Words :: Tom Butler. Excerpted from Patagonia National Park: Chile, reprinted with permission by Patagonia. The book is an initiative of Rewilding Chile, the offspring organization of Tompkins Conservation.
REWILDING PATAGONIA, REWILDING THE EARTH
Is there another place-name more powerful than “Patagonia” in conjuring visions of soaring mountains, wide-open spaces, and rugged beauty? Around the globe, people hear that word and think of the windswept expanse of what pioneer Lucas Bridges called “the uttermost part of the Earth.” Indeed, Patagonia remains one of the last, best, wildest places on the planet.
The popular idea of the region as pristine and untouched, however, is far from the whole truth. What a person experiences today in Patagonia National Park and surrounding territory is a result of ancient forces and recent land-use history. If we could look back through time at this region of the globe, millions of years before our species was born in Africa, we’d see tectonic plates crashing, mountains rising and eroding, ice ages coming and going, and a rich tapestry of life, which evolved and changed over time, flourishing here. And then, less than a blink-of-an-eye ago in geologic time, people arrived.
The earliest cultures of the region we now call Patagonia are little known to us, hinted at by what those first peoples left behind . . . bones, stone tools, intriguing hand-paintings on cave walls. The area now within the park holds dozens of archaeological sites from those early peoples, who likely followed wildlife seasonally and used the low-elevation, east-west-oriented Valle Chacabuco as a convenient path from the Pacific coast across the Andes and to the Patagonian steppe of present-day Argentina.
For several thousand years the landscape was a peopled wilderness—a place where the human community was fully integrated into the larger community of life. The land remained free; its destiny was not yoked or bent to the whims of people who sought to possess, bind up, manage, and profit from it. Whether this light touch on the landscape was due to the people’s cultural practices, or to their modest technology and low population numbers, or to a combination thereof is less important than the result: a place where life’s abundance, attuned to a particular place and time, could achieve untrammeled expression.
The colonial period offered a dramatically different story of how people occupied the land. European settlement prompted a nearly wholesale elimination of the Indigenous human cultures of the region, large-scale deforestation, systematic forest and valley burning, and massive soil erosion resulting from these practices and from the introduction of domestic livestock. The ecological damage that resulted did not spring from malevolence on the part of the newcomers but from misunderstanding the land’s gifts and limits.
The stories of these colonial-era pioneers embody struggle and success. Their lifestyle birthed distinctive skills in leathercraft and woodworking as well as stories and songs that reflect the Patagonian frontier, with the gaucho as archetypal hero. The legacy of that European immigrant culture is part of what makes the region so attractive today, the mix of wild country and local customs of the people who call this region home.
Despite the self-importance we humans place on our work and aspirations (and it’s understandable that we do so), in the big story of Life on Earth, people are newcomers to the scene. And the even briefer period in which humans have occupied the territory we call Patagonia, just 13,000 years or so, reminds us that we are but passing stories on the land. Our elder cousins—Andean condors, pumas, rheas, and guanacos—have much to teach us about surviving and thriving in a cold and lonesome land at the end of the Americas.
Despite the self-importance we humans place on our work and aspirations (and it’s understandable that we do so), in the big story of Life on Earth, people are newcomers to the scene.
The venerability of the mountains offers a sense of proportion, and, perhaps, a dose of humility. Mountains rise and fall; glaciers grow and recede. Our individual stories are carried off by the wind as it roars across the steppe. Oh, but during the brief days we are here experiencing Earth’s beauty, is the spectacle not glorious? Consider one such day in the Valle Chacabuco . . .
Once upon a time, during the period when Tompkins Conservation was working to transform the former Estancia Valle Chacabuco into a world-class protected area that would be added to Chile’s national park system, I spent a sunshine-filled day hiking here with friends. My companions—conservationists from Australia, the United States, and Canada—were all accomplished photographers who kept stopping to take pictures. I trundled on, alone with my thoughts and the sound of birdsong for company, strolling through grassland dotted by herds of guanacos (Lama guanicoe). The trail ascended into the mountains, into the lenga forest with its gnarled trees draped in lichen, a type of forest that feels imbued with mystery, like something out of a fairy tale or childhood dream. Beyond its beauty, however, this habitat is a stronghold of the endangered huemul (Hippocamelus bisulcus) or South Andean deer.
As dusk neared, our party regrouped on the leeward side of a copse of trees, in case the wind kicked up. It didn’t. It was a cloudless night and we lay in our sleeping bags under the stars—such as I have not witnessed before or since and may never again given the creeping light pollution of nearly eight billion humans occupying a small planet. The heavenly show was magical, for there was not a dwelling, much less a town, within many kilometers. The excitement of witnessing that nighttime display was amplified by a simple fact: The four of us lying on the ground were mere visitors in the home of the park’s wild residents, which include pumas (Puma concolor), the region’s apex carnivore.
Intellectually, of course, I know what those cats eat—because the Tompkins Conservation team has been studying puma-huemul interaction for more than a decade. The goal of its long-term research is to understand whether the healthy population of large cats is negatively affecting the imperiled population of deer, which, fortunately, it is not. The local pumas primarily prey on guanacos, various small mammals, and very rarely huemuls. Moreover, the research data is conclusive that Patagonia Park pumas do not eat middle-aged hikers like me.
