ShareThisBy ROBERT COLLIER
Friday, November 03, 2006
The Chilean government is planning to blast a highway directly through one of the country's most pristine wilderness areas, a move that environmentalists say threatens a unique experiment in international forest protection.
Last week, government officials announced that they will build a 62-mile highway through Pumalin Park, a nature refuge created by San Francisco multimillionaire Douglas Tompkins that ranges from glaciated peaks to steep-walled fjords and includes some of Chile's last remaining groves of giant alerce trees, a relative of California's redwoods.
The government of President Michelle Bachelet also signaled that it will push ahead with another controversial project, a proposed $4 billion hydroelectric complex south of Pumalin that would dam the Baker and Pasqua rivers, world-famous for fishing and whitewater kayaking.
The double-barreled decision shocked environmentalists in Chile and abroad who had hoped that Bachelet, a socialist who took office in February, would continue the nation's gradual swing toward protection of its wilderness areas, which include almost one-third of the world's remaining virgin temperate rain forest.
Instead, they say, Bachelet has dramatically reversed course.
"It's crazy and illogical to do this," said Adriana Hoffman, who was director of the government's National Environmental Commission during the administration of Bachelet's predecessor, Ricardo Lagos.
"By building this highway, they are going to destroy such a marvelous area, using huge amounts of explosives that will cause huge damage to the forests and the marine life of the fjords," said Hoffman, now the president of Defenders of the Chilean Forest, an environmental group based in Santiago, the Chilean capital.
The Bachelet administration says the highway is needed for economic development and energy security. Chile lacks petroleum resources and suffers from chronic blackouts because of interruptions in imports of electricity and natural gas from neighboring Argentina.
"We are going to expropriate this strip of land (through Pumalin) because we know that Chile needs hydroelectric resources ... multiple resources, potential rights of way," said Minister of Public Works Eduardo Bitran when he announced the decision last week. "This is great news for those Chileans who want a more united country."
Government officials say the road project will cost $100 million, starting next year and finishing in 2010.
Construction of the highway will fill in the last gap between Chile's densely populated center and the thinly settled far south. Until now, this gap has been occupied by Pumalin, a 762,000-acre, Yosemite-size area that Tompkins purchased from various landholders in the early 1990s and assembled into a private park, open to the public. The park stretches from the Pacific to the Argentine border, and conservative politicians representing the far south have long complained bitterly that a foreigner was blocking their access to the rest of the country.
In a country where environmental protection is still seen by many as a foreign concept, Tompkins and his Chilean allies have fashioned their defense of Pumalin in cautiously economic terms.
They accept the need for improved transit in the area but say the highway should follow a route farther to the west than the one chosen. Their alternative would skirt Pumalin Park and use high-speed ferries to link existing stretches of dirt road that serve isolated fishing villages.
"I thought rational minds would prevail, that the government would put its money to better use," Tompkins said in a telephone interview. "We accept the need for better connectivity, but the route we proposed would serve more people, be much faster to build and would cost only one-tenth the amount."
The government has not yet given final approval to the project, which is still in the thick of environmental impact studies.
(E-mail Robert Collier at rcollier(at)sfchronicle.com)
