Prioritizing their restoration tasks, Kris zeroed in on the fencing as her first obstacle. The fencing blocked the migration of guanacos. Able to leap eight feet high, the animals attempted to cross the valley despite multiple strips of barbed wire. Hundreds bled to death, impaled on the spikes. As long as the fencing existed, it was impossible for wild animals to reestablish natural migration patterns.
Kris wanted the guanacos to come down from the hills, the puma to stalk and kill them, and the wild ostrich–like Darwin’s rhea to bound across the grasslands eating frogs, mice, and plants. To do that she needed to remove 400 miles of fence, so she launched a volunteer program. Working with Malinda and Yvon Chouinard, she coordinated so that employees from the Patagonia company were given time off to volunteer. With thick gloves to protect their hands, they dug up fence posts and coiled the barbed wire in large balls that looked like galvanized tumbleweeds.
The volunteers also waged war on invasive species. Thousands of plants were dug from the soil—roots and all—and then carted away or burned. “It was so interesting to see how the local people reacted to fence removal,” said Lito Tejada-Flores, Doug’s longtime climbing friend who had bought a plot of land nearby. “I don’t think they’d ever seen that much space without fences. There were campesinos coming from other areas just to see it.”
When Kris and Doug’s friends came to visit the Chacabuco Valley, some fell in love with the region and bought property nearby. Edgar and Elizabeth Boyles, Doug’s close friends from San Francisco, purchased a place in Puerto Guadal, where their son, Weston, could explore rivers and wilderness and accompany them to lively dinners at the Tompkins home. From the time he was ten years old, Weston heard the same lecture from “Uncle Doug”—skip college and dive directly into life.
Doug’s grandson Gardner Imhoff spent his vacations in ValChac where he hiked, rafted, and listened as his grandfather attempt to convince him that “Harvard is a rip-off and ought to be boarded up with cheap plywood.” Never a fan of formal education, Doug delighted in upending the carefully laid plans of parents. Kris Tompkins was far more diplomatic yet held her ground. In public and even at the dinner table, Doug and Kris were famous for impassioned arguments, dismissing the other’s conclusions and shredding one another’s logic. Their battles were notoriously intense, and yet when they were over it was as if they had changed channels and gone back to being civil. Friends viewed their ability to clash in public not as a sign of weakness but rather of the strengths welding their marriage.
Surrounded by open skies, lakes, and wild animals, the Tompkins home received a steady assortment of friends and visitors from abroad as Doug and Kris labored on their new national park project. They also spent days at a time hiking, climbing, or flying above their new home. When Doug spotted a mountain peak that he suspected had neither been climbed nor named, he jumped at the chance for a first ascent. Together with Yvon they struggled to reach the summit. It was not particularly technical, but on their first effort Yvon and Doug were too exhausted to reach the 6,211-foot peak. Yvon’s boots cracked and broke. “We should call this Geezer Peak,” he joked.
Descending to the lodge, Tompkins announced that in honor of his wife he was christening the peak “Mount Kristine.” Tompkins was sure the mountain was anonymous and therefore could be named. Chilean officials agreed with him. Among the gifts Kris received from Doug, it was Mount Kristine that topped the list. “He put me on the map!” she laughed.
* * *
At least 90 percent of our movement in Chile and Argentina was in the air, maybe more. Nearly everything we did was based around flights.
Flying changed the way we looked at the land and, more importantly, how we understood landscapes, especially the complex topography of southern Chile. It taught us how to look at coastlines, the islands and their relationship to the continent. We could never have understood the ecology of the Iberá Wetlands without the hundreds of hours flying over it. The national parks that we’ve donated were, in large part, understood through knowing every peak, every fold in the valleys, every pond, lake, and watershed. It was from the air that the big-picture landscapes came into view. Flying was also the direct means to articulate to those who were skeptical, politicians and community members, why an area was so important and see firsthand how it would or wouldn’t influence communities.
