Excerpted from the new biography of Doug Tompkins, A Wild Idea, by Jonathan Franklin, with permission from HarperCollins Publishers. 

When a journalist called Kris Tompkins and asked, “How do you feel that you’re just starting off with this new park and they’re going to build dams on the Baker River?” Kris had no idea what the reporter was talking about. Then she read the newspapers.

A group of corporations announced they had selected the heart of Patagonia for a $3.2 billion complex of a dozen hydroelectric dams. The largest proposed dam measured 240 feet high and would require nine years to build. The Patagonian landscape was going to be sliced by power lines, electricity generation stations, and a noisy, dirty, nine-year construction cycle with some 6,000 temporary workers—which in South America meant shantytowns, prostitution, garbage galore, and the destruction of a peaceful rural life. The project was called HidroAysén and would be the largest energy project in the history of Chile.

The dam project was a partnership between Colbun, a company held by the Matte family, one of Chile’s wealthiest, and the publicly traded multinational ENDESA. And they planned to build the dam only a few miles away from the proposal for Patagonia National Park, in Valle Chacabuco. The proposed dams would interrupt the Baker River, into which the Chacabuco River emptied, meaning that the entire watershed was about to be disrupted.

ENDESA and Colbun announced they had lined up financing for the construction of the massive dams. Describing the project as a 20-year boon to the local economy, the two partners predicted the dams would generate $120 billion in revenue. Once the dams and power transmission lines were installed, they claimed, their electricity would travel first to a plant near the town of Cochrane, then would pass through roughly 5,000 transmission towers that would zigzag across the country—one huge tower every quarter mile for a thousand miles. The consortium estimated annual production of 3,000 megawatts, equivalent to one-fifth of Chile’s electricity consumption. In Santiago, hydro-power was touted as “clean energy for the masses” and the distribution system hailed as a dazzling engineering feat to construct “the world’s longest electrical transmission lines.”

To acquire the land needed for the new reservoir, the consortium bought out dozens of landowners. An artificial lake they proposed to create would flood the valley across from the entrance to Valle Chacabuco. According to ENDESA and Colbun, since the electricity came from water it was sustainable and therefore renewable “green energy.”

Three dams were designed for the Baker River, and two to siphon energy from the Pascua River. Under Chile’s water code and the 1980 Constitution, water rights had been privatized and river water transformed into a commodity to be bought, sold, and traded. The government had granted ENDESA privileged concessions and favorable conditions to own the water and also to profit from its movement.

ENDESA had every reason to believe HidroAysén was a done deal. Opinion polls showed 57 percent of the Chilean public approved of the dam idea, as hydro energy was seen in a positive light by most citizens. 

In trying to figure out how to respond, Doug Tompkins turned to his international allies—including Robert Kennedy Jr., who years earlier had helped form the nonprofit called Waterkeeper Alliance. Kennedy was appalled at the idea of the dam. “Every river is a masterpiece,” he said. “Most people in the world will never see the Mona Lisa, but everybody would be diminished if it were destroyed.”

Political hacks and Chilean power brokers alike knew the dam project had been announced only after long negotiations and a clear promise of government support. The politicians would guide the project through any and all environmental impact complications—that was tacitly understood. Three billion dollars in construction contracts meant sufficient graft among Chile’s elite to schmooze federal, regional, and local regulators. The enormous structures required thousands of truck-loads of cement, hundreds of suppliers, 5,000 temporary rental units, and a supply chain to please all the political parties back in Santiago. The proposed Baker River dam would flood unpopulated valleys, turning parts of Patagonia into valuable lakefront property.

If HidroAysén was approved, Doug Tompkins told fellow environmental activists, the floodgates of development would open. Patagonia would drown under a wave of destruction sold as progress. Damming the free-flowing rivers would serve a death blow to the long-term strategy that Doug and Kris had developed to allow Valle Chacabuco to return to wilderness while at the same time transforming the regional economy from one based on resource extraction industries into one based on conservation and ecotourism.

