“Everybody needs Beauty as well as Bread” – John Muir

PATAGONIA SIN REPRESA (Patagonia without Dams!!)

I have a huge lump in my throat as I try to put into words what I have learned about the potential pending doom of Patagonia. I feel, more than ever, the pains of John Muir, the famous naturalist who fought to his death to preserve the wilds of the Sierra Nevada as the plague of civilization oozed into these pristine wilds. San Francisco’s City Council came to the decision in 1913 to build the now infamous Hetch Hetchy dam to provide more water for the growing city. This declaration caused 100s of Natives Americans to relocate and flooded a valley Muir believed to be even more beautiful than the now famous Yosemite Valley. He passed away a year after the decision was finalized. Today, less than 100 years later, only one river in California, the Smith River found close to the Oregon border, runs wild and free without a dam. [List of California Dams] [Dams: Good verus the Bad]

Below is an excerpt from pg.19 of the Lonely Planet’s online guide to Patagonia (a popular traveler’s guidebook) which outlines the issue at hand today in Patagonia:

“Patagonia boasts one of the world’s great water reserves, with deep glacial lakes, two of the planet’s largest non-polar ice fields, and powerful, pristine rivers rushing from the Andes to the Pacific. It’s a dream if you’re a salmon, a nature lover or kayaker. Or a hydroelectric company.
Energy is a hot topic in Chile, where natural resources are few. Spurred by fears of a pending national energy crisis, Spanish-Italian multinational Endesa and Chili-based conglomerate HydroAysen are laying plans for large scale dams throughout Patagonia. By come estimates, 12 Patagonian rivers, including the Baker, Pascua, Futaleufu, Manso and Puelo, are threatened. A study by the University of Chile found that tourism, the region’s second-largest industry, would take a severe hit if the dams are built. While the damns would provide a short-term solution, in the long-term they would transform one of the greatest wildernesses on Earth into an industrial engine.
Popular views construe the project as necessary to protect the nation’s energy reserves, but in fact the public sector uses only a third of Chile’s energy – over half is consumed by the mining industry. Pristine ecosystems and rural farms are at stake, but an even greater issue is building the world’s longest transmission lines.
Thousands of high-voltage towers would run 2415km to bring power to Santiago and mining operations in the North.
‘As a planet we are in a fresh water crisis and global warming will make it worse,’ assures Aaron Sand]gers of International Rivers. ‘These rivers are immensely valuable. We should safeguard our remaining sources of freshwater.’
In the Puelo Valley, the flood zone would put the farm and family burial ground of third-generation subsistence farmer Segundo Cardenas underwater. A century ago, the government gave citizens incentives to populate this remote region. In a reversal, it’s now asking Patagonians to give up their waterways, and in some cases their livelihood. Some feel that the country is pillaging the resource-rich south to feed the energy-hungry north.
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ Cardenas wondered. ‘When you build a house, would you take a board from one wall to patch another? That’s what Chile is doing.’
For more information, contact Patagonia Sin Represa (Patagonia without Dams: www.Patagoniasinrepresa.cl) or the US Based NRDC (National Resource Defense Council; www.nrdc.org).”

ABOVE: A dam and man-made water canals have already been built in the Lake’s District of Chile’s Patagonia

History, time and again, shows that money and greed trump the protection of our wildernesses and ecosystems. The earth seems to be balancing on a steep apex, and it is only a matter of years before human life on this planet is drastically impacted, if not destroyed, by our own consumptive behaviors. The scariest part to me, is that the majority of the whopping 7 billion people worldwide (as of October 2011) are not even aware of the problem. **Interesting population growth fact: in 1900, the population of Earth was 1.6, and just 99 years later we flipped those numbers to 6.1 billion Learn More About Population Growth).

When I worked for the City of Vacaville last year teaching outdoor education to children, I had a rough encounter promoting my program at a city fair. A man came up to me, a bit of alcohol on his breath, and started yelling that I better not teach that global warming bull—-. I just stared at him in shock, and often on this bike ride I wonder to myself, what should I have said to help him see that there is a problem without spurring more anger?

Is it too late?

There are shimmering glimmers of hope shining through the scars of plastic inundated oceans and clear-cut hillsides caused by the overwhelming growth of man. The Tompkins, founders of the clothing brands NorthFace, Espirit, and Patagonia, live on their properties in Chile for a majority of the year. They have purchased thousands of acres which they are turning into remote protected land for public use. Miles upon miles of fencing have been removed and invasive plant species spread by cattle are tediously picked out of the landscape by hand. The Chilean and Argentinian governments are in a constant battle with the Thompkins, feeling their actions as a threat – Learn More About the Tompkins. Many people wonder is the only way to protect our wilderness land to privatize it? Something does not seem right about that. However, the Tompkins are just two of many more philanthropists and small organizations working to educate the masses with a focus on lowering our rising rate of consumption.

How do we separate politics, for example, the harsh Berlin wall between Republicans and Democrats stagnating the United States, from the protection of our planet and our future? Tompkins has pointed out, “Environmental problems arise from the mistaken notion that humans come first. They have to come second; this has not sunk in to the political and social leadership.”

I will continue to ponder these questions as we roll along and hike in the wilds of Patagonia.

~Melissa

“These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.” ~ John Muir’s Protest of the Hetch Hetchy Dam