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.
