Thanks to Tex from Patagonia (the company not the Region :-)). Tex sent me the text which was published in Bloomberg about Tompkins and his action.
I put the text here.
North Face Founder Tompkins Battles Endesa Over Patagonia Dams
March 3 (Bloomberg) -- Douglas Tompkins, who helped found the North Face and Esprit clothing companies, is refusing Endesa SA surveyors access to a nature reserve in southern Chile, saying the Spanish utility's plans to dam two nearby rivers would scar the landscape and drive away tourists.
``They're not on our land,'' said Tompkins, 62. ``We don't let 'em on.'' His wife, Kristine, a former chief executive officer of Ventura, California-based outdoor-clothing retailer Patagonia Inc., runs a foundation that owns a 70,000-hectare (173,000-acre) reserve. It's close to where Endesa plans to build hydroelectric plants in Chilean Patagonia, a region of jagged Andean peaks, glaciers, cascading rivers and turquoise lakes.
Since moving to Chile in 1991, after selling his stakes in the clothing companies, Tompkins says he has spent $170 million to buy land for wildlife sanctuaries in Argentina and Chile and on grants for projects protecting the environment.
Tompkins says he will try to block Endesa's $3.5 billion to $4 billion hydroelectric project by financing education programs, supporting activists and helping rally local residents. He also may file an objection to the project with the government's energy regulator.
Madrid-based Endesa says new sources of energy are needed to prevent economic growth from stumbling in Chile, where almost 19 percent of the population lives in poverty.
``They are going to have to get past massive citizens' protests,'' Tompkins said in an interview at his gray-shingled home on the shores of a fjord 1,200 kilometers (700 miles) south of Santiago. ``This thing is a monster.''
Growing Demand
The four planned generators would meet half the annual growth of about 5 percent in the country's power demand, says Rafael Mateo, chief executive of Endesa's Chilean generating unit. The government forecasts Chile's copper-rich economy will grow at least 5.5 percent in 2006 after expanding an average of 6.2 percent annually for the past two years.
``Environmentalists will have to do a giant lobby to create a counterweight to the great energy needs we have,'' said Juan Pablo Cofre, who manages $90 million at Euroamerica Administradora de Fondos Generales SA, a Santiago-based insurance company.
President Ricardo Lagos, who leaves office March 11, described the project as a ``great opportunity'' for the province of Aysen, where the dams would be located and energy costs are the highest in the country.
Still, Lagos, 68, said during a Feb. 2 visit to the area that he didn't want energy at the expense of the beauty of the landscape. Endesa must submit an environmental impact study to obtain regulatory approval for the project.
Under the Endesa proposal, a 2,000-kilometer transmission line would carry power generated by hydroelectric plants on the Pascua and Baker rivers to the country's most heavily populated areas, around Santiago.
Kayaking, Fly-Fishing
Tompkins says the dams and power lines would alienate tourists, who are drawn in increasing numbers to the area's forests, mountains and rivers. Visitors kayak, raft and fly-fish on the Baker, Chile's largest river.
``Tourism is the best card to play,'' Tompkins said. ``People come from all over the world, spend all kinds of money. This is going to cut severely into those prospects.
``You don't run power lines through the Grand Canyon,'' he said.
Tourism accounted for 3.2 percent of Chile's $103 billion economy in 2003, the government says. Tompkins, who first visited Chile in the early 1960s, moved from his home in San Francisco in 1991 when he began creating what now is a 317,000-hectare reserve, called Pumalin.
Sheep-Eating Pumas
The park has trails that lead through lush vegetation and slow-growing hardwood trees, some more than 1,400 years old. Pumalin is named after the pumas that roam it -- and also attack the Tompkinses' sheep.
Tompkins faced opposition from Chile's armed forces and lawmakers while he was acquiring the parcels of land that now make up Pumalin. They said foreign ownership of territory that runs from Chile's mountain border with Argentina to the Pacific coast, effectively cutting the country in half, was a threat to national security.
``We got a lot of grief and we got hit over the head for a lot of years by all sorts of ideologues,'' Tompkins said. ``Or people who just thought we were a bunch of nut cases.''
Opposition has waned since then, helped by the government's declaring Pumalin a wildlife sanctuary in August, said Guillermo Holzmann, a political science professor at the University of Chile in Santiago.
Ted Turner, Benetton
Kristine Tompkins, 55, says she wants to turn the land owned by her foundation near the Baker River into a national park. The area is a habitat for the huemul, an endangered species of deer.
Other landowners in Patagonia, a region that stretches from southern Chile across the Andes into Argentina, include Cable News Network founder Ted Turner, billionaire U.K. investor Joseph C. Lewis and Italy's Benetton family.
Yvon Chouinard, the 67-year-old founder of the Patagonia clothing company, says he and Tompkins made a six-month road trip from Ventura to the tip of South America in 1968. At the time, both were surfers and climbers with little concern for the environment.
``It was a slow thing,'' said Chouinard, who now donates part of his company's sales to environmental causes, including Kristine Tompkins's foundation, in a telephone interview. ``Traveling around, you see the planet deteriorating everywhere, and not many people are doing much about it.''
For Tompkins, the solution to energy shortages is to use less power.
The couple's home -- which Tompkins designed -- is heated by a black, wood-burning stove, while a generator provides electricity for three hours a day. A separate battery runs laptop computers with satellite links to the Internet. There is no refrigerator or other electrical appliance in the kitchen.
If people learned how to use less power, regions such as Patagonia wouldn't be in danger, Tompkins said.
``It's one of the jewels of Latin America,'' Kristine Tompkins said. ``It deserves absolutely to be left pristine.''
To contact the reporter on this story:
Heather Walsh in Santiago at hlwalsh@bloomberg.net
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