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Rewilding Earth Podcast
Episode 133 | Beyond National Parks: Kris Tompkins’ Ambitious Vision For Continental-Scale Rewilding
00:38:57
“Whoever you are, wherever your interest lies, whatever you’ve fallen in love with, get out of bed every morning and do something. Act, step into the fray—fight for a human society in balance with the natural world.
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- [00:11]
Chris Tompkins
I want to see us reconnect the Southern cone of South America back up to the rest of the continent biologically. And that's what we're working on now. This is the kind of work that I won't see the end of in my lifetime, which makes me really happy. I think that reconnecting Chile, up the Andes, all the way to the top of Colombia and over in Argentina, reconnecting that portion of the Southern cone with Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia, Uruguay, that's the way we have to be looking at things.
- [01:05]
Jack Humphrey
You're listening to the Rewilding Earth podcast. Fans of continental scale rewilding know today's guest well. Chris Tompkins, co founder of Tompkins Conservation. Chris and her late husband Doug Tompkins are the world's most successful national park oriented wildlands philanthropists. Their legacy so far includes 15 national parks and marine sanctuaries in Argentina and Chile, safeguarding countless species including jaguars, giant otters, red and green macaws, giant anteaters, and Darwin's Reyes. But Chris's story doesn't end there. In this episode, we'll hear about Chris's latest vision, rewilding the entire Southern cone of South America. Think jaguars roaming freely from Patagonia to the Pantanal. And a continent connected by thriving ecosystems. The Tompkins conservation story continues to unfold in some surprising ways, as you'll hear on this special episode of the Rewilding Earth podcast. I'm your host, Jack Humphrey and I cannot tell you how excited I was to meet one of my all time heroes of conservation. Let's dive in. Chris, welcome to the Rewilding Earth podcast.
- [02:27]
Chris Tompkins
Thank you. Very happy to be among the tribe today.
- [02:31]
Jack Humphrey
I want to congratulate you on the twins, the twin anteaters.
- [02:38]
Chris Tompkins
You know what I was starting to think, God, did we have twins in my family this week? Yeah, that obviously it takes place, but it's rare. We have hundreds of giant anteaters back into the system in northern Argentina and never have we witnessed a pair of twins. So yeah, all of it's exciting.
- [03:00]
Jack Humphrey
It would seem like a lot of people would say after everything that you've done, the national parks, the monumental task of getting all that done, it would be considered by many a legacy. A well deserved rest would be in order. But you just continue on.
- [03:17]
Chris Tompkins
I'm not somebody and I think Doug was the same way. Most of us, we don't look back so much. We're not so interested in looking back and what's taken place, what have we been able to accomplish and things like that. It's much less interesting to me than looking out and really defining what are the things not being done. I'm very happy with the things that all the teams and Doug during his life and my own, really proud of all that stuff. But I always like to look at and evaluate myself and anything I'm involved in by the absence of something rather than the presence of what we've done. What are the things we, we are not doing? What are the things we're not looking at yet? What are the things that as the velocity of climate chaos, extinction increases all the time? Why aren't we equally looking at how we do what we do? And are we getting enough impact out of everything we do? Are we looking at things broadly enough? And we've spent the last not quite a year looking at this very self critically, very trying not to limit ourselves. And we have decided in Chile and in Argentina that we're not thinking big enough. And I don't think conservationists and rewilders around the world are thinking big enough. And I include myself in that. So we're starting to look at things on a continental basis rather than within the confines of a specific park or specific protected area. It's a little like you're looking at the Wildlands project from the early 90s. It was a continental concept and a lot of that got shelved for practical reasons, whatever the reasons were, and I'm sure there were plenty. But in my own thinking, I want to see us reconnect the Southern cone of South America back up to the rest of the continent biologically. And that's what we're working on now. This is the kind of work that I won't see the end of in my lifetime, which makes me really happy. I, I think that reconnecting Chile, up the Andes, all the way to the top of Colombia, and over in Argentina, reconnecting that portion of the Southern cone with Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia, Uruguay. That's the way we have to be looking at things. So I don't. Yeah, I'm not too fussed about looking back at what we have done. I consider that only a platform for going much more aggressively and faster into a bigger vision, an ecological vision.
