Taking Note
DM
The Private Saviors of Chile's Forests Over the past four years, Esprit clothing mogulturned-ecophilanthropist Douglas Tompkins quietly pursued his ambition of creating a vast private park...
...Wood products have become Chile's second-largest export after copper, earning more than $1.6 billion in 1994...
...Without telling anyone what he was doing or why, he acquired property piece by piece until he had in his possession 670,000 acres of pristine rainforest that stretched from the Pacific Ocean to Argentina...
...imperialist, a national-security threat, a money launderer, and even a Zionist securing land for a "second Israel...
...To prevent catastrophe, we will have to talk not only about trees, but also about economics, people and that "i"-word-ideology...
...In many respects, setting up private nature reserves with Northern capital is the ultimate in pragmatism...
...The Washington State-based logging company Trillium has bought nearly as much old-growth forest in Tierra del Fuego with nary a peep of protest...
...In a world where only money talks, Northern environmentalists have simply joined the game to further their cause...
...To feed the insatiable demand for furniture and paper products in Japan, Europe, the United States and increasingly other parts of Latin America, Chile is rapidly cutting down its temperate rainforests and replacing them with profitable plantations of pine and eucalyptus...
...We shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking that a world full of Pumalins will allow us to avert a looming environmental endgame...
...Only 12% of Chile's territory remains forested (compared with 66% of Brazil and 22% of Argentina...
...Their voices, however, have been drowned out in the fray...
...Indisputably, Tompkins has been unfairly singled out for attack...
...The property is crucial to Tompkins' grand plan because it bisects the northern and southern pieces of his proposed park...
...Finally, the purchase of parkland is a non-confrontational, apolitical strategy that does not directly contest the capitalist development model that is at the root of the problem...
...Indeed it feeds into neoliberal assumptions by privatizing what should be a public resource...
...In this strategy, forests become commodities...
...When Tompkins was within 30,000 acres of owning all the land he intended to buy, local logging and salmon-farming interests, conservatives in Congress, and rightwing nationalist groups caught wind of what he was up to...
...Chile's fledgling environmental movement and the government's own environmental commission support Tompkins...
...The difference, of course, is that Trillium plans to cut down the 10,000-year-old trees on its property, while Tompkins' purchase puts a glass fence around his Eden...
...The owners, in the end, have the prerogative to dictate their park's use and management, as Tompkins' threats to close off Pumalin to the public attests...
...If the government does buy the land, Tompkins threatens to retaliate by keeping the land he has acquired off-limits to the public...
...The government, which should rightly be the conservator of its national forests, is instead orchestrating the logging free-for-all through its pro-business policies and its lax enforcement of environmental regulations...
...environmental groups in Latin America...
...The Private Saviors of Chile's Forests Over the past four years, Esprit clothing mogulturned-ecophilanthropist Douglas Tompkins quietly pursued his ambition of creating a vast private park in southern Chile to be named Pumalin (the Spanish diminutive of puma...
...ompkins' project, while more lavish and audacious, is nonetheless cut from the same cloth as many other initiatives by U.S...
...Several weeks later, it reversed itself, instead appointing a commission to study the probable impact of the park...
...Peter Cleary of the Washington-based Nature Conservancy calls private-park projects "the wave of the future...
...First, private parks are exactly that: private...
...While no doubt saving forests from the teeth of chain saws, these projects are partial solutions at best...
...Adopt-anacre fundraising programs and debtfor-nature swaps are efforts in the same vein...
...They immediately cried foul, accusing him of being a U.S...
...Given such a situation, it is no wonder that initiatives such as Douglas Tompkins' appear to be the only hope for Chile's forests...
...He has become Chile's second-largest private landowner in the process-though his declared intention is eventually to hand the land over to the country's national park system...
...Those final 30,000 acres, currently owned by the Catholic University of Valparaiso, have become the set piece in a showdown between Tompkins and his foes...
...The National Forest Corporation (Conaf), the state forestry agency, has been cut by 50% since 1978, and its staff of 1,500 is capped by law...
...The North thus ends up cast in the role of riding in on a white horse to save Latin American countries from themselves...
...In July, the national government, caving in to its right-wing flank, vowed to buy the land...
...And as in any monetary transaction, it is Northern groups and individuals who hold the power of the purse...
...he imbroglio in which Tompkins finds himself highlights how Chile's recent dynamic economic growth has come at the expense of the environment...
Vol. 29 • November 1995 • No. 3
