Pumalin Park

SIGN HUNG BY DOUG TOMPKINS IN THE NEWLY OPENED FRONT OFFICE OF HIS PRIVATE PUMALIN PARK IN CHILE... 

Pumalin Park, named for the area s native pumas, started with the 18,000 acres he purchased in the Renihue valley, that beautiful broken-down ranch with the stunning view of the fjord and its impossibly blue waters, and a snowcapped volcano framed by the front window of the ranch house. He had a homestead reachable only by boat or plane paradise to a man who felt most alive bivouacking on... 

Pumalin Park remains the centerpiece, the most beautiful, the most remote, and the most troublesome. Finally, in 2005, with a new president in place—Tompkins s former supporter, Richard Lagos— and a new environmental chief, Adrianna Hoffman, Pumalin was granted the long-promised status of nature sanctuary. The park by then was open to the public, and on track for eventual donation to the... 

There were several routes that the power lines and roads could take, some of them far less destructive than others. The proposal Endesa favored, perhaps unsurprisingly, runs right through the heart of Pumalin Park. 

In the midst of the battle, nature took matters into its own hands. An enormous volcanic eruption in May 2008 near the town of Chaiten, at the southern border of Tompkins s Pumalin Park, destroyed the town and forced evacuations from the area, although the park itself weathered the crisis with little damage. The proposed dams have... 

The media attacks on Tompkins and his Pumalin Park project would become so severe that one reporter asked in 1994, What would you say to those who think Pumalin could become another Colonia Dignidad Tompkins said the question was absurd, but it was perhaps the most severe accusation that could be made in Chile, for no vestige of the Pinochet regime was more feared and despised. 

So, by the time a newspaper interviewer was hearing how weary the Tompkinses had grown of the endless fight over Pumalin, Doug and Kris were well into a spree of buying land and creating parks that was unprecedented in the conservation history of any country. 

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