Of all of my experiences in the south, beyond our love story, the biggest single impact on how I see the world, how I gauge beauty, how I found my true self is, without question, through the thousands of hours of flying with Doug. Of the two near-death experiences I have had, the ones where you are steeled and prepared to go; one was flying, the other sailing in deep winter along the Chilean coastline. These things sculpt who we are like nothing else can. We even went flying to buy groceries.
Doug loved me to eternity, but if our bed had been large enough, his little Husky would have been tucked in with us.
—KRIS TOMPKINS
* * *
Living on the sheep ranch was a logistical headache. It took years to sell off the entire flock. But as the sheep herd was reduced over time, a more profound beauty sprouted. Fields of golden grasses sprang up. “The amount of grassland recovery, the pace of recovery of this ecosystem, was faster than anticipated. Which isn’t to say that it won’t take hundreds of years more. It will,” declared Tom Butler, the editor of Wild Earth magazine and a longtime editor of Tompkins’s books. “But it has bounced back quickly. You drive through Patagonia and you don’t see grass. Then you drive into the Chacabuco Valley and you see this lush, waving grassland and big herds of guanacos. It just feels right. It feels magical, heavenly. It’s pretty amazing what nature can do when allowed to recover.”
Chapter 15
The River Killers
This is a country that has been sacrificed. Socially and environmentally speaking it’s a country of sacrifice. Chile has murdered most of its rivers. The Loa doesn’t flow into the ocean anymore. Whatever water it has is sewage and industrial waste tailings. The Aconcagua is considered a dead river. The Maipo is a dead river. The paradigm: Chile is for exploitation. So, who is this gringo coming to tell us we must create National Parks?
—JUAN PABLO ORREGO, Chilean environmentalist
When a journalist called Kris and asked “How do you feel that you’re just starting off with this new park and they’re going to build dams on the Baker River?” Kris had no idea what the reporter was talking about. Then she read the newspapers.
A group of corporations announced they had selected the heart of Patagonia for a $3.2 billion complex of a dozen hydroelectric dams. The largest proposed dam measured 240 feet high and would require nine years to build. The Patagonian landscape was going to be sliced by power lines, electricity generation stations, and a noisy, dirty, nine-year construction cycle with some 6,000 temporary workers—which in South America meant shantytowns, prostitution, garbage galore, and the destruction of a peaceful rural life. The project was called HidroAysén and would be the largest energy project in the history of Chile.
The dam project was a partnership between Colbun, a company held by the Matte family, one of Chile’s wealthiest, and the publicly traded Spanish multinational ENDESA. And they planned to build the dam only a few miles away from Chacabuco Valley. The proposed dams would interrupt the Baker River, into which the Chacabuco River emptied, meaning that the entire watershed was about to be disrupted.
Kris and Doug were stunned. They had been outfoxed by ENDESA in the battle to buy Huinay, the parcel of land in the center of their Pumalín Park project further north. Now ENDESA was at their doorstep again, this time with plans to build a series of dams to harvest the energy of a dozen rivers.
ENDESA and Colbun announced they had lined up financing for the construction of the massive dams. Describing the project as a twenty-year boon to the local economy, the two partners predicted the dams would generate $120 billion in revenue. Once the dams and power transmission lines were installed, they claimed,
their electricity would travel first to a plant near the town of Cochrane, then would pass through about 5,000 transmission towers that would zigzag across the country—one huge tower every quarter mile for a thousand miles. The consortium estimated annual production of 3,000 megawatts, equivalent to one-fifth of Chile’s electricity consumption. In Santiago, hydropower was touted as “clean energy for the masses” and the distribution system hailed as a dazzling engineering feat to construct “the world’s longest electrical transmission lines.”
To acquire the land needed for the new reservoir, the consortium bought out dozens of landowners. An artificial lake they proposed to create would flood the valley across from the entrance to Valley Chacabuco. According to ENDESA and Colbun, since the electricity came from water it was sustainable and therefore renewable “green energy.”