- [06:25]
Jack Humphrey
I was thinking, since this was facilitated by our jaguar restoration coordinator, Turtle Southern, that we would maybe talk a little bit about big predators and specifically the jaguar program, the breeding program, as I understand it, was already in motion even before the parks were officially established. I think that goes back to 2012 or so, or is my clone we.
- [06:48]
Chris Tompkins
Had even a park, which is about 1.8 million acres of wetlands. We started buying territory up there in 1997 and it took a while to understand how many species were actually missing. And we have been working on rewilding forests in Chile and Waymo deer and bringing puma numbers back up to their rightful level and so on and so forth. But when we got settled in Ibera and really decided to make that one of our principal projects, we found untold opportunities and challenges to try to bring back just about everybody. And that's where you see the giant anteater and the ocelots and cougars. Pumas are slowly coming back. And pompous deer and two kinds of peccaries and so on and so forth. Yeah. When we decided to commit ourselves not only to establishing these large protected areas, which is the canvas upon which you can then realistically, strategically bring back species gone missing, was one of the biggest challenges in 31 years. How do you actually bring these especially top predators back? And what you have to understand why they went extinct in the first place? And knowing that, can you mitigate those reasons? Because if you start bringing them back and they end up back where we started, this is, that's the worst possible case. Do we have the territory? How do you find the people to work on these different species? Because each species is so specific to, to the strategies you use to bring them back. The costs are different. Everything about it is. Each one is so unique. But now I wouldn't elect to work on something in land or sea if I wasn't also willing to take on bringing back who's missing.
- [08:55]
Jack Humphrey
Yeah. I remember you saying somewhere that if you're not thinking big enough, if you're thinking about things you can accomplish in your lifetime. And I thought that was a really cool quote. And you brought that full circle today.
- [09:09]
Chris Tompkins
Yeah. I think that we're at a stage certainly at my age, at 74, I have nothing to lose. I have no fear. And the big picture, looking at human and non human survival, we really have nothing to lose. And so I think our work always has to be grounded in the reality of is there a possibility of pulling something off because we don't have enough money time to be wrong too often. So you have to try to get it right. And often you're flying blind, you're not sure what it's going to take. That's how we measure with is it thumbs up or it thumbs down? Once we go for something, we go all in.
- [09:58]
Jack Humphrey
Yeah. And it's nice having nature as a partner because I don't think that I could stomach even looking at scales that we're talking about and the work to be done if nature wasn't there to catch that last part of the things that we don't understand and that we can't do.
- [10:15]
Chris Tompkins
Natural systems, they can be helpful and they can be incredibly cruel. We are not at the helm. We can assist in nature sewing itself back together again. And the success of that or the failure of that is really. How well did we read what the natural systems within which we work, how well did we or do we understand them? And are we picking the right areas? Are we picking the right species? Are we. Is all the work on the social and community side and that means local, regional, national, all the way up to the presidency, Are we sewing all this together so that when we pass it over to nature, who's the has the lion's share of the work to try to restitch some of these species? Have we done our best in trying to set the circumstances such that they there's a chance that it'll function? So far we haven't had any species we're working with and there are 24 species, I think 25 who haven't as of yet gone sideways or backwards.
- [11:30]
Jack Humphrey
Yeah, that's due to the team and everybody that's working on the ground.
- [11:36]
Chris Tompkins
The amount of work, a hundred percent.
- [11:39]
Jack Humphrey
Man, I just can't. It seems very exciting, but also as I get older it seems, wow, the amount of energy and you talk sometimes about the third generation and what you're very excited to see developing. You want to talk about that a little bit?
