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View the next Chile postcard
View Photos of Chile
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By Henry Tepper
New York State Director
The Nature Conservancy
Henry Tepper, The Nature Conservancy’s New York State Director, traveled to Chile with his family on a conservation fellowship in September. While in Chile, Henry’s goal is to share the relevant conservation experience acquired over more than two decades of working in the land protection and conservation field in New York and New England.
Postcard 1: Greetings, from Santiago!
September 28, 2006
My conservation fellowship in Chile began two weeks ago, and already enough has happened that it is time to file a report back home. I’ll be sending descriptions of my work on a regular basis. I arrived with my family in Santiago on Wednesday, September 12. We quickly settled into our apartment in Vita Cura, an attractive, leafy suburb very close to the city. We have a beautiful apartment with panoramic views of the city and the Andes. We could certainly get used to the expatriate lifestyle! It’s springtime in Santiago, and the weather seems a bit like north-central California—think San Jose. Most days start on the chilly side, with dazzling sun that soon burns off the haze and smog. Those evenings have spectacular sunsets from our apartment balcony. About every third or fourth day, there are overcast days with closed in clouds, the mountains invisible, and the brisk temperatures. But this being spring, the weather is getting steadily warmer.
I have hit the ground running in my assignment for the Conservancy here. I am working to forge a partnership between a private business council, the American Chamber of Commerce of Chile (AmCham), and TNC. The goal of this alliance is to increase private philanthropy for the environment and private sector-driven conservation in Chile. My hosts at AmCham have generously allowed me to work in the AmCham office, which is a short walk from my apartment. This is more than a symbolic act, because AmCham is an influential organization in Chile, whose members are some of the most important and powerful business leaders and large landowners in the country. AmCham is already opening numerous doors for me, and importantly has assigned a young American woman, Amanda Jefferson, who works here, to help me with the project. Amanda is very interested in this effort, and she and I are collaborating side by side. Her knowledge of Spanish and of the business community in Santiago will be invaluable.
My work to date has already required me to assimilate and synthesize the countless lessons I’ve learned in almost 20 years of work in private land conservation in the United States. This, of course, was the rationale for sending someone like me, whose Spanish, by the way, is truly pathetic, on a special assignment in Chile. I also have the benefit of my network of colleagues throughout TNC, who have shown great interest in my work here. I expect to work particularly closely with the TNC lawyers who have been working for years to adapt private land conservation strategies pioneered and perfected in the United States, to countries across Latin America.
Our hope is that AmCham in Chile will be able to engage the potential commitment of landowners to private conservation to leverage urgently needed changes in Chile’s tax laws. Following the example of the explosive growth of private land conservation in the United States, we believe that only if Chile’s tax laws are modified will private conservation action increase, and that it may take a commitment to such action to change the laws.
This is an elegant, and obviously very ambitious, construct and strategy. Of course I’m realistic about how much we can accomplish during my short stay here. But our idea has been well-received initially, and my goal is to generate as much momentum as possible so that the staff at AmCham and TNC in Chile can continue this work after I leave. We also plan to produce several concrete products that will be useful moving forward, including an annotated conservation easement template for Chile that synthesizes the various easement adaptations used by TNC and our partners in different Latin American countries.
One fascinating issue that I will discuss in future postings is the ever-present influence of Chile’s painful political history, and the country’s extraordinary progress in transcending those experiences. It seems hard to imagine that the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet ended less than twenty years ago, and this makes the political stakes for assuming a position on the political left or the right of great significance.
My family is settling in well here. My children, Kate, age 13, and Miles, age 10, have begun attending a small international school nestled against the mountains, and are already enjoying the experience. My wife Jane is taking Spanish classes daily and revelling in having her first three months off from work in decades. We’ve begun exploring the countryside around Santiago, including trips to the beautiful and virtually empty beach town of Pichidangui, two hours north of the city. On the drive to the beach we saw the Chilean Matorral ecosystem, which looks like chaparral that receives slightly more rainfall, and viewed with alarm how new irrigation techniques are facilitating avocado plantations that require the cutting of native esclerofilo forest on the hillsides of previously pristine Matorral. We’ve also visited Cajon de Maipo, the closest mountain valley to Santiago. The birding has been outstanding throughout. I will eventually make trips farther from the city to meet landowners, and we are planning a working vacation to the Lakes District and Patagonia in late November.
In short, we are having a lifetime experience, which I hope will also help advance the state of conservation in Chile. Not a bad way to spend three months.
Next: Exploring Valdivia!
For more information about Chile:
- The Nature Conservancy in Chile
Home to the driest desert in the world, regions that receive more than twice as much rainfall as Seattle, and snow-capped volcanic peaks, Chile is a country of extreme contrasts and immense biodiversity. - Where We Work: Valdivian Coastal Range
During the last Ice Age, these coastal forests served as a refuge, a haven free from the freeze. As a result, the Valdivian Coastal Range still harbors Chile's highest concentrations of species found nowhere else on Earth. - Where We Work: Nevados de Chillán Biological Corridor
Nevados de Chillán is in south central Chile's Bío Bío region, about 400 kilometers (248 miles) south of Chile's capital city of Santiago. The area is ecologically notable for its position at the dividing line of two ecosystems that are in danger at a global scale: the Mediterranean Scrub of central Chile and the Valdivian Temperate Rainforests of southern Chile. - How You Can Help: Donate Online
Support conservation by helping to save the last great places in Chile.