With ENDESA challenging Doug and Kris in their own adopted backyard, the fight became personal. It was time to rally the Chilean environmental community, in which Doug and Kris had developed relationships forged during years of shared battles. “Doug called us all down for a meeting at Chacabuco to talk it over,” recalled Peter Hartmann, a Chilean environmental leader. “He said, ‘This cannot happen. This project is terrible. We have to do something and I’ll help you. Let’s launch the biggest environmental campaign that Chile has ever seen.’” 

Doug asked Juan Pablo Orrego, who had been a leader in the campaign against damming the Biobío River, who was director of Chilean NGO EcoSistemas, to develop a strategic plan. Orrego and a team of Chilean activists prepared a 116-page report that concluded with a recommendation for a legal entity known as the Patagonia Defense Council. This was a coalition that included environmental groups, tourism operators, local citizens, and even sympathetic politicians. “Many of the NGOs objected. They said that allowing politicians to be part of it would tarnish the process,” said Rodrigo, who was on the council. “But we did it anyway. If we tried to protect every ego in the environmental movement that wanted to protect their purity, we were not going to achieve any objectives.”

Tompkins was incensed at the idea of dams in Patagonia. He told the team that they needed to stall the approval of the dam. He was certain that the future of energy production was migrating to alternatives. New technologies, he insisted, were lowering the price of producing solar panels and wind turbines. The price for these nonconventional renewable energy sources, Tompkins said, was poised to drop. Alternative energy sources were just around the corner. “Doug had a wider vision of the world than we did,” said Hartmann. “His global vision was a big asset.”

With activists fanning across the country to support the largest environmental uprising Chile had ever seen, Doug took control of the messaging, specifically the look and feel of the media campaign opposing the dam. He knew that damming a river to produce electricity was controversial in any corner of Latin America. In Chile, it was a declaration of war. Many of Chile’s young environmental activists had cut their teeth in the ultimately unsuccessful battle to save the Patagonia’s Biobío River. It was a bitter loss. They had lost a masterpiece, and there was a desire to never again be so trounced. A young activist working with EcoSistemas coined a three-word slogan for their campaign: “Patagonia Without Dams.” In Spanish, the phrase, “Patagonia Sin Represas,” was romantic, and catchy. Organizing a nationwide opposition movement against the largest energy project in Chile’s history was a challenge. Arguing against dams was in many ways seen as an affront to the nation’s free-market development model, which was based on exporting raw materials including cellulose, fishmeal, and raw copper. Chile was not investing in value-added processes like turning the wood into furniture, the fish into cat food, or the copper into pipes. The post-Pinochet government, known as La Concertacion, had consistently proclaimed that the duty-free, export-everything-to-the-world strategy would continue. Protesting the development model was seen as both anti-investment and anti-Chilean.

Doug Tompkins | Photo by Beth Wald

*

HidroAysén insisted that Chile was running out of electricity. Soaring consumption meant blackouts were just around the corner. TV ads depicted an entire football stadium falling dark as part of a false-rumor campaign alleging that Chile faced an existential electricity crisis. To stab home the point, power supplies to the nation were being interrupted in ways that many Chileans considered not only suspicious but devious. To make the populace suffer just enough to align them behind the HidroAysén project, had the blackouts been deliberate?

Tompkins laughed at the free marketer’s logic, calling them industrial age dinosaurs. He argued that GDP growth and electricity consumption no longer rose in lock step. Renewable energies were emerging as an alternative. A booming economy could also sport stable if not shrinking electrical consumption. “Hydro power?” Tompkins scoffed. “That’s last century.”

The electricity consumption projections ginned up by ENDESA were gutted in the economic wreckage following the 2008 financial crisis in the United States. The financial downturn, following wild speculations on the ability of US real estate to sell at ever-more-inflated prices, slammed the Chilean economy. Commodity prices for copper, cellulose, and fishmeal tanked. Chile’s key exports were pummeled. HidroAysén executives nimbly exploited the economic downturn. What better way to combat sluggish GDP growth, they argued, than a fresh infusion of several billion dollars? Thousands of construction jobs were dangled as the carrot to overcome the constant jabs from Chilean environmental activists.

