Reintroducing Keystone SpeciesJune 2021

Please note: This video was one of a number of presentations from the webinar, and in order to allow each video to be watched individually, they all have the same 30 second introduction to provide the required context. If you have already seen this introduction in another video from the webinar, please skip to 0:31.

Read the video transcript:

The subject of the webinar today is animating the carbon cycle. It really explores the very important link between biodiversity and climate. And the goal of this webinar is to launch a new global initiative to launch nature and climate, and set the first global target for restoration and rewilding to address this accelerating climate breakdown.

Our next panelist is Kristine Tompkins. Kris is a hero to many of us. She’s a practitioner, she’s a diplomat, she’s a doer. As the president of Tompkins Conservation, she’s also the un patron of protected areas. She’s the former CEO of Patagonia. And she spent the last 25 years protecting and restoring Chile and Argentina’s wild beauty and biodiversity through creating national parks and reserves. Just a huge, tremendous achievement. She and her late husband have done a tremendous example for the world. Eleven national parks in Argentina and Chile, and approximately 14.5 million acres. Through Tompkins conservation and their partners.

If you’ll allow me, a personal anecdote. My experience of Chris and Tompkins work is that they achieve practical results for nature and people, and they do it with love and with joy. Chris. Okay, let me make sure this works. You’re good, Chris. Okay.

Hi, everybody. Nice to be joining all of you here. I think my job from Mr Martin is to give some very specific examples of rewilding that we’ve been working on for the last 15 years. We, my husband Doug and I, got started in conservation when we decided to abandon our, our business lives. You could call us refugees from the business world. And we went down to Chile and eventually Argentina and started buying land from private owners, aggregating as large territory as we could for each project we were involved in and ultimately build the infrastructure inside. So, all would be welcome to these really jewels of the countries and then donate them back to the governments of Chile or Argentina.

And the first couple projects we worked on, Pumalin, was certainly the mothership, which ended up being just a little over a million acres as a national park. We weren’t thinking about rewilding in those days because actually rewilding wasn’t probably necessary. This was a fully functioning, pristine temperate rainforest territory. And so it wasn’t completely on our radar. This was in the early nineties. In 1997, we shifted or added another region to our work, which was the Ibera wetlands in the northeastern section of Argentina. And this is where we began to realise that our conservation work, by the nature of where we’d begun, was really short sighted. That it wasn’t enough in most of the areas we would end up working with over the years to just protect the territories. As someone always said, landscape without wildlife is just scenery. And we were not in the scenery business. We have been very specifically in the biodiversity extinction crisis, stable ecosystems business.

And so it was the first time that we began to realise that rewilding was not only interesting, but was essential. So what I’m going to show you here, and I’m going to use this as our example for today, is just the rewilding work that we’ve been doing in this Ibera wetlands. It’s about 2 million acres that is now a combination of a national park and provincial park, with ten neighbouring communities around it and so on. So here you see, of course, giant anteaters who had been extirpated from the wetlands for probably nearly 70 years. And we have brought them back. There are three healthy communities. We have over 200 in the wild, having been reproducing successfully for over a decade now. That’s how we got started. We thought we would start with a species we thought was pretty straightforward. It never is, but that was the logic. I’m having trouble rolling this. Hmm. There. I don’t know. Excuse me just a moment. Oh, there it is. Thank you. So this is a. This is the landscape we’re talking about. As I said, it’s a couple million acres of wildlands, excuse me, wetlands surrounded by a lot of rice operations that were illegal, pine plantations and so on.

So there were a lot of political and just hardcore conservation issues to take care of. But as we were, we were really coming to understand who was there in this territory, but most especially who was missing. As we began to form that list, we began to form the strategy. And as I mentioned, we started with the giant anteater, but have hence worked with all of the species you see here. I’ll get into them more one by one as we go. Our plan had always been to continue to aggregate lands as we could, but in parallel to that, really build the teams and the structure to reintroduce keystone species who had been pushed out many for over 100 years. So this is. I’ll just go through them briefly. The red and green macaw has been out of this ecosystem for almost 130 years. And when Sebastian Dimartino, who is head of rewilding Argentina, came to us and said, hey, I think that we can bring this bird back, I personally was not enthusiastic about it because I thought it would be so difficult to do, and I turned out to be right. But today we have almost 20 individuals reproducing in the wild. So they are back. We have lots of individuals to work with who are coming through what is essentially a school of getting these individuals flying, learning to eat the seeds that they need to be eating in the wild. What is this threat? Because most of them are coming out of private collections or zoos. And this is probably the rewilding project that has just really enamoured all of us. This has been. The guys running this team have been extraordinary. But they’re back. Just another photograph. These are the deer coming back in from. They’re not extinct from Argentina, but they have been extincted from this region for a very long time. So we have populations to draw from. They’re very hard to translocate. And I’m sure many people listening today understand that certain species are very tricky.