- [11:55]
Chris Tompkins
Yeah, I think when we got started and even a little bit now, so much of what we've been doing over the last decades is the Chris and Doug show. And I rebel against that so deeply because I've been down there on the ground all these years and we would not be at square one without these teams which today are independent from Tonkins Conservation. Right after Doug died, I worked really hard to make Rewilding Chile an independent organization and Rewilding Argentina as well. And very specifically because I knew that if something happened to me, my job was to make them as tough and strong. And they're all people we've worked with since the beginning, practically. They are the authors really of so much of the creation of this work. So when I think of the first generation, I think of Doug and Chris, the second generation, I think of Sofia Henonen, the head of Argentina, Carolina Morgao, the head of Rewilding Chile, and many of the team members we've been together Forever. And so I'm charging them it's second generation isn't enough. You need to be building the third generation. And they have. We are. I work a lot with people in their late 20s, early 30s. And so now, of course, I'm so always looking over the fence. So now I'm looking. Is there a fourth generation? Because we don't care that the Chris and Doug names disappear. We hope there maybe we're a vague memory, but we want to see this style of work and the commitment to this work go long after we're gone.
- [13:47]
Jack Humphrey
Yeah.
- [13:48]
Chris Tompkins
And after the second and third generations are gone. So that's. That is a. That is actually one of our strategies is it's not enough. It doesn't matter about Chris and Doug Tompkins. It was that we're a catalyst. But what matters is how far can this go in the absence of each generation? How can it keep going? This commitment to large scale conservation of land and marine and rewilding, whether it's forest or grasslands or jaguars or red shouldered macaws.
- [14:25]
Jack Humphrey
Yeah. In the Midwest, we call it the heartland. It's the Mississippi river watershed. We started looking at the most ambitious places to consider rewilding. Like Iowa, which is like 99.9% bean and corns and.
- [14:42]
Chris Tompkins
Yeah.
- [14:43]
Jack Humphrey
And Dave Foreman said in a meeting we're going to have to look at flyways here because. And the rivers and tributaries, creeks. And I noticed that you. That rewilding Argentina is especially looking at the river corridors to connect north to Grand Chaco. And I wondered if you could talk.
- [15:02]
Chris Tompkins
The Pantanal.
- [15:03]
Jack Humphrey
Yeah.
- [15:04]
Chris Tompkins
Yeah. When we decided to commit ourselves to this continental rewilding of the next 20 years, one of the reasons that we felt it's possible is in the west you have the Andes and in the northeastern side of the continent you have these enormous river systems. The Pantanal, all of it is connected up by very large rivers. And for the most part those rivers are pretty clean of big cities and things like that. So you can really see which we are already with some of our young jaguars. They're crossing the Parana River. One of them or a couple of them are in Paraguay already. Yeah. We're using the Andes on the west side and rivers on. On the east side to see that those species, in the case of jaguars, we hope they go all the way up the rivers and find their kin up in the Pantanal goes a long way.
- [16:11]
Jack Humphrey
There's some ambition for you.
- [16:12]
Chris Tompkins
Yeah. But it's not impossible. And you have to have deep kind of co. Mingled like minded partners in each of these countries because it is working at a depth and the complexity of working in now enormous territories and different governments, different states, provinces. But so far it's, I'm really shocked by the positive feedback that we're getting and working already in Brazil. Sofia and I met with the Minister of Environment in Brazil in March and people see this, they see it's possible and they might not have had the wherewithal to say, okay, let's rethink how we're doing things and the scale at which we're doing them. But people respond really well to this. It's, nobody's going, oh, God, it's too big, it's too scary, it's impossible. And that was a real eye opener for me.
- [17:17]
Jack Humphrey
That's that it was an eye opener for you because people can't really, if they know you and your history, they can't really tell you something's too big.
- [17:25]
Chris Tompkins
You're not gonna, Well, I, I, this is so big.
- [17:30]
Jack Humphrey
Yeah.
- [17:30]
Chris Tompkins
That I didn't see it. I didn't see that people really inherently believe that, that this is what has to be done. And so if there's a team out there or a few teams who are willing to take on the sort of overall design mapping, trying to raise the money for these big expansions, I've been really gratefully surprised by how people are reacting to it. Nobody has said this is crazy.
