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My siblings and I grew up
on our great-grandfather's farm
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in California.
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It was a landscape
of our family and our home.
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When it was clear
that nobody in our generation
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wanted to take on
the heavy burden of ranching,
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the ranch was sold to a neighbor.
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The anchor of our lives was cut,
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and we felt adrift
in the absence of that land.
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For the first time, I came to understand
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that something valuable
can be best understood
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not by its presence,
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but by its absence.
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It was impossible to know then
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just how powerful the absence
of those things we love
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would have an impact far into my future.
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For 23 years, my working life
was with Yvon Chouinard.
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I started when he was designing
and manufacturing
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technical rock and ice climbing equipment
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in a tin shed near
the railroad tracks in Ventura.
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And when Yvon decided
to start making clothes for climbers
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and call this business Patagonia,
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I became one of the first six employees,
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later becoming CEO
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and helping build a company
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where creating the best products
and doing good by the world
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was more than just a tagline.
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Doug Tompkins, who would become
my husband years later,
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was an old friend and climbing
companion of Yvon's
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and also an entrepreneur.
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He cofounded The North Face
and Esprit company.
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All three of these businesses
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were created by people
who had grown up through the '60s,
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shaped by the civil rights, antiwar,
feminist and peace movements.
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And those values
were picked up in those years
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and carried throughout
the values of these companies.
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By the end of the 1980s,
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Doug decided to leave business altogether
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and commit the last third of his life
to what he called
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"paying his rent
for living on the planet."
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At nearly the same time, when I hit 40,
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I was ready to do something
completely new with my life.
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The day after retiring
from the Patagonia company,
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I flew 6,000 miles to Patagonia the place
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and joined Doug as he started
what was the first conservation project
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of that third of his life.
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There we were, refugees
from the corporate world,
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holed up in a cabin on the coast
in southern Chile,
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surrounded by primaeval rainforest
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where alerce trees
can live for thousands of years.
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We were in the middle
of a great wilderness
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that forms one of the only two gaps
in the Pan-American highway,
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between Fairbanks, Alaska, and Cape Horn.
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A radical change to our daily lives
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spurred on as we had begun to recognize
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how beauty and diversity
were being destroyed
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pretty much everywhere.
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The last wild protected places on earth
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were still wild
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mostly because the relentless
front lines of development
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simply hadn't arrived there yet.
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Doug and I were in one
of the most remote parts on earth,
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and still around the edges
of Pumalín Park,
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our first conservation effort,
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industrial aquaculture
was growing like a malignancy.
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Before too long, other threats
arrived to the Patagonia region.
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Gold mining, dam projects
on pristine rivers
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and other growing conflicts.
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The vibration of stampeding
economic growth worldwide
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could be heard even in the highest
latitudes of the Southern Cone.
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I know that progress is viewed,
generally, in very positive terms,
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as some sort of hopeful evolution.
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But from where we sat,
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we saw the dark side of industrial growth.
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And when industrial worldviews
are applied to natural systems
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that support all life,
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we begin to treat the Earth
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as a factory that produces all the things
that we think we need.
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As we're all painfully aware,
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the consequences of that worldview
are destructive to human welfare,
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our climate systems and to wildlife.
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Doug called it the price of progress.
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That's how we saw things,
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and we wanted to be a part
of the resistance,
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pushing up against all of those trends.
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The idea of buying private land
and then donating it
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to create national parks
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isn't really new.
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Anyone who has ever enjoyed the views
of Teton National Park in Wyoming
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or camped in Acadia National Park in Maine
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has benefited from this big idea.
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Through our family foundation,
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we began to acquire wildlife habitat
in Chile and Argentina.
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Being believers in conservation biology,
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we were going for big, wild and connected.
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Areas that were pristine, in some cases,
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and others that would need time to heal,
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that needed to be rewild.
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Eventually, we bought
more than two million acres
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from willing sellers,
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assembling them into privately
managed protected areas,
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while building park infrastructure
as camp grounds and trails
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for future use by the general public.
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All were welcome.
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Our goal was to donate all of this land
in the form of new national parks.
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You might describe this
as a kind of capitalist jujitsu move.
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We deployed private wealth
from our business lives
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and deployed it to protect nature
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from being devoured by the hand
of the global economy.
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It sounded good,
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but in the early '90s in Chile,
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where wildlands philanthropy,
which is what we called it,
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was completely unknown,
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we faced tremendous suspicion,
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and from many quarters,
downright hostility.
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Over time, largely by doing
what we said we were doing,
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we began to win people over.
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Over the last 27 years,
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we've permanently protected
nearly 15 million acres
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of temperate rainforest,
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Patagonian step grasslands,
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coastal areas,
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freshwater wetlands,
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and created 13 new national parks.
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All comprised of our land donations
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and federal lands
adjoining those territories.
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After Doug's death
following a kayaking accident
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four years ago,
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the power of absence hit home again.
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But we at Tompkins Conservation
leaned in to our loss
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and accelerated our efforts.
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Among them, in 2018,
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creating new marine national parks
covering roughly 25 million acres
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in the southern Atlantic Ocean.
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No commercial fishing
or extraction of any kind.
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In 2019, we finalized
the largest private land gift in history,
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when our last million acres
of conservation land in Chile
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passed to the government.
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A public-private partnership
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that created five new national parks
and expanded three others.
