Tompkins Saves the Rain Forest by Buying It
3/16/97
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Headline: Tompkins Saves the Rain Forest by Buying It
Source: Los Angeles Times
Date: 3/16/97
Author: Victor Perera
Copyright Los Angeles Times
Sunday, March 16, 1997
CHILE
He Saves the Rain Forest by Buying It
By VICTOR PERERA
PUERTO MONTT, CHILE--If Thoreau were to come
back to life, he might do with his book royalties
something that Douglas Tompkins is doing with his
private fortune: invest it in a swath of pristine
woodlands in a remote South American country and
convert it into a vast Walden Pond. But the
eccentric tycoon who made his money from the sale
of stock in his Esprit clothing chain has gone
one step farther. After spending more than $10
million on 700,000 acres of spectacular temperate
rain forest, mountain lakes and coastline in
southern Chile, he offered to turn it over to his
host country as a national park, with the sole
proviso that it be declared a nature sanctuary.
The Chilean government turned down the offer,
denouncing Tompkins as a dangerous radical and
his gift as a Trojan horse.
The Chilean government's seemingly perverse
response is not altogether surprising. Truth is,
it has good reason to be alarmed by Tompkins.
A self-professed "deep ecologist," Tompkins
contributes millions of his foundation money to
environmental groups that regard Homo sapiens, at
best, as a single thread in the fabric of Earth's
biodiversity and, at worst, as a willful
destroyer of nature's grand design. No one is
more detestable in Tompkin's radical cosmology
than the industrial forester and land developer.
In an afterword in his book "Clearcut,"
Tompkins confides that flying his plane over
devastated forests of British Columbia--hidden
from public view--aroused a "green rage" that
converted him into an environmental radical. He
is an advocate of Norwegian philosopher Arne
Naess, who calls for a global council of sentient
beings to feel our planet's cries of distress in
our own bodies before taking remedial action.
Close inspection of the proposed Pumalin
Park reveals why Tompkins has raised such a
ruckus. His nearly 714,000 acres resemble an
upended boot aimed at the heart of southern
Chile. If he acquires the strip of land
separating his two main holdings, Tompkins could
effectively split the country in two, since his
property straddles Chile at its narrowest point,
a corridor running about 50 miles between the
Pacific coast's Gulf of Ancud and the Argentine
border.
Pumalin Park would thus become an effective
buffer against the northward advance of loggers
and land developers, which may be precisely what
Tompkins has in mind.
Tompkins evidently enjoys being in the eye
of an environmental storm. "They are getting so
paranoid that when Santiago college students
marched to oust foreign loggers from Tierra del
Fuego, President Eduardo Frei accused me of
paying for it," he says, sipping tea in his
Education, Science and Ecology Foundation
headquarters, constructed from fallen
alercetrees, the native giant sequoias that grow
on his property. While his lawyer claimed the
foundation's telephones were tapped, Tompkins
accused Sen. Claudio Alvarado of lying to the
Chilean Supreme Court about his driving
homesteaders out of lands adjacent to his
property.
"I'm offering them hard cash for agriculturally
unproductive land," he says. What's wrong with that?"
Since then, Tompkins has offered to help settlers relocate
to more productive land. He has also set up a model farm
at the park entrance to showcase sustainable agronomy.
At times, Tompkins' disingenuousness comes across as real
naivete. He is a brilliant businessman and articulate
spokesman for his ecological ideas--and hopelessly
heavy-footed in dealing with political opponents. But
he backs his objectives with real clout. He recently
transferred $85 million worth of Esprit stock to
his foundations, in addition to his initial
$50-million investment, to demonstrate his
commitment to biodiversity.
Tompkins has managed to polarize not only the political
far right but the traditional left, which is suspicious
of his money and his connections to corporate America.
He professes surprise at the alarm he set off when he sued a
salmon farmer for poisoning the bays with chemicals and
killing sea lions on his coastline. He has taken on Chile's
three most powerful lobbies--the loggers and land developers,
the copper miners and the sacrosanct salmon farms--that are
pouring billions of dollars into the resurgent Chilean economy.
Still, Tompkins is a true believer in the paradigm shift that
will turn every thinking person into a deep ecologist in the
next millennium. He insists we accept individual
accountability for the harm we inflict on the
planet, and become infected with his "green
rage." And he may be right that time is on his
side. He finances all the progressive
environmental NGO's in Chile and many more
abroad. Young environmental radicals have started
calling him a hero. As his popularity spreads, so
does his controversy, and he appears to like it
that way, for all his insistence that he and his
work have been "overdimensionalized."
One of his new staff environmentalists, Carlos Cuevas,
is assisting in the production of a companion tome
to "Clearcut" that will expose the devastation of
Chile's forests. Cuevas asserts that Tompkins' park works
hand in glove with an emerging green revolution among
Chile's youth. "What Doug stands for would be just as
threatening to the Chilean establishment if he
were Chilean-born. The main difference is that,
as a lippy foreigner unacquainted with our
politics, he is vulnerable to nationalistic
attacks on his 'gringo arrogance.' "
One of the most controversial-and exciting-
projects sponsored by Tompkins' foundation is the
Gondwana Global Park project, supported by
Defensores del Bosque Chileno (Defenders of the
Chilean Forest) and other cutting-edge
environmental groups. (The head of Defensores,
Adriana Hoffmann, is receiving an award from
the United Nations this week for her work
protecting Chile's forests.) They are proposing
a land sanctuary in the southern tips of Chile,
Argentina, Tasmania and New Zealand that
would protect rare trees like the lengas and
the giant sequoias that once formed part of a
single sub-equatorial land mass before
continental drift split them apart. The Gondwana
park would be a mirror image of the whale
sanctuary declared by the International Whaling
Commission in 1994 to ban whaling in all Atlantic
waters south of 40 degrees latitude.
On paper, the Gondwana park project seems relatively
inoffensive. In fact, it confronts, head-on, the
Frei government's promotion of large-scale
deforestation in Chile's far south, where
hundreds of thousands of lenga and Chilean
sequoia have been converted into wood chips for
export to Japan and Europe. At present, defenders
of the Chilean Forest and other environmental
groups have teamed up with the Sierra Club and
two Chilean congressmen to strengthen
environmental legislation and stop the decimation
of Tierra del Fuego's lenga forests by Trillium
Corp., part of a Bellingham, Wash.-based
industrial development consortium that recently
began logging operations in the U.S. Northwest
and abroad. Chile's Supreme Court is about to
rule on the congressmen's petition to forestall
the logging of 50,000 hectares of lenga and
coihue forest as an ecologically unsustainable
project.
On the advice of his new, more savvy staff,
Tompkins has toned down the rhetoric, and the
government's attacks on him and Pumalin Park have
abated. Recently, two progressive ministers in
President Eduardo Frei's government voiced
support for his park. Tompkins has even extended
a conciliatory hand to the salmon farmer he sued,
who is linked to his nemesis Sen. Alvarado. But
his phones are still tapped, and sensitive
documents mysteriously disappear from his files.
Tompkins admits he has been stymied by the
virulence of the government's opposition; the
missing land strip, Loncohuinay, which is owned
by Chile's Catholic University, is out of his
reach for now. "My wife, Kris, and I will work on
infrastructure for the park, and wait for the
next elections. I am in no hurry." Although
Tompkins has derided ecotourism as "the point
man" for destructive commercial tourism, his
projects include opening miles of forest trails
for his alerce groves, fiords, volcanoes and high
country lakes, and an airstrip to provide access
to visitors. "I am bending over backward," the
new, more accommodating Tompkins insists before
breaking into a broad grin, "to meet the
government halfway."