When HidroAysén officials realized how successful Doug had become in organizing the media messaging for Patagonia Without Dams, they jumped at the opportunity to portray him as a radical environmentalist and even as anti-Chilean. They tried to make him the poster boy for the anti-dam campaign, ignoring the Chilean environmental activists. Tompkins rarely moderated his positions, making him an easy target for the pro-dam consortium.

ENDESA redefined its position not as pro-dam but as pro-Chile. Shouldn’t the country have the sovereign right to develop? It painted Tompkins as a capricious foreigner who zipped around in airplanes while denying locals the right to watch TV or use washing machines. To finish off the job (and the river), HidroAysén turned to Burson-Marsteller, a consulting firm nicknamed the “Darth Vader of Advertising” for its willingness to defend polluters.

The pro-dam forces created a new slogan: “HidroAysén: The Nation’s Project.” The response from Patagonia Without Dams was full-page ads mocking the “obsolete and destructive” idea that billions of dollars in corporate profits were necessarily good for the nation.

Tompkins launched his counterattack with a scathing review of HidroAysén’s association with Burson-Marsteller. “If HidroAysén is so great, why don’t they sell it on its own merits?” He lambasted the PR firm as the patron of lost causes. “Why do they have to hire agencies known for defending the indefensible?”

With presidential elections coming up, the Patagonia Without Dams coalition sought to place HidroAysén on the agenda: Every candidate would have to stake a position. HidroAysén’s fortunes were boosted by the rising political power of a Chilean billionaire—Sebastian Piñera, number #765 on the Forbes 2009 list of the world’s wealthiest individuals.

Tompkins saw Piñera as a wildcard. On one hand, he was just the kind of wealthy businessman whom Tompkins specialized in publicly spearing and goring. Socially awkward and prone to colossal verbal blunders on live TV, Piñera also sported an independent streak far more modern than was typical of Chile’s ossified political parties. He spoke excellent English, had studied in Boston, taught in the Chilean university system for years, and was an avid bookworm. He was also an adventure junkie, a pilot, and, like Tompkins, landed on beaches, backyards, or freeways when fuel ran low.

After a day in Reñihue listening to Doug lecture on conservation opportunities, Piñera began his own search for wildlands to preserve. Doug and Kris tipped him off—the bottom third of Chiloé island was for sale. It was ideal for a park and, at 285,000 acres, large enough to ensure a conservation legacy. Piñera flew in, bought the land, and announced the creation of “Tantauco Park”—a wildlands that would be open to the public and administered and owned by his own foundation. Tantauco was a mirror image of Tompkins’s own mega-project known as Pumalín Park. Piñera even hired Carlos Cuevas, a key ally of Tompkins’s, to shepherd his Tantauco park plans forward.

Although not a prominent public figure to most Chileans, Piñera was infamous in the upper echelon of Chile’s close-knit business circles as a dirty dealer. “His worst enemies are his former business partners,” concluded an author who spent two years writing an unauthorized biography of the man worth $2.6 billion. Fellow executives described him as the kind of colleague who’d execute your plan with impeccable attention to detail—right after he stole it from you. Several asked pointedly, “Is Piñera a crook, or does he just get very close to the line?”

In November 2009, Piñera trounced all candidates in Chile’s presidential election and sailed to victory. With a billionaire, free-market president taking charge, the chances of stopping HidroAysén looked bleak. Then in the early hours of February 27, 2010, one week before Piñera took over the presidency, an 8.8 Richter scale earthquake rocked Chile, decimating the southern coastal towns near Concepción and leaving a path of destruction throughout central Chile. As after-shocks continued throughout the night, and as the outgoing Bachelet government botched the warning, tsunami waves killed 150 people on the coast, and life in Santiago was disrupted. Whatever plans Piñera had were shattered. His task was now rebuilding hospitals, schools, and thousands of homes destroyed by the massive earthquake. HidroAysén jumped into the chaos in search of a winning strategy.