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This ended up being
an area larger than Switzerland.
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All of our projects
are the results of partnerships.
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First and foremost with the governments
of Chile and Argentina.
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And this requires leadership
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who understands the value of protecting
the jewels of their countries,
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not just for today,
but long into the future.
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Partnerships with like-minded
conservation philanthropists as well
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played a role in everything we've done.
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Fifteen years ago,
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we asked ourselves,
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"Beyond protecting landscape,
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what do we really have to do
to create fully functioning ecosystems?"
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And we began to ask ourselves,
wherever we were working,
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who's missing,
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what species had disappeared
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or whose numbers were low and fragile.
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We also had to ask,
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"How do we eliminate the very reason
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that these species went extinct
in the first place?"
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What seems so obvious now
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was a complete thunderbolt for us.
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And it changed the nature
of everything we do,
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completely.
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Unless all the members of the community
are present and flourishing,
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it's impossible for us to leave behind
fully functioning ecosystems.
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Since then, we've successfully
reintroduced several native species
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to the Iberá Wetlands:
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giant anteaters,
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pampas deer,
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peccaries
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and finally, one of the most difficult,
the green-winged macaws,
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who've gone missing
for over 100 years in that ecosystem.
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And today, they're back,
flying free, dispensing seeds,
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playing out their lives as they should be.
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The capstone of these efforts in Iberá
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is to return the apex carnivores
to their rightful place.
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Jaguars on the land,
giant otters in the water.
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Several years of trial and error
produced young cubs
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who will be released
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for the first time in over half a century
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into Iberá wetlands,
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and now, the 1.7-million-acre Iberá Park
will provide enough space
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for recovering jaguar populations
with low risk of conflict
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with neighboring ranchers.
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Our rewilding projects in Chile
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are gaining ground on low numbers
of several key species
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in the Patagonia region.
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The huemul deer
that is truly nearly extinct,
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the lesser rheas
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and building the puma
and fox populations back up.
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You know, the power
of the absent can't help us
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if it just leads to nostalgia or despair.
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To the contrary,
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it's only useful if it motivates us
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toward working to bring back
what's gone missing.
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Of course, the first step in rewilding
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is to be able to imagine
that it's possible in the first place.
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That wildlife abundance
recorded in journals
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aren't just stories
from some old dusty books.
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Can you imagine that?
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Do you believe the world
could be more beautiful,
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more equitable?
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I do.
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Because I've seen it.
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Here's an example.
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When we purchased
one of the largest ranches
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in Chile and Patagonia, in 2004,
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it looked like this.
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For a century, this land
had been overgrazed by livestock,
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like most grasslands around the world.
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Soil erosion was rampant,
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hundreds of miles of fencing
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kept wildlife and its flow corralled.
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And that was with the little
wildlife that was left.
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The local mountain lions and foxes
had been persecuted for decades,
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leaving their numbers very low.
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Today, those lands are the 763,000-acre
Patagonian National Park,
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and it looks like this.
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And Arcelio, the former gaucho,
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whose job was to first find and kill
mountain lions in the years past,
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today is the head tracker
for the park's wildlife team,
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and his story captures the imagination
of people around the world.
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What is possible.
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I share these thoughts and images with you
not for self-congratulations,
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but to make a simple point
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and propose an urgent challenge.
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If the question is survival,
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survival of life's diversity
and human dignity
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and healthy human communities,
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then the answer must include
rewilding the Earth.
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As much and as quickly as possible.
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Everyone has a role to play in this,
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but especially those of us with privilege,
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with political power,
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wealth,
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where, let's face it,
for better, for worse,
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that's where the chess game
of our future is played out.
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And this gets to the core of the question.
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Are we prepared to do what it takes
to change the end of this story?
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The changes the world has made
in the past few months
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to stop the spread of COVID-19
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are so promising to me,
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because it shows we can join forces
under desperate circumstances.
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What we're going through now
could be a precursor
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to the broader potential damage
as a result of the climate crisis.
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But without warning,
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globally, we're learning to work together
in ways we could never have imagined.
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Having watched young people
from around the world
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rising up and going out into the streets
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to remind us of our culpability
and chastising us for our inaction
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are the ones who really inspire me.
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I know, you've heard all of this before.
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But if there was ever a moment
to awaken to the reality
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that everything is connected
to everything else,
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it's right now.
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Every human life
is affected by the actions
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of every other human life
around the globe.
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And the fate of humanity
is tied to the health of the planet.
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We have a common destiny.
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We can flourish
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or we can suffer ...
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But we're going to be doing it together.
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So here's the truth.
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We're so far past the point
when individual action is an elective.
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In my opinion, it's a moral imperative
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that every single one of us
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steps up to reimagine
our place in the circle of life.
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Not in the center,
but as part of the whole.
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We need to remember
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that what we do
reflects who we choose to be.
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Let's create a civilization
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that honors the intrinsic
value of all life.
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No matter who you are,
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no matter what you have to work with,
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get out of bed every single morning,
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and do something that has nothing
to do with yourself,
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but rather having everything to do
with those things you love.
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With those things you know to be true.
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Be someone who imagines human progress
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to be something that moves us
toward wholeness.
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Toward health.
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Toward human dignity.
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And always,
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and forever,
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wild beauty.
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Thank you.