Resalvajizar el planeta
Translator: Gisela Giardino
Reviewer: Sebastian Betti
Hello everyone, first of all,
I beg your patience please.
I want to talk to you in Spanish
and this requires that I talk
with my notes, I’m sorry.
I grew up in California,
in my great-grandparents' field.
That field was sold when my cousins,
my brothers and I were adults.
At that time, our generation
wasn’t willing to take on
the heavy burden of running
an agricultural field.
However, the loss of that landscape
left us lost, rootless, aimless.
For the first time, I felt
that something valuable
may be better understood,
not for its presence, but its absence.
For 23 years my working life
went together with Yvon Chouinard.
It began in a modest tin shed, in Ventura,
and came to be the Patagonia company.
Over time, I became its CEO
and I helped building a company
in which creating the best products
and doing it while caring for the planet
was more than just a tagline.
I already knew him, but I met
Douglas Tompkins again in 1990
when I visited El Calafate.
Doug was an entrepreneur.
He had founded the company
The North Face ESP.
And by the late ’80s he had decided
to commit the last third of his life
to what he called “paying his rent
for living on the planet”.
At about the same time I hit 40
and I was ready to do something
completely new with my life.
The day after I retired from
the Patagonia company
I flew 6,000 miles South to Patagonia
and I joined Doug
on our first conservation project.
We were in one of
the most remote places on Earth
and yet, industrial aquaculture
grew like cancer
around the edges Pumalín Park.
Gold mining, dam projects in rivers
and other threats reached the region.
The noise of the stampede
of global economic growth
could be heard even
in the farthest latitudes
of the Southern Cone.
Progress is typically seen
in very positive terms.
But from where we were standing
we could see the dark side
of industrial growth.
When the vision of the industrial world
is applied to the natural systems
that support all life,
we start treating Earth like a factory
that produces all the things
we think we need.
And, as we are all already aware of,
the consequences of that worldview
are destructive to human welfare,
to our climate systems and wildlife.
Doug called it the price of progress.
Doug and I wanted to be a part
of the resistance
to that direction of global society.
When we acquired wildlife habitat
in Chile and Argentina
we went for big, wild and connected.
Some areas were pristine,
others needed healing and to be rebuilt.
Finally, our foundation
bought more than 2.2 million acres
from willing sellers, in order to create
privately managed protected areas,
with public park infrastructure
like campgrounds and trails,
it was all welcome.
Our goal was to donate that land
in the form of new national parks.
I could describe it as a kind of
“jiu-jitsu capitalism”.
We deployed private wealth
created in our business life
to protect nature from being devoured
by the hand of the global economy.
It sounded good,
but in the early ’90s in Chile
where philanthropy to save wild lands
was completely unknown,
we faced tremendous suspicion,
and sometimes downright hostility.
Over time, we began to win people over.
In the last 27 years
we have permanently protected
about 15 million acres
of temperate rainforest,
Patagonian steppe, grasslands,
coastal areas and wetlands.
We helped create 13 new national parks
composed of our land donations
and adjoining federal lands.
Fifteen years ago we asked ourselves:
beyond protecting the land
and the landscape,
how can we create
fully functional ecosystems?
That’s when we started asking ourselves
who were missing.
What species had disappeared
or were vulnerable.
But first, we had to consider:
How do we eliminate the reason
why these species became extinct
in the first place?
The solution, so obvious now,
hit like a thunderbolt.
The idea of rewilding changed
the nature of everything we do.
Unless all members
of a community are present
and flourishing,
it’s impossible to create
fully functional ecosystems.
We started to introduce
native species to the Southern Cone.
In the Iberá Wetlands,
we brought giant anteaters,
pampas deer, peccaries,
red-and-green macaws,
absent for over a hundred years
in Argentina.
The capstone to Iberá’s recovery
will be the return apex carnivores
to their rightful place.
Jaguars on the land,
giant otters in the water.
After several years of trial and error,
we produced cubs that will roam free
in the wetlands of Iberá
for the first time in over half a century.
Jaguar populations can recover
in the area of Iberá Park,
of 4.2 million acres,
with low risk of conflict
with neighboring ranches.
In the Chilean Patagonia
we are rebuilding the ecosystem
with endangered huemul deer,
lesser rhea, puma and condors.
When almost five years ago we lost
Doug in a kayaking accident,
the power of absence
hit me one more time.
At the foundation we decided
that our mourning would be the fuel
to step up our work.
In 2018, we helped create
new marine national parks
in the Southern Atlantic Ocean,
and in 2019 we completed the largest
private land gift in history,
donating more than one million acres,
an area larger than Switzerland,
to create national parks in Chile.
This public-private partnership
has already created
five new national parks,
and expanded three other.
The power of absence is of no use
if it leads us to nostalgia or despair.
It’s only useful if it motivates us
to work to somehow restore
what has been lost.
In fact, the first step to rewilding
is to be able to imagine
that it is possible.
That the abundance of wildlife
is not a fable from a long time ago,
but part of a better
and more beautiful future.
We believe it’s possible.
We experienced it.
I leave you with these thoughts.
We have an urgent challenge.
If what’s at stake is survival,
the diversity of life, human dignity,
and the health of non-human communities,
then the answer
must include rewilding the Earth
as much and as quickly as possible.
And this gets us
to the core of the question.
Are we ready to do what it takes
to change the end of this story?
The massive changes that the world
has gone through to stop
the spread of COVID-19
gives me hope.
It shows that we can join forces
under desperate circumstances.
It’s like a trial run to respond
to today’s climate crisis.
Globally, we are learning
to work together
in ways we would have never imagined.
I know you’ve heard all this.
But if there was ever a moment
to awaken, is now.
It was never clearer that everything
is connected to everything else.
Our interdependence.
Every human life is affected
by the actions
of all other human lives
around the world.
And the fate of humanity
is linked to the health of the planet.
We have a common destiny.
We can flourish or we can suffer.
But we’re going to do it together.
We are far past the point
where individual action was a choice.
In my opinion it’s a moral imperative
that each of us steps up
to reimagine our place
in the circle of life.
And not in the center
but as part of the whole.
No matter where you are,
no matter what you have,
get up every morning
and do something for the things you love,
for what you think is the truth,
that’s our part.
Today and ahead.
Thanks a lot.