The CEO of ENDESA’s parent company, a powerful businessman named Pablo Yrarrázaval, donated $10 million in earthquake relief from the company coffers. Lest shareholders question the value of the disbursement, Yrarrázaval turned the donation into a PR show in favor of HidroAysén. First, he showed up at the presidential palace with a symbolic check the size of a coffee table, then pointedly asked the government to provide HidroAysén with “more objective” treatment and not to succumb to the “excessively large demands” of environmental protection legislation.

Along with showering the national government with cash and the rural Aysén community with student scholarships, swings, and seesaws, ENDESA went on a hiring spree. The company padded its payroll with former ministers and government employees to lobby its case. Tompkins, however, was crushing them in the court of public opinion, so ENDESA offered a succulent monthly salary (reportedly above $25,000 a month) to Daniel Fernández, a smooth, self-promoting executive running Chile’s largest public TV channel, Television Nacional de Chile.

Fernández was the perfect political operator for the job. Long accustomed to negotiating the corporate and government cliques that financed and governed Chile’s fledgling democracy, Fernández had what Chileans called “political wrists” that could twist in all directions. Under his stewardship, HidroAysén officials felt assured that they would regain public approval, which they assumed was all they needed to begin the nine years of construction and then start operating the dams.

With Fernández at the helm, the HidroAysén campaign against Tompkins now included rumor-mongering stories to the Chilean press that Tompkins had sired illegitimate children in the rural south. Tompkins took the provocation personally and directed the Patagonia Without Dams advertising campaign to showcase the powerful men behind the consortium. He targeted the business leaders financing the destruction of free-flowing rivers for short-term profits. “Doug set forth the theme,” recalled Elizabeth Cruzat, an accomplished designer working on the campaign. “We’ve got to unmask these people,” Doug told his media team. “We have to talk about the real motivations behind the HidroAysén project. We’ve got to show their motives for building the dams.”

Cruzat and her husband, Patricio Badinella, designed advertisements featuring the face of Eliodoro Matte, the most powerful executive of Colbun. They doctored a photo of Matte to make him look like a wolf. Then they created an image with the wolf’s face wrapped in wool and added the body of a sheep. They gave Matte’s son, Bernardo, similar treatment. The full-page ads were published in Chilean newspapers with the tagline “Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing.”

Chile’s insular elite sat up and took notice, having never been called out by name before. “Doug had this correct idea that people like the Mattes are aware of things like prestige or reputation,” said Badinella, the art director for the campaign. “And, rather than ENDESA, which was a huge anonymous corporation, Colbun was a company related to a well-known family name in Chile. Tompkins always thought we had to try to connect with them and show that what they were doing would erode their own reputation.”

Tompkins always used a respectful tone and had met both Bernardo and Eliodoro Matte in person. He never forgot that he was a visitor in Chile and was careful not to make enemies gratuitously. He even invited the Mattes to visit his impeccably designed Pumalín Park. When Doug called them up, he held spirited discussions as he outlined his defense of nature. To the Mattes he queried, “Do you want to be remembered in history as the family that destroys Patagonia?”

Instinctively protective of Chile’s wealthy upper crust, Chile’s leading newspapers refused to publish many of the Patagonia Without Dams advertisements. So Tompkins borrowed a tactic from Greenpeace. He held a press conference highlighting the banned ads and stirred up a media storm in which the focus of the entire debate was whether or not to publish headlines, including “When Foxes Guard the Chicken Coop” and “Patagonia—Not For Sale.” Tompkins delighted in shining a bright light on Daniel Fernandez, the pricy PR consultant who was caricatured as a red devil with evil horns shaped like high-tension towers and an extension cord sliding out his butt.

The HidroAysén leadership team was stunned. Tompkins made them look ridiculous. National polling showed a surge in opposition to the dams. From the initial 57 percent in favor, the Patagonia sin Represas campaign masterminded by Tompkins swung sentiment sharply against the project. Now only one in three Chileans supported the dam.

