People say “Patagonia” the way they say “someday.” It is a word that lives slightly ahead of real plans, shorthand for wind, wilderness, and the edge of the map. Ask most travelers why Patagonia sits so high on their wish list and the answers tend to blur together. Mountains. Glaciers. Hiking. A feeling.

That feeling is real, but it is also incomplete. Patagonia is not just a place of dramatic scenery. It is a place where scale distorts your sense of time, where weather moves faster than thought, and where silence can feel almost physical. In Patagonia National Park, one of the region’s quieter and less crowded corners, that sense of vastness comes with something more unusual, the awareness that you are moving through a landscape in recovery.

 

 

What Patagonia actually is, and why it feels different

Patagonia is not a single destination. It is a region that spans southern Chile and Argentina, stitched together by the Andes and pulled apart by climate, geography, and distance. Forests and fjords dominate the western edge. To the east, the land opens into steppe and sky, flatter and drier, with a sense of exposure that never quite leaves you.

This constant contrast is part of what makes Patagonia feel so alive. Light changes rapidly, clouds slide across peaks, and the wind reminds you that comfort is never guaranteed. Patagonia National Park, set in Chile’s Aysén region, captures this instability beautifully. Its landscapes do not shout for attention. They stretch. They breathe. They ask you to slow down enough to notice what is happening between the obvious highlights.

A morning in the Chacabuco Valley

Imagine a morning in the Chacabuco Valley, the kind that begins cold and pale before warming almost imperceptibly, guanacos drifted across the grasslands like punctuation marks. They move without urgency, heads lifting occasionally, the valley wide enough that no one needs to rush. Somewhere higher up, condors ride the rising air, barely moving their wings. There is no single viewpoint demanding a photograph, no crowd waiting its turn. Just space, wind, and the quiet sense that the land is doing what it was meant to do.

That feeling is not accidental. It is the result of deliberate restoration.

 

Rewilding you can actually see

Patagonia National Park is often described as a conservation success story, and unlike many places that borrow that language lightly, it earns it. The Chacabuco Valley was once dominated by large scale ranching. Fences cut the land into parcels, livestock grazed intensively, and wildlife movement was restricted in ways that took decades to become fully visible.

When Tompkins Conservation began acquiring land here, the goal was not simply protection, but repair. Livestock were removed. Fence lines were dismantled. Native ecosystems were given space to function again. In 2018, the restored landscape was donated to the Chilean state and Patagonia National Park was officially created.

Rewilding can sound abstract until you stand in a place like this. You see it in the numbers, yes, but more importantly you feel it in the behavior of the land. Guanacos returned in significant numbers. With them came predators, including pumas, reclaiming their role in the ecosystem. Wetlands recovered. Grasslands thickened. Trails were built lightly, with restraint, so visitors could pass through without overwhelming what was coming back to life.

A landscape defined by openness

Patagonia National Park does not hinge on a single iconic landmark. Its power lies in continuity. The Chacabuco Valley acts as a natural corridor, linking steppe to forest, river to plateau. You move through it gradually, often without realizing how far you have gone until you stop and turn around.

Aysén remains one of Patagonia’s least populated regions, and that remoteness shapes the experience. Roads take time. Distances feel longer than the map suggests. But that effort pays off in a way that is increasingly rare. There are moments when the only sound is wind moving through grass, when the road ahead is empty for miles, and when wildlife sightings feel private rather than staged.

Finding your Patagonia

Patagonia National Park quietly adapts to different kinds of travelers. Walkers find a network of trails that invite immersion rather than conquest. Some days unfold as gentle rambles near lagoons and wetlands. Others demand long hours on foot, moving through valleys where weather can shift without warning. The reward is not a single dramatic moment, but accumulation. Time outdoors adds up here.

Wildlife watchers experience the park differently. The possibility of seeing a puma, even without a guarantee, changes the way you pay attention. You slow down. You scan ridgelines. You notice tracks in soft ground. Even when the animals remain unseen, their presence shapes the atmosphere.

Birdlife provides its own rhythm. Condors dominate the sky, but it is often the smaller species that bring intimacy to the experience. Wetlands flicker with movement. Calls echo from unexpected places. The park feels inhabited in ways that are subtle but constant.

Water adds another dimension. Rivers and lakes cut through the landscape, offering days that shift naturally between walking and paddling. Cycling and long scenic drives extend that sense of flow, turning movement itself into part of the pleasure.

 

Patagonia as a lived place

It is tempting to imagine Patagonia as empty. It is not. Patagonia National Park is tied to small towns and gateway communities that have always existed alongside distance and isolation. Chile Chico and Los Antiguos sit near the immense lake known as Lago General Carrera in Chile and Lago Buenos Aires in Argentina. The lake softens the region, creating a surprising microclimate where fruit trees grow and life gathers around the water.

These communities matter because conservation does not exist in isolation. The park’s transformation has reshaped local economies and identities, shifting work from extraction toward stewardship, guiding, and hospitality. That human transition is part of what gives the park its depth. You are not visiting a sealed wilderness. You are passing through a place where people and landscapes are adapting together.

Why this park stays with you

Patagonia will always be visually striking. But Patagonia National Park offers something more enduring than spectacle. It offers the experience of witnessing a landscape mid recovery, still carrying traces of its past, but clearly moving toward something more balanced.

If you come here expecting a checklist of highlights, you will leave satisfied. If you come curious about how ecosystems heal, how silence feels when it stretches for miles, and how travel can be less about consuming a place and more about listening to it, you will leave changed.

That is why Patagonia lingers in the imagination. Not because it is far away, but because it reminds you what space, patience, and wildness can still look like when they are given room to return.