So this is just an example of us using the local provincial helicopters to fly individuals in. This species is healthy again. Its numbers are high enough that it is creating and expanding the two populations that we have prompted over the years, jaguars. We always understood that if we were going to do this properly, we had to face the fact that we needed to bring jaguars back into the system. And we were prepared intellectually to do it financially. We had the territory. Within this territory, there is probably a 700,000 acre, no conflict zones, which is hard to find. But we knew that we were going to have to try what had not been attempted before, which was develop a breeding centre for jaguars using, again, individuals out of private collections and largely from the zoo world. It’s a long story. It’s taken ten years, but today I’m very happy to say that as of January 6 of this year, we have two females with four cubs, two each. We’re getting
ready to release a male who has came out of wild Brazil. Very important. And by the end of the year, we hope to have a total of ten jaguars out and running free again in the Ibera wetlands. And they’ve been missing since the 1930s.

The big thing about this is, of course, those of you who’ve worked with top predators and bringing them back, you know that the social and cultural issues and political issues are equally difficult as the technology and the strategies to bring them back physically. In Corrientes province, where we’re located up there, we were so fortunate that the quarantinos see themselves, their spirit animal, their strength and purpose came out of the fact that there were jaguars in their territory. And so we had an unbelievably positive response in the schools, in the government, in all lines of social life. And so this has become the real champion of a province that had been largely ignored for decades in Argentina. And as I said, there are ten communities around the wetlands and they are very much the champions and they have a sense of ownership, but in the positive sense of that word toward this species, and in fact, all of them who are coming back. So that has been an enormous challenge. And I’ll never forget the day that we opened up the gates and little by little, they are going into the wild. And so far, so good.

Here is one of. Here’s a shot of the reproduction centre that we built. Each individual coming in out of their previous lives had their own octagon trees. Everything they needed to try to rewild themselves. And I think that’s a big part of this project, has been, how do you help these animals find themselves again? And this is Tobuna. She was the first one to arrive. Couldn’t hunt, couldn’t do anything. She was raised in a zoo and she became one of the great hunters and leaders, mascot of the. Of the project. This is a photograph of three of the jaguars who walked out through the gate. The mother and. And her two cubs. They’re doing well. They’ve been out for five months, four months now, and everybody’s doing really well. So this again has been one of the great trials of some of our work.

The other great keystone species we have taken on is bringing back the giant river otter, which has had been thought to be extincted from Argentina for decades, for a very long time. I will say anecdotally that one week ago, the head of all rewilding for Argentina was in a boat in the impenetrable, out in the Gran Chaco region, where we, with others created impenetrable national park, was out paddling by himself, and up popped a male giant otter, a species that the country thought had been extincted for decades, as I said. And so this is a great celebration. And in the meantime, back in Ibera, we actually are bringing them back. We have three new pups, the first pups. And so another top predator is coming back. And this is just to remind ourselves that whether it’s conservation on the ground or in the sea, any of our rewilding work, there is no Tompkins work without the teams.

And largely, often the bulk of the teams are coming from local regions. And surely in the rewilding projects here in Ibera, you can’t get around this roadless area unless you are one of the geniuses of the place. And these people have made all of us possible, all of our work possible. The pride that has come from all of this goes into the communities and, as I said, into the local governments, to the regional governments, to the national government. For the first time ever, there are jaguars on the pace of the bills of pesos, there are anteaters on the bills of the currency. So it, in all these places, we can talk about individual species and what it takes to get them back. But what you don’t see is the repercussion, the tectonic shifts that happen to people from all across the country and in many cases across the world, because this work is very difficult. It’s sometimes, as you all know, it can be contentious. But then when it works, it’s not just the people of the place who are adjusting and also learning the language of how do you speak about these animals again? What do you do when you run into them? And so on and so forth.

The impact of rewilding, whether it’s the UK, wherever it is, eastern Europe, doesn’t matter where it is. It changes the way citizenry looks at their own territories, it changes the way we look at what’s possible to do, and it changes the way that we call it rewilding ourselves. It changes the way you order your own life. So, obviously, I’m a proponent. I’m not so tied into the scientific side of rewilding as it specifically relates to climate change. I know that it does, because I see territories we work in, where some of our biggest grasslands, 250,000 acres, you take the livestock off and you encourage wanakos and everybody to come back into their rightful territories. And I have seen this over and over again, what it does to the landscape.

But I can really speak about the reverberation that takes place in all of us and the reverberation between species, which, of course, is massive. So I’m really proud to be a part of this, part of conservation, and I wish there were more active rewilding projects here in North America, where I’m stuck here for the last year. And I don’t understand, there’s so many opportunities for rewilding here, at least in the lower 48. And so I’m always looking around, not only in the territories we typically look at, but looking around where, what are the opportunities? Russ was talking about it in terms of hotspots and so on. We intend to keep going, and wherever we work, we want to leave behind fully functioning ecosystems and not just beauty. So the rewilding Argentine team is the. That’s who does all of this work, leads this work in Argentina, and we have a lot of projects going in Chile specifically to rewilding and the Tompkins conservation Chile team there. So I’ll leave it at that.