Sebastian Piñera jumped into the fray, accusing the environmentalists of “being irresponsible and opposing everything.” While talking to construction industry leaders he warned, “If we don’t make the decisions now, we are condemning our country to blackouts next decade.” The president’s assertions unleashed yet another backlash. Academics, columnists, and historians alike compared Piñera to General Pinochet, who had famously reduced the future of Chilean government to the phrase “With me or with chaos.”

HidroAysén officials next suggested that foreign meddlers were attacking Chile’s natural resources. Banking on xenophobia, they suggested that the environmentalists were fakes and that really the anti-dam campaign was a front by foreign electricity companies seeking to steal a great business opportunity from ENDESA. “Daniel Fernández is desperate. They are paying him to carry out the project and he is not achieving it,” mocked Sara Larrain, a member of the Patagonia Defense Council. “This is the desperation of someone who let himself become a mercenary for the company.”

Tompkins continued to rattle the status quo. Every time the Chilean media—and increasingly the international press—reached out to him for comment, he lambasted the dam owners as nearsighted businessmen with no sense of national patrimony. “The passport is meaningless,” Tompkins said, addressing criticism that he was a foreigner meddling in Chilean affairs. “It is really your behavior that determines whether you are a patriot. If you’re trashing your own country, ruining the soils, contaminating the waters and the air, cutting down the trees, overfishing the lakes, rivers, and oceans, you’re not much of a patriot. I see a lot of nationalists pumping their chests about being such patriots, and meanwhile they’re trashing their own country!”

Tompkins even took the anti-dam campaign overseas. Newspaper and billboard ads ran on the side of London’s double-decker buses, in which Tompkins mocked the Chilean government’s plans to plunder Patagonia. “We were talking directly to the political class and telling them: ‘We accuse you!’” said Cruzat. “We placed ads in England to embarrass them, to say to the world, ‘Look! This is what they’re doing.’ For Chileans to be exposed like that was very shameful.”

A myriad of different environmental groups now saw an opportunity to save the rivers and doubled down on organizing local opposition to the dam. Caravans of cowboys waving flags adorned with the Patagonia Without Dams logo garnered massive television news coverage as they rode horses in mass protests. A who’s-who of Chilean environmentalists plus hundreds of enthusiastic volunteers joined the uprising. In many ways, Tompkins was showcasing his marketing skills learned during the years he built up the clothing company Esprit. At Esprit, he had infused the catalog shoot with adrenaline and a sense of buzzing excitement. Even customers felt like they belonged to a larger movement. Now in Patagonia, and throughout the nation, those same talents lit a fire in the hearts of thousands of Chileans. But instead of promoting disposable clothing and short-term fashion trends, Tompkins was now promoting nature.

When he first founded The North Face in the early 1960s, Tompkins had stressed the beauty of the mountains, the lure of the outdoors. Now in Chilean Patagonia, he was launching a campaign that once again appealed to the heart. “The prioritization of beauty is, in some ways, totally aesthetic,” said Nadine Lehner, an executive assistant to Doug and Kris for six years. “And in some ways it’s also this very nimble move to recognize what people gravitate toward and how to create a brand or create a feeling that people crave.”

Tompkins knew precisely what motivated young people. Like the volunteers who donated their free time pulling up weeds and fence posts at Patagonia Park and the hundreds who lined up to pose in the Esprit catalog, Tompkins, through his behind-the-scenes financing and strategy, now masterminded a unified campaign to champion wild rivers and to protect what was still left of Patagonia.

Along the 1,700-mile-long route of the proposed line of electrical towers, environmental activists went property-by-property, door-to-door, informing locals about the reality of accepting a massive tower in their yard. “A lot of groundwork went into this,” said Cruzat. “A lot of people talking to locals, saying, ‘They’re going to destroy the value of your lands if they build a tower here. You won’t be able to sell it because you’ve got a high-tension tower in front of the house. And you won’t be able to move because wherever you go, a tower will be there.’”

