U.S. entrepreneur Douglas Tompkins’ dogged effort to create the world’s largest privately owned nature park in southern Chile is bearing fruit. Under an agreement signed with the Chilean government this month, Tompkins’ Pumalin Park will be declared a Nature Sanctuary. As part of the agreement, Tompkins must submit his plans for environmental-impact assessment, wherein public comment will be solicited, and must set up a Chilean foundation to manage the park. Tompkins, former co-owner of the San Francisco, California-based Esprit women’s-clothing chain, has spent at least $30 million on the park since 1991. He is reportedly Chile’s largest individual landowner with 894,957 acres (362,180 hectares) in Region 10’s Palena province. The park is a dramatic expanse of snow-capped volcanoes, mountains...
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Colombian congressmen from the Atlantic Coast pushed last month for legislation that would remove central-government control over five national parks so the land could be used for a huge port complex and tourist developments. The proposal, which according to environmentalists would have decimated Colombia’s remaining dry tropical forests and threatened a substantial piece of the country’s national park system, prompted an outcry. But it took revelations about links between the proposed developer and a convicted drug trafficker as well as the threat of a presidential veto to block the legislation. Developers especially coveted Tayrona National Park, a 37,000-acre (15,000- hectare) reserve with unique forests and nine marine ecosystems at the foot of the world’s highest coastal mountain range, the Sierra Nevada de Santa...
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Chile’s plans for a 200-kilometer coastal highway south of Valdivia in the country’s 10th Region is drawing criticism from environmental and indigenous groups concerned about impacts on the region’s Olivillo coastal rainforest. Though the Public Works Ministry has completed nearly 25% of the dirt road, the project has drawn fire from a coalition of 12 Chilean groups backed by the Natural Resources Defense Council, (NRDC) the U.S. environmental-law organization. This March, the environmentalists won a small victory when they forced the public works ministry to suspend the project pending an environmental-impact study. The government also promised to look for less environmentally damaging routes. But in an interview with EcoAméricas this month, Eduardo Astorga, director of the ministry’s environmental department, said that further...
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Brazil and Bolivia plan to create a binational ecological corridor to better protect plants and animals on both sides of the two countries’ border in the Amazon region. The 57-million-acre (23-million-hectare) corridor, nearly the size of Great Britain, would encompass the Guaporé, Mamoré and Itenez river basins. Connecting 30 existing areas under various types of protection in the northwestern state of Rondônia, the 32 million acres (13 million hectares) on the Brazilian side would form the country’s largest conservation area, Brazilian officials say. On the Bolivian side, the ecological corridor would connect eight protected areas in the northeast of Santa Cruz and Beni districts, and in eastern areas of the Pando district. “We need to integrate our protective actions,” says Hamilton...
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