- [18:05]
Jack Humphrey
Yeah. I think inspiration in different ways. I always translate it through my America lens. And we grew up in a system where the government establishes national parks at sometimes the request or the pressure applied by the public, but it's always the government that does it. And then the other example here is that doesn't have to be that way everywhere in the world, but we do have a lot of different issues here. I think it was, yeah, it was the last episode. I had Michael Kellett on from Restore, and he has a list of 500 potential new national parks in the United States and a hundred that have been deeply researched for the last several years that are what he considers strong candidates for national parks and places where people have more connection to them. There would be closer national parks in the east and around nearer cities and things. Because here, of course, you, everybody always looks out west when you think of national parks and people in the east just can't get to those. Or if they do, it's a once in a lifetime, I went to Yellowstone kind of thing. It's thinking bigger. And you guys helped us with that thinking. Like, we were already the Continental scale conservation groups. And we thought we were thinking big, but we. I personally didn't think about wildlands philanthropy playing the possibility of playing such a huge role. And I wonder what you think about that in the United States where we begin this movement or continue a movement to really drum up support for the idea of a hundred new national parks dotted across the landscape and how much of a role the wildlands philanthropy would necessarily have to play. Or we could take advantage of that in situations to drum up the support because it has to be done on the ground with every individual park by locals and people in the region to really be successful.
- [20:03]
Chris Tompkins
Yeah, it does. It has to be quite the particularities of a place answer that question as an idea. I think that the protection of the jewels of a country and the biological necessities of a country are really important. I think protecting sacred lands for Native Americans in the United States, I think that's the social traditional territories need to be protected in the way that they believe they should be protected. I don't work in the United States much, but I will say a critique I have up here since I came up for Covid and just shocked at all the opportunities that there are for rewilding species. Mammals be all sorts of things and how little of it is done here in the United States. I just don't get that this is a country of low hanging fruit when it comes to helping out species whose numbers may be low and fragile or in areas where they're gone altogether. And I know we're working on a couple projects here in the United States just because when I got up here I thought how can it be that that there's so little going on? I think there's more. Whether it functions or fails. There's more going on in Europe than there is in the United States in terms of rewilding. And European countries by nature are pretty small and they're very developed. They're old cultures. That's. If I was up here full time, I would go after some things that are really following the ecological kind of stepping stones, whether they're national parks or not. The rewilding of species. I just don't understand why there isn't more of it going on. And I also think that there's a real disconnection. This is not just in the United States but in a lot of countries. People thinking that protecting the land is. You get that locked up and then that's it, just let it evolve toward its own. But any land conservation is just the first opportunity to look at who's missing and go much more deeply into what, what it takes to have that land fully function. And we're still seems to me stuck in this generation of oh, these big land masses are protected. Yeah, but that's, that's just the first necessary step.
- [22:55]
Jack Humphrey
Yeah, it's like a puzzle that's missing pieces. One of the low hanging fruits for us and the reason that we were really excited for turtle to come on board to run the jaguar recovery project is that it seems like low hanging fruit. It seems like with the northern jaguar project just to the south and visiting males to the southwest that the big problem is figuring out how to get a female here. But it seems so tantalizingly close compared to some of these other battles. I do know that we're very opportunistic at the rewilding Institute and we're going to have jaguars back. We are going to. And Turtle just went to the Grand Canyon and looked around and said this is jaguar country. So all the way up to Grand Canyon is the vision for that.
- [23:40]
Chris Tompkins
But it's that they were up toward the Colorado river which really surprised me. I had no idea. I know you said that getting females in North America is difficult if not impossible. That's not true. We, we have been running a, a jaguar breeding center for 12 years now, maybe 11 longer. And because we were facing the same situation, Brazil, Paraguay, nobody wanted to give us jaguars for every good reason. And in those days nobody was moving big carnivores around or really moving wildlife around. The wildlife trade was very suspect and so on and so forth. And we started going to South Africa and looking at how are they doing the things that they're doing. They were so far advanced compared to us and ended up saying if we can't get jaguars, we're going to have to produce jaguars here who have no human contact and so on. And hence the 10 years of the jaguar breeding center which was very expensive and not at all assured that it would be successful. And now we have 25 to 30 Jaguars that we're aware of running free. It is already starting to disperse out of a 1.8 million acre wetland complex. And technically you can bring jaguars back to the United States. There's no question. The question is there a willfulness to do? Does, would Arizona and maybe more helpfully New Mexico or California can, is it possible politically and so on and socially? And when we started we, we were prepared with a full blown provincial and national campaign to try to convince people that jaguars should come back to this part of South America. And what Turned out we were so wrong about our program because it turns out in our case, the Corinthis people have missed the jaguar since it left because their spirit, I'll call it a spirit animal, their spiritual identity is found within the jaguar. Not only were they happy that we were willing to commit to all of this, but they would get on our case because they said it was taking too long to get the first jaguars back into freedom and roaming. So that was the luck of the draw in our case. That changes everything. But yeah, I think personally, jaguars can and should be a member of the United States predator family. And to the extent that the population could flourish up here, I have no idea. The pre work you have to do to reintroduce a species equals everything else that will come after you've made the decision to do the work that you have to do socially, culturally is more important. You have to have people on the ground who are first responders essentially to the thousands of things that will come up once you have a predator back on land. And you have to anticipate the worst possible case and plan for that. You can't give up. That's the main thing.