But still, to lie on the ground and see the sun dip below the horizon and to know that a puma may stalk the shadows nearby . . . That is the essence of a wilderness experience—to be in a landscape that is self-willed, not yoked to humans’ need to manipulate or extract “resources,” a land home to self-willed creatures living wild and free in their own ways. Including creatures with sharp claws and big teeth.
When our group awoke to sunrise illuminating Cerro San Lorenzo, we were blessed with another day amidst sublime scenery and abundant life, a landscape that embodies ecological health and wholeness. And that is remarkable in several ways. Because when the bulk of the park area was purchased for conservation purposes in 2004, the former estancia hosted tens of thousands of sheep and hundreds of miles of ranch fencing. The property had been grazed by domestic livestock for more than a century, with attendant soil erosion, degradation of the natural grasslands, and loss of wildlife. One gaucho’s job was to track and kill pumas that could threaten the sheep.
Today that fencing is gone (dismantled by volunteers), the grasslands are recovering, huemul numbers are growing, and the pumas are fully protected.
The former puma killer now uses his wildlife-tracking skills in service of science and conservation. Guanacos roam freely. An innovative captive-breeding program for Darwin’s rheas (Rhea pennata) is augmenting the existing wild population. This is rewilding philosophy put into action, with positive results for all to see.
When the term “rewilding” was introduced by conservationist Dave Foreman in the early 1990s and popularized initially in Wild Earth journal, it referred to large-scale wilderness recovery, on a scale that would allow apex carnivores such as pumas and wolves to survive and perform their vital role in limiting populations of prey species and smaller predators. At the time, the field of ecological restoration was focused on sites, not systems. A catchy word that conveyed an ambitious goal of helping nature rebound over vast expanses of formerly degraded land was needed, and Foreman’s ecological knowledge and brilliance for language coined “rewilding.”
In the decades since, the word has become widely used by conservationists around the globe to refer to a variety of activities leading to improved ecological conditions. Rewilding has gone mainstream and, for many of us, it retains its core value of putting nature first, even while we understand how that is wildly beneficial to people. The “Global Charter for Rewilding the Earth,” drafted for and adopted by the 2020 World Wilderness Congress, captures this spirit:
Rewilding means helping nature heal. Rewilding means giving space back to wildlife and returning wildlife back to the land, as well as to the seas. Rewilding means the mass recovery of ecosystems and the life-supporting functions they provide. Rewilding means restoring and protecting specific places—on land and in the ocean—where nature is free to direct the ebb and flow of life. Rewilding is about allowing natural processes to shape whole ecosystems so that they work in all their colorful complexity to give life to the land and the seas. Such wild lands and waters are critical to sustain ecological vitality by supporting intact food webs and natural processes. Rewilding is also about the way we think. It is about understanding that we are one species among many, bound together in an intricate web of life that ties us to the atmosphere, the weather, the tide, the soils, the freshwater, the oceans, and all living creatures on the planet.
Patagonia National Park offers a specific, marvelous example of people helping to reverse the typical declining trajectory of land health in our time and allow natural processes to reassert themselves over whole regions. In turn those natural processes support all life, including human life. It seems incongruous, perhaps, but it is the overarching and mostly unnoticed work of nature, of wildness, that makes human civilization possible.
Landscapes that exude wholeness and ecological integrity, that produce such beauty and abundance are rare and getting rarer. Places like Patagonia National Park are crucial to helping rewild our hearts and minds, reawakening individuals to the reality that Homo sapiens is but one species among millions on Earth, connected to—related to—them all and subject to the same natural laws and limits. Wild places help us remember what the world once was, and might be again—a terrain of boundless wonder where life’s diversity grows richer over time.
Places like Patagonia National Park are crucial to helping rewild our hearts and minds, reawakening individuals to the reality that Homo sapiens is but one species among millions on Earth, connected to—related to—them all and subject to the same natural laws and limits.
National parks and other permanently protected natural areas are the foundation of a global rewilding vision and movement that is gathering momentum. All the particular places that are protected by conservation advocacy; all the missing species that are welcomed home to them—particularly highly interactive apex carnivores such as large cats, wolves, and sharks—and all the people inspired to restore and protect wildlife habitat in their own communities are the medicine to heal Earth’s wounds.
Those three pillars of rewilding—protected areas, recovery of keystone species, and capturing the hearts and minds of people—are the foundation of wild hope, radical hope, for a better future. And they require no superpower, no magical epiphany, only the commitment and work of individuals, groups, and governments around the world to advance equitable solutions to the intertwined crisis of climate chaos and unraveling biodiversity. Patagonia National Park advances the crucial idea of natural climate solutions (as it stores vast amounts of carbon naturally) and continues a long tradition of wildlands philanthropy and public-private collaboration, where private initiative and funding supports public values.
This is how a global rewilding vision becomes reality—place by place, project by project, hectare by hectare as people who love the land and want to be good members in the community of life work boldly to knit together terrestrial and marine protected areas. Imagine those arks of radical hope connecting up into systems of conservation lands—beautiful green and blue ribbons of natural habitat eventually wrapping at least half the globe in wild beauty.
Today, rewilding Patagonia.
Someday, one day, the Earth again a peopled wilderness.
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