Three dams were designed for the Baker River, and two to siphon energy from the Pascua River. Under Chile’s water code and the 1980 Constitution, water rights had been privatized and river water transformed into a commodity to be bought, sold, and traded. The Pinochet government had granted ENDESA privileged concessions and favorable conditions to own the water and also to profit from its movement.
As ENDESA and Colbun engineers finalized plans to pour cement right across the road from the entrance to Tompkins’s planned park, ENDESA had every reason to believe it was a done deal. Public opinion polls showed 57 percent of the Chilean public approved of the dam idea, while hydro energy was seen in a positive light by most citizens.
In trying to figure out how to respond, Tompkins turned to his international allies—including Robert Kennedy Jr., who years earlier had helped form the nonprofit called Waterkeeper Alliance. Kennedy was appalled at the idea of the dam. “Every river is a masterpiece,” he said. “Most people in the world will never see the Mona Lisa, but everybody would be diminished if it were destroyed.”
Political hacks and Chilean power brokers alike knew the dam project had been announced only after long negotiations and a clear promise of government support. The government would guide the project through any and all environmental impact complications—that was tacitly understood. Three billion dollars in construction contracts meant sufficient graft among Chile’s elite to schmooze federal, regional, and local regulators. The enormous structures required thousands of truckloads of cement, hundreds of suppliers, 5,000 temporary rental units, and a supply chain to please all the political parties back in Santiago. The proposed Baker River dam would flood unpopulated valleys, turning parts of Patagonia into valuable lakefront property.
Colbun and ENDESA had been gifted the rights to Chile’s water and controlled roughly two-thirds of the nation’s electrical supply; the HidroAysén project would be a cash cow.
This was not ENDESA’s first dam project in Chile. President Eduardo Frei had supported ENDESA’s project to build dams across central Chile’s majestic Biobío River years earlier, ending the classic rafting routes that Doug had shared with his family and Esprit employees in the 1980s. The Biobío dam projects in the 1990s were heavily opposed by local environmental groups, but they lost. Chile had barely returned to democracy, and after seventeen years of harsh military rule Chileans activists weren’t yet used to openly criticizing their own government. The ragtag group of environmentalists who opposed the project faced an uphill battle. They brought their defense of the Biobío River to Europe, to the United Nations, and even to the International Monetary Fund’s headquarters in Washington, DC. They nearly halted the project. But ultimately, the Chilean government approved damming the Biobío River.
In Patagonia, ENDESA held a far stronger hand for damming the rivers. There was little to no indigenous presence in the Aysén region, and the local population was sparse and impoverished. For a few million dollars they could buy out rural families living in the zone. For a few million more they could sell the plan to Chileans back in Santiago, most of whom had never heard of the Baker River or, for that matter, Patagonia. After their victory damming the Biobío, ENDESA thought it knew the playbook of Chilean environmentalists, and discounted any chance that the activists, whom they considered a bunch of hippies, could do any more than put up a bit of resistance that might delay the inevitable approval process.
If HidroAysén was approved, Doug told collaborators, the floodgates of development would open. Patagonia would drown under a wave of destruction sold as progress. Damming the free-flowing rivers would serve a death blow to the long-term strategy that Doug and Kris had developed to allow Chacabuco Valley to return to wilderness while at the same time transforming the regional economy from one based on resource extraction industries into one based on conservation and ecotourism.
* * *
Dams are almost always a boondoggle. If you look at the economics on them, they’re ways of privatizing the flow of the river, stealing it from the public—they almost always are constructed with giant public subsidies. And the people in these river valleys—their lives are permanently destroyed because the river’s gone, and their homes are flooded and they’re forced to move. It’s okay to do that if there’s a definitive public benefit, but in virtually every case where you look at dams, that benefit evaporates under close scrutiny. In a true free market, natural resources are properly valued, and it’s the undervaluation of those resources that causes us to use them wastefully. So, it’s a publicly owned resource that is privatized using public dollars, and they’re almost all involved in dramatic economic chicanery that is going to benefit a few billionaires, making them richer by impoverishing everybody else. They raise the standard of living for themselves by diminishing the quality of life for everybody else, and they do that by escaping the discipline of the free market and forcing the public to pay their production costs. If you show me a polluter, I’ll show you a subsidy. I’ll show you a fat cat using political clout—Doug understood that what we were dealing with was not free market capitalism. It was corporate crony capitalism.