- [27:17]
Jack Humphrey
Yep.
- [27:18]
Chris Tompkins
You learn from your mistakes and then you have to go dust yourself off and go at it again.
- [27:24]
Jack Humphrey
You said something in an interview one time about 1 or 2 million acres. Sounds like a lot until you're talking about big predators, specifically jaguars and dispersal needs and you know how busted up the Southwest is with the highways 10, all of that kind of stuff. We have to think about overpasses, we have to think about underpasses. We have to get around a lot of infrastructure. Maybe that's a consideration.
- [27:53]
Chris Tompkins
The Grand Chaco, all of these areas have small ranchers or they've got six cows or they have 6,000 cows. This is. I don't think it's much different. In many cases you have to go ranch by ranch and figure out. It takes a long time to stitch these things together. You can't wait for everything to be protected. It never will be and probably shouldn't be. Every place we work, we have ranchers all around. We have sometimes crops, pine plantations. Out of the neighbors of this 1.8 million acre wetland complex has cattle, rice, pine plantations. It is surrounded by those things. But those are the people whom you're working with. Those are the people who they become, in a way, secondary partners in some of these rewildings. And a lot this happens with a lot of ranchers. And even in Chile, around town, Horstel Piney national park, the Biggest estancias now stop killing their pumas because some of their biggest income now is people coming on and staying at whatever they've built. And spend days shooting photographs of pumas because that's where you can go to see the eyelashes of a puma practically. So it's all the community work. Can't be. That is a ubiquitous issue. That 1.8 million acres. We thought, okay, we have time before jaguars multiply in the wild, before they have to start to disperse. This is happening much faster than we thought. And this is one of the things that I started to say, God almighty, we gotta step it up here. We have a sub adult male who four months ago swam across the Patana river, I think it's the third largest river in the continent to Paraguay. The guys on the Argentine side, the rewilding Argentina guys are. They know he's on the move because he's collared. We know exactly where they're going. And so they worked with the Paraguayan government and ranchers in Paraguay. So by the time this little, he's not so little, he's a year and a half old, reached the actual shore of Paraguay, there were hundreds of people waiting to watch him walk up on the shore. The police were there, the military was there. People were in their boats waiting for him so they could arrive back to the shore with him. And. And so a dispersing mail became this young God of a whole of a country just because he swam from Ibera over to Paraguay. And that taught us something extraordinary. And another example of this. The red shouldered macaws have been gone for nearly 140 years. We brought them back. It's a long story. I won't go there. When we were about to release them, we did a release and it failed quickly. All four individuals died. We didn't know so much. So now we're in this second generation of individuals to be released. So what did the team do? They got on the local radio, in the papers everywhere and blasted this phone number out to everyone. If you see a red shouldered macaw in your backyard or the call this number, note the time you saw it. And you can't swing a cat. Now in the in Corrientes or Misiones, people like elbow themselves to be the last one who saw one and called it in. And they now if somebody tried to kill a red shouldered macaw to make a hat out of it, they'd be hard and feathered, I think. So there's so much to learn about. How do you turn this conversation from a Very ancient fear with a lot of these species into something that brings back truckloads of pride. You can't imagine today, kids in school constantly painting their faces to look like jaguars. They're. There was a jaguar finally, one who went into a town. There are 10 communities around Ibera Wetlands. And one. And they're watching him, Caller. They're watching. See what happens. And he makes it to. To Concepcion, this town on the edge. And everybody is alerted. Everybody in the town. All the jaguar team are tracking him. They're going to the town and just to see what he does. Is he going to go for trash? Is going to go for a dog? Is he going to go for a cow in the backyard? Whatever it is? And it was another enormous learning moment for us because eventually she turned and walked back into the wetlands. Everybody was fine. There's so much to be learned about how do you turn a species who has historically been an enemy into a rock star? And making people, not making, but seeing people benefit from the presence of these individuals. And the guys in Argentina and Chile are. We really have worked on it for so long in such contentious circumstances that I think we have come to understand our place in this room, which is really. We are just creating circumstances and being deeply respectful in some ways. This work, the social, educational, cultural work, is so simple because you're consulting the geniuses of the place. That's who these people are. And the people working on these are local people. You don't have people from far away coming in and working with communities on these kinds of reintroductions. They have to be people whom they trust. And it is long term.
