggesting that they were being spied on. A team of electronics specialists was even flown to Doug and Kris’s office in Puerto Montt. Yes, they told Tompkins, your phones are tapped. Determined to react, Doug asked what they could do. “We sent a charge back the other way, and blew out the tapping system,” said Kris. “And it blew out our entire phone system.”
“We call it ‘the weight of the night,’” said Enrique Correa, Chile’s most influential lobbyist, as he explained the hidden hand of fascism used to threaten and muzzle Chile’s emerging democracy in the mid-1990s. Correa described the repressive power as concentrated both in the Chilean military (where, even after the return to democracy, Augusto Pinochet was named commander in chief, then designated “Senator for Life”) and in the conservative wing of the Catholic Church. The conservative Catholic movement known as Opus Dei was so strong in Santiago that church leaders were able to label the heavy metal band Iron Maiden as “Satan worshippers” and even shut down the band’s planned 1992 concert in Santiago.
Sifting through one of Foundation for Deep Ecology’s statements, the Opus Dei congressional delegation unearthed his defense of a woman’s right to abortion. They went on the warpath, attacking him as a promoter of abortion. For the extreme Catholic faith, Tompkins was also guilty of a second sin—a failure to put homo sapiens atop all of God’s creations. With his Deep Ecology philosophy and millions in cash, Tompkins was, in the eyes of powerful Chilean officials like Frei, a dangerous renegade.
A Wild Idea Page 17