—ROBERT KENNEDY JR.
* * *
With ENDESA challenging Doug and Kris in their own adopted backyard, the fight became personal. It was time to rally the Chilean environmental community, in which Doug and Kris had developed relationships forged during years of shared battles. “Doug called us all down for a meeting at Chacabuco to talk it over,” recalled Peter Hartmann, a Chilean environmental activist. “He said, ‘This cannot happen. This project is terrible. We have to do something and I’ll help you. Let’s launch the biggest environmental campaign that Chile has ever seen.’”
Doug asked Juan Pablo Orrego, who had been a leader in the campaign against damming the Biobío, and who was director of his own Chilean NGO, called EcoSistemas, to develop a strategic plan. Orrego and a team of Chilean activists prepared a 116-page report that concluded with a recommendation for a legal entity known as the Patagonia Defense Council. This was a coalition that included environmental groups, tourism operators, local citizens, and some sympathetic politicians. “Many of the NGOs objected. They said that allowing politicians to be part of it would tarnish the process,” said Hartmann, who was on the council. “But we did it anyway. If we tried to protect every ego in the environmental movement that wanted to protect their purity, we were not going to achieve any objectives.”
Tompkins was incensed at the idea of dams in Patagonia. He told the team that they needed to stall the approval of the dam. He was certain that the future of energy production was migrating to alternatives. New technologies, he insisted, were lowering the price of producing solar panels and wind turbines. The price for these nonconventional renewable energy sources, Tompkins said, was poised to drop. Alternative energy sources were just around the corner. “Doug had a wider vision of the world than we did,” said Hartmann. “His global vision was a big asset.”
With activists fanning across the country to support the largest environmental uprising Chile had ever seen, Doug took control of the messaging, specifically the look and feel of the media campaign opposing the dam. He kn
ew that damming a river to produce electricity was controversial in any corner of Latin America. In Chile, it was a declaration of war. Many of Chile’s young environmental activists had cut their teeth battling to save the Biobío. It was a bitter loss. They had lost a masterpiece, and there was a desire to even the score. A young activist working with EcoSistemas coined a three-word slogan for their campaign: “Patagonia Without Dams.” In Spanish, the equivalent phrase, “Patagonia sin Represas,” was romantic, and catchy. It crystallized the notion that Patagonia was a wild paradise, even if most Chileans couldn’t find it on a map of their own country.
Organizing a nationwide opposition movement against the largest energy project in Chile’s history was a challenge. Arguing against dams was in many ways seen as an affront to the nation’s free-market development model, which was based on exporting raw materials including wood pulp, fish meal, and raw copper. Chile was not investing in value-added processes like turning the wood into furniture, the fish into fillets, or the copper into pipes. The post-Pinochet government, known as La Concertacion, had consistently proclaimed that the duty-free, export-everything-to-the-world strategy would continue. Protesting the development model was seen as both anti-investment and anti-Chilean.
Doug had an idea: What if he focused not on the dams but rather on the power lines? He considered the 1,200-mile-long electrical transmission lines a scar—as ugly as a clear-cut and many times longer. And that concept, that image—a 1,200-hundred-mile-long scar, gashing his beloved Patagonia and cutting through half the country—became the cornerstone of his media strategy. What if he made a ghastly collage? What if he and his team showed the power lines defacing every corner of Chile? Although the proposed electrical lines traveled nowhere near Torres del Paine, Patagonia’s most famous national park, Tompkins hired a local advertising team to mock-up a photo with power lines slashing the view of its famous spires. Many of Doug’s allies doubted him. “It’s not even true!” they griped. “Don’t worry,” he replied with a grin. He was betting that an image so distasteful would stimulate a nationwide appetite for beauty.
A Wild Idea Page 23