- [34:36]
Jack Humphrey
I don't think that I know of very many groups, including ours, with the exception of Turtle and her experience, that are very well equipped to deeply engage in rewilding liaison projects like this community projects. It would be really great if you guys had more time, which I know you don't, and maybe a good fundraiser to have people come down once in a while and get trained and have actual programs.
- [35:04]
Chris Tompkins
Well, people do come down. Yeah, they do come. It's like us going, how did you guys do it?
- [35:08]
Jack Humphrey
Like, how did you deal with this situation? In this situation?
- [35:11]
Chris Tompkins
Oh, yeah. Sebastian DiMartino, who's head of Rewilding in Argentina, Christian Salcedo, who's the head of Rewilding Chile, we've worked together with those guys forever. And they're really good at what they do. And they're very matter of fact. Especially Sebas. He's very matter of fact. You can't do this. Until you've done this. And some of it's universal, some of it. All these ideas are probably pretty universal, but they are. They boil down to something that's very intimate and very specific to. It could be a village, it could be a city, whatever it is. So, yeah, these guys. There are a lot of possibilities to talk to them. What. In fact, Sebas was in Tucson. He went and talked to somebody in Tucson about. And went around for a few days, and he talked about our jaguar experiences and so on. So, yeah, we're an open book. We don't hold anything to our chest if we've learned something good or bad. Yeah, we pass it on. Sure.
- [36:25]
Jack Humphrey
In light of the world we live in and everything that's going on, good and bad. What. What today are you really excited about? What's really just. You can't stop thinking about right now?
- [36:38]
Chris Tompkins
Oh, the expanding, reconnecting the Southern cone of South America back up to the rest of the continent ecologically.
- [36:47]
Jack Humphrey
Was that conversation in Brazil fairly recent?
- [36:50]
Chris Tompkins
Yeah. March.
- [36:52]
Jack Humphrey
Okay. So you're just like, really? Okay. So that whole epiphany about how much more welcoming to it. Yeah.
- [36:59]
Chris Tompkins
Was last summer, we. I said, God, pretty sure we're not thinking big enough. We have to start thinking in terms of Hail Mary passes. And of course, you keep doing your daily work in Argentina, in Chile. But in parallel to that, how do you make the biological Hail Mary passes start? They're not going to. As I said, it's not going to happen in my lifetime, but it's got to happen. Let's start it now in parallel to the stuff that's already being done, developing very specific partners who see the same thing and can do the heavy lifting in their country.
- [37:40]
Jack Humphrey
Chris, thank you so much for taking the time. I love this, and you're welcome back anytime. You guys have provided quite a lot of energy to us here to do the things that we're trying to do here, and I think that's probably translates all over the world according to all the awards and medals. You have more medals than Michael Phelps. I just read that today. I'm like, what the heck? This list is like 50 miles long. It's awesome.
- [38:05]
Chris Tompkins
Listen, this is a team effort, and I mean it. That rewilders. We just have to be as bold as possible and don't take anything as being too difficult or too scary because we have nothing to lose. Remember that. All right.
- [38:21]
Jack Humphrey
Thank you so much.
- [38:22]
Chris Tompkins
Lots of love. Ciao. Ciao.
- [38:24]
Jack Humphrey
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