Question. If u were Douglas Tompkins, would u :
1) Not know the future - build the Pumalin Park
2) Know the future - build the Pumalin Park
3) Not know the future - Not build the Pumalin Park
4) Know the future - Not build the Pumalin Park
Pick one. Your choice can define how you live your life.
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North Face Founder Saves, Fights Nature as Chile Volcano Erupts
By Joshua Goodman
May 19 (Bloomberg) --
North Face Inc. founder
Douglas Tompkins and his wife Kristine have spent $50 million to save Chile's rain forest. Now nature is rebelling: A volcano that has erupted for the first time in 9,000 years is ravaging the reserve they have built.
The Chaiten volcano sits on the southern edge of
Pumalin Park, a 300,000-hectare (740,000-acre) site created by the Tompkinses to preserve a swath of Patagonia. Ash and rivers swollen by volcanic mud have damaged land, trees and trails on a third of the park and threaten to obliterate 17 years of work,
Kristine Tompkins said.
``It's a mess, a serious mess,'' she said in a May 13 phone interview from Pumalin's administration center at Puerto Varas, about 160 kilometers (100 miles) from the volcano. ``If it gets worse, it could hammer in a big way the infrastructure we've built, and wipe out forests that'll take thousands of years to return.''
The
eruption, which started May 2, has spewed windblown ash east across the Andes as far as Buenos Aires, almost 1,500 kilometers away, and forced the evacuation of more than 4,000 people living within a 30-kilometer radius of the mountain. A 3,000-year-old hardwood forest of
evergreen Alerce trees has been spared so far.
About 90 percent of the now-evacuated town of Chaiten is flooded, Chile's national emergency office said on May 15. Residents probably won't be able to return for at least three months, Chilean Defense Minister
Jose Goni said the same day.
Patagonia Visit
Douglas Tompkins was traveling and unavailable for comment, Pumalin spokeswoman Carolina Morgado said. In an interview with Bloomberg News last year, Tompkins, now 65, recounted the steps that led him to Chile
He said he first visited Patagonia, a vast expanse of mountains, rivers and grasslands at the southern tip of South America, in the 1960s. A climbing buddy with him on that trip later started
Patagonia Inc., the outdoor-apparel company where his present wife once served as chief executive officer.
Tompkins himself went on to found and sell outdoor-gear maker North Face in the 1960s. In 1968, he started fashion company
Esprit Holdings Ltd. with his first wife. He gave up his Esprit holdings for $200 million in 1989.
Two years later, he sold his Ferrari and Amish-quilt collection and moved to an isolated cabin in Chile to work fulltime on conservation. He married Kristine, a long-time friend, in 1993. They say they have spent $200 million to acquire and preserve 810,000 hectares of land in Chile and neighboring Argentina.
People, Livestock
Pumalin, which spans the country from Argentina on the east to the Pacific Ocean on the west, is the showcase of their holdings. Its self-guided trails, rustically luxurious cabins and elegant visitors' center draw 7,000 visitors a year. In 2005, the Chilean government granted the park the status of a nature sanctuary.
Since the eruption, the Tompkinses have relocated 75 people who live and work in the reserve.
Kristine Tompkins said flyovers showed that flooded, debris-filled rivers threatened to wipe out livestock on several farms that they own contiguous to the park, which is owned by a foundation established by the couple.
``We're anticipating major damage,'' Kristine Tompkins, 57, said in the May 13 interview. ``What's shocking is that this thing is still blowing as hard as it was the first day and we don't know what will happen next.''
The eruption is refocusing attention on the Tompkins holdings and stirring up old controversies.
Local Concern
Douglas Tompkins, who says he is a proponent of so-called
Deep Ecology, a philosophy that blames technology from laptop computers to nuclear power plants for damaging the environment, has upset local officials and business people by refusing to allow logging, hydroelectric dams and a proposed roadway through his reserve.
President
Michelle Bachelet's government announced May 8 it would ban all land purchases in the area hit by the volcano, after local officials said they were concerned that Tompkins would try to take advantage of the eruption to buy out farmers whose livelihood could be wiped out.
The possibility that Tompkins would seek to enlarge his holdings was ``an important factor in the decision'' to seek a ban, Claudio Alvarado, the opposition Congressional deputy for the area, said in an interview. The aim is to ``avoid speculation and people taking advantage of the situation,'' he said.
Carlos Ignacio Kuschel, a senator from the region, said the measure wouldn't be an effective deterrent.
``Tompkins has never paid attention to these things, he just buys,'' Kuschel said in an interview. ``He's capricious and the older he gets, the more difficult he becomes.''
Kristine Tompkins said she and her husband have no plans to buy more land because of the eruption.
``We're so used to this kind of thing,'' she said. ``At first we joked that if this volcano exploded it would end up being our fault.''
To contact the reporter on this story:
Joshua Goodman in Rio de Janeiro at
Jgoodman19@bloomberg.netLast Updated: May 19, 2008 00:00 EDT