In a desperate move, Chilean legislators offered a customized law for HidroAysén exempting the company from environmental impact assessments. Under the proposed legislation, dams could be “fast tracked” in the name of energy security. Tompkins and his team went ballistic. They fired off ad copy, editing and designing into the wee hours of the night, and launched yet another advertising blitz, this one depicting the businessmen as fat pink pigs with evil blue eyes and a slobbering mouthful of US $100 bills.

The campaigns created a stir in Chilean society. Eliodoro Matte began long discussions with his son and heir, Bernardo. Was the investment worth risking the family’s reputation and their most valuable asset: the family name? Was Tompkins perhaps correct? Was the Matte dynasty investing on the wrong side of history?

As the debate blossomed, demonstrations erupted in towns across Patagonia. Cowboys blocked traffic. Throughout southern Chile, a growing coalition supported the vision of Patagonia Without Dams. Even the salmon lobby, which abhorred Tompkins and was among his fiercest critics, fretted that the dams might damage lakes and rivers. They joined the anti-dam coalition. Ad-by-ad, march-by-march, industry-by-industry, the pro-Patagonia campaign surged. “With time, Doug started figuring it all out and surrounded himself with people who knew how to manage politics in Chile,” said the activist Peter Hartmann. “Doug realized that sometimes you just have to be patient, and the only thing to do is wait.”

When the HidroAysén consortium sent a fleet of pickup trucks to roam rural Patagonia in a ranch-to-ranch public relations blitz, it didn’t take long for the Tompkins team to respond. HidroAysén employees in the pickup trucks promised the rural landowners that the dams were a sign of progress and that they would bring cash. The new lake, they swore, would not be an eyesore but rather a tourist magnet. Not only would the transmission towers be good for the economy but they meant fast cash to whoever signed up first. They tried to explain that the rural landowners were fortunate that instead of merely having the wires pass by, they would be handsomely paid just to let a simple tower be built.

Searching for a way to counteract the company’s offensive, art director Badinella called up the offices of HidroAysén. He mimicked the drawl of a rural Chilean cowboy and asked the secretary at the company, “Whatdidyasay them company trucks looked like? I wanna be ready when they pass by.” The receptionist was helpful. The trucks, she explained, were white, with a blue logo on the door.

Using that description, Badinella and Tompkins launched a radio campaign portraying the employees in the white pickups as hucksters on a mission to destroy the Patagonian way of life. The radio spots urged local farmers and ranchers to fight back. To defend their land. “Don’t even open your door!” the ads suggested. “Don’t let them on your property!” The seeds of a rural backlash were planted.

The Patagonia Without Dams campaign also hired songwriters to write rhyming ballads known as payas to ridicule the dam project. The paya is a Chilean country music style built on spontaneous biting rhymes, like slap-down rap. In paya competitions, two payadores banter back and forth, insulting one another in a verbal duel that leaves the audience on the floor in laughter. “There are some formats of the paya in which you can insult people, while in others you must be a gentleman,” explained Badinella.

The Patagonia Without Dams campaign even designed comic-book-style ads featuring stories in which Don Epifanio, a white-haired and wizened Patagonian cowboy, discussed the false promises of the dams in a conversation with his horse. The pro-Patagonia campaign added two new phrases: “Destruction Is Not a Solution” and “Chile Says No to HidroAysén.”

Still, HidroAysén moved forward. By an 11 to 0 vote, the environmental committee for the Aysén region approved the project. The green light from local regulators soothed the worries of HidroAysén executives—finally, they were harvesting the fruits of funding local economic development schemes, student scholarships, and promises of subsidized energy tariffs for the region. Their 10,500-page environmental impact study was proof that they had studied every angle and answered everyone. Nine days later, the consortium’s victory lap was rudely interrupted by the largest public demonstration in Chile in over a decade.

