The Private Saviors of Chile’s Forests
Over the past four years, Esprit clothing mogul-
turned-ecophilanthropist
Douglas Tompkins quietly pursued
his ambition of creating a vast pri-
vate park in southern Chile to be
named Pumalin (the Spanish
diminutive of puma). 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. 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 coun-
try’s national park system.
When Tompkins was within
30,000 acres of owning all the land
he intended to buy, local logging
and salmon-farming interests, con-
servatives in Congress, and right-
wing nationalist groups caught
wind of what he was up to. They
immediately cried foul, accusing
him of being a U.S. imperialist, a
national-security threat, a money
launderer, and even a Zionist secur-
ing land for a “second Israel.”
Those final 30,000 acres, current-
ly owned by the Catholic University
of Valparaiso, have become the set
piece in a showdown between
Tompkins and his foes. The proper-
ty is crucial to Tompkins’ grand
plan because it bisects the northern
and southern pieces of his proposed
park. In July, the national govern-
ment, caving in to its right-wing
flank, vowed to buy the land.
Several weeks later, it reversed it-
self, instead appointing a commis-
sion to study the probable impact of
the park. If the government does
buy the land, Tompkins threatens to
retaliate by keeping the land he has
acquired off-limits to the public.
Indisputably, Tompkins has been
unfairly singled out for attack. The
Washington State-based logging
company Trillium has bought near-
ly as much old-growth forest in
Tierra del Fuego with nary a peep
of protest. The difference, of
course, is that Trillium plans to cut
down the 10,000-year-old trees on
its property, while Tompkins’ pur-
chase puts a glass fence around his
Eden.
he imbroglio in which
Tompkins finds himself
highlights how Chile’s re-
cent dynamic economic growth has
come at the expense of the envi-
ronment. To feed the insatiable de-
mand for furniture and paper prod-
ucts in Japan, Europe, the United
States and increasingly other parts
of Latin America, Chile is rapidly
cutting down its temperate rain-
forests and replacing them with
profitable plantations of pine and
eucalyptus. Wood products have
become Chile’s second-largest ex-
port after copper, earning more
than $1.6 billion in 1994. Only
12% of Chile’s territory remains
forested (compared with 66% of
Brazil and 22% of Argentina).
The government, which should
rightly be the conservator of its na-
tional forests, is instead orchestrat-
ing the logging free-for-all through
its pro-business policies and its lax
enforcement of environmental reg-
ulations. The National Forest Corp-
oration (Conaf), the state forestry
agency, has been cut by 50% since
1978, and its staff of 1,500 is
capped by law. Chile’s fledgling
environmental movement and the
government’s own environmental
commission support Tompkins.
Their voices, however, have been
drowned out in the fray.
Given such a situation, it is no
wonder that initiatives such as
Douglas Tompkins’ appear to be
the only hope for Chile’s forests.
ompkins’ project, while more lavish and audacious, is
nonetheless cut from the
same cloth as many other initiatives
by U.S. environmental groups in
Latin America. Peter Cleary of the
Washington-based Nature Con-
servancy calls private-park projects
“the wave of the future.” Adopt-an-
acre fundraising programs and debt-
for-nature swaps are efforts in the
same vein. In many respects, setting
up private nature reserves with
Northern capital is the ultimate in
pragmatism. In a world where only
money talks, Northern environmen-
talists have simply joined the game
to further their cause.
While no doubt saving forests
from the teeth of chain saws, these
projects are partial solutions at best.
First, private parks are exactly that:
private. 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. In this
strategy, forests become commodi-
ties. And as in any monetary trans-
action, it is Northern groups and in-
dividuals who hold the power of the
purse. The North thus ends up cast
in the role of riding in on a white
horse to save Latin American coun-
tries from themselves. Finally, the
purchase of parkland is a non-con-
frontational, apolitical strategy that
does not directly contest the capital-
ist development model that is at the
root of the problem. Indeed it feeds
into neoliberal assumptions by pri-
vatizing what should be a public re-
source.
We shouldn’t fool ourselves into
thinking that a world full of
Pumalins will allow us to avert a
looming environmental endgame.
To prevent catastrophe, we will
have to talk not only about trees, but
also about economics, people and
that “i”-word-ideology.
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