A crowd of some 70,000 people marched through central Santiago. The demonstration stretched for a mile—from Plaza Italia to La Moneda, the presidential palace. The protesters marched peacefully to Piñera’s office and delivered a letter. The Patagonia Without Dams campaign then lit the match of social activism. Long-simmering complaints and grievances were given a stage, and the anti-dam march helped unleash the demands of the Chilean people, which had been in a nearly 30-year hibernation. Other social movements soon erupted with a hunger for justice and a cry to be heard. Piñera was weakened further with the eruption of another democratic uprising, this one led by high school students.

When Piñera declared that public education was “a market commodity” and should be priced accordingly, the reaction was instantaneous. Hundreds of thousands of high school students, led by college students Camila Vallejo, Gabriel Boric, and Giorgio Jackson, shut down the nation’s schools for nearly a year with sit-ins and marches. Tens of thousands of students occupied their high schools, living inside and raising money through selling tickets to live music concerts presented pro-bono by sympathetic bands. Piñera and the elite were dumbfounded. What was happening to the social order?! How had teenagers become revolutionaries?

Unlike their parents’ generation, these Chileans born after 1980 had not faced the bloody torture squads of General Pinochet and his feared DINA and CNI secret police. Not knowing the precariousness of Chile decades earlier, they felt little loyalty to the development model that had undoubtedly lifted millions from poverty. The teenage protesters provided even more bodies for the anti-dam campaign.

The rowdy yet peaceful street protest demanding “Patagonia Without Dams” also reinvigorated a historical Chilean belief that tens of thousands of citizens taking to the streets could create a more equitable democracy. Throughout the nation’s history, rebellion has been a well-honed tool in the fight for social justice. By 2010, few marchers feared anything worse than tear gas, a light beating, or brief imprisonment. Tortures and disappearances were a thing of the past. As Chileans became emboldened, sparks of protest flared.

Organizations that were not part of the Patagonia Defense Council launched their own anti-dam demonstrations. “People were coming to us and saying, ‘What time is the demonstration in Puerto Montt?’ And I’m saying, ‘Well, I don’t know. I’m not organizing it,’” said Hernan Mladinic, a sociologist working with Tompkins. “That was the moment we realized this was a big national wave, and unstoppable.”

The government’s support for HidroAysén wilted. The project was suddenly bogged down by the invisible workings of bureaucrats who understood the project was, politically speaking, dead in the water. Political channels that HidroAysén officials had greased in preparation for the approval of their multibillion-dollar extravaganza were suddenly clogged as a political tide washed back upon them.

“Doug worked like crazy on the campaign, but he had fun,” said Badinella, the art director. “I’ve worked for a lot of companies with very sophisticated clients that knew a lot about communications. But to have the combination of abilities that Doug had? To be able to know what you’re talking about? Know about the media at your disposition to achieve your goal? And then to trust in the people you’re working with and leave a door open for them so that they can create ideas? That’s difficult to achieve. If you ask me if, in seven years working with Doug, if he ever messed up, I’d say probably not. And as everyone who works in advertising knows, generally when the client sticks their nose in too much, they usually screw it up.”

While the HidroAysén consortium continued behind the scenes to try to move its project forward for a few more years, the political support never returned, and it got stuck in an endless environmental approval process. By 2014, the project was stalled, and then HidroAysén’s backers quietly abandoned the project a few years after that. “The Patagonia Sin Represas campaign became something cultural,” Cruzat insisted years later. “Before that, if you asked someone in Chile ‘Where are you from?’ they might answer ‘from the south.’ Today people say, ‘I’m from Patagonia.’ There are Patagonian restaurants, Patagonian food, arts and crafts from Patagonia found throughout Chile. All that has occurred in less than 10 years.”

Down in Patagonia, Kris and Doug Tompkins were delighted. The pro-Patagonia campaign cost $6 million. It was a small fortune for any environmentalist and could have funded the construction of many miles of hiking trails, hundreds of acres of organic farm upkeep, or the planting of thousands of Alerce seedlings. But Doug found the money exceptionally well leveraged: With $6 million the Patagonia Defense Council had stopped a project budgeted at $3.2 billion. By the end of the seven-year battle, Doug—and his ever-growing cadre of allies—had drowned the dam in bad publicity.