The Chacabuco Valley stretched wide before us. The golden steppe was broken by winding rivers, framed by snow-capped ridges that seemed to glow in the fall sun. We were in the heart of Patagonia National Park, a place reborn from what used to be one of the largest sheep ranches in Chile. Old Estancias once carved the land into squares made of barbed wire and filled with overgrazed pastures. But today, those fences are gone. The grasslands pulse with guanacos again and the park has become a symbol of what rewilding can mean when it’s done right.

We’d come here to see a beacon of rewilding in the area, which took shape as an oddly familiar looking species of bird called the Darwin’s rhea (known locally as ñandú or choique.) It’s Patagonia’s strangest survivors, this flightless animal with legs built for speed and feathers streaked in soft browns that disappear into the grass. From a distance, they look almost prehistoric, like something you might imagine darting across the steppe in a bygone epoch. Up close, they’re ecosystem engineers, spreading seeds that shape grassland health, and feed predators such as pumas and foxes that depend on them for survival.

These birds possess an unusual way of fertilizing the land, making them critical players and worth a heavy invesment in their rewilding. Unlike guanacos, which use fixed latrines (skat dropping areas) that concentrate nutrients in one spot, rheas are wanderers in every sense. As they roam, they drop seeds across the steppe in a steady scatter, with each pile of droppings carried further by rodents like tuco-tucos that burrow and churn the soil. This gives plants a chance to take root in Patagonia’s harsh winds. It’s a less prominent, yet highly fundamental cycle where rheas eat, move, fertilize, and in doing so, stitch the landscape together. Without them, the steppe would grow weaker and far less resilient.

Rheas, standing about three feet tall, are designed to vanish into Patagonia’s grasslands rather than dominate them. Rheas move almost like ghosts, disappearing into the landscape until you realize the ground itself was alive and moving all along. And yet here, in what should be one of their strongholds, rheas had nearly vanished. 

Just a decade ago, a survey inside the park found fewer than 22 individuals left—a catastrophically low number for a bird so integral. The reasons were painfully manmade, as they often are when it comes to biodiversity loss like this. Decades of ranching, which ended here in 2008, had blanketed the valley in fences that trapped and killed rheas. Eggs were taken for food, chicks were chased down, and their range shrank until they were pushing just shy of a memory.

That’s where Emiliana Retamal, a young veterinarian turned wildlife ranger, comes into the conversation. She’s part of a small team with Rewilding Chile trying to bring rheas back to the Chacabuco steppe. The first thing she said upon meeting was to slow our movements, talk less, and to follow her lead when approaching these flightless wonders. We were off to the holding pens that served as a temporary home for both rhea adults and chicks, known here as charitos. Some of them were getting ready to be released into the wild, marking another historic moment for the rewilding team.

The following morning was all about getting things right. Rewilding Chile’s rhea initiative, called Ñandú Conservation and Recovery Programme, has been running since 2014. Ever since, the team has been incubating eggs, raising chicks, slowly reintroducing birds into the wild, all building toward a goal of restoring a self-sustaining population of at least 100 adults and at least four actively reproducing.

For Emiliana, release days are equal parts research, nerves, and a ton of hope. Each bird is carefully prepared, including mandatory health checks, parasite treatments, and a period of acclimatization inside open-air pens where they gain strength and learn to fend for themselves. The idea is not to domesticate them in any way, but rather, give them just enough of a head start to survive top predators, and Patagonia’s harsh winters once the pen gates swing open. Some are fitted with GPS collars—the first of their kind for monitoring rheas here—allowing the team to track their survival rates and see if they’re reproducing in the wild.

We were fortunate enough to witness this particular relase, which was a true milestone. Alongside captive-born birds, a group of 15 rheas had been translocated from Argentina for the first time. These wild individuals were specifically brought in to bolster genetics. These bird groups act quite differently, with the wild ones moving as a tighter group and demonstrating discomfort around people. That’s exactly what Emiliana wants, as the goal is to ensure the animals remember what it means to be wild or remain entirely wild to up their chances of survival.

When the moment finally came, the puesto (or field station) buzzed with controlled urgency. Emiliana and her patchwork team of rangers, vets, community leaders, and allies, moved with practiced rhythm, coaxing these powerful, awkward-looking birds into small wooden crates. These rheas were not tame, so asking them to willingly go into confinement requires a patient and steady hand. Every movement was about safety—maximizing calmness while minimizing stress, and avoiding injury for all.

Outside, a convoy of trucks rumbled to life while drones circled high above, ready to follow the release. Autumn had painted the surrounding forests in fire-reds, yellows and oranges. The air carried the kind of crispness that warned of winter’s approach. Bundled in layers, we set off across the park along a road that wound through valleys where iconic mountains dominated the horizon. The landscape begged us to stop and stare, but the mission pushed us forward. When we reached the release site, the cages were lifted down and arranged side by side. The team stood in a nervous silence. Everything was ready, so the countdown began.

On the count of three, the gates opened and the wranglers stepped back fast. For a heartbeat, not a single bird moved. Then, with a rush of feathers and legs, the rheas spilled out into the open, scattering across the grasslands like wind made visible. Some lingered, hesitating at the threshold. Others bolted in tight groups, vanishing into the tawny steppe. It certainly was not graceful, but it was emotional nonetheless. A species that had nearly disappeared from this place was running free, once again.

Releases like this may look simple. Open the gates, let the birds run, right? But the reality is far from it. Rewilding is hard work, and with rheas, it’s closer to brutal. In the wild, more than half of chicks don’t survive their first year. Eggs are eaten by predators or trampled by livestock, chicks are picked off by foxes, eagles, and pumas, and even curiosity can be fatal. Young birds often die from mistaking the wrong thing for food, like rocks or other inedible objects. And on top of that, the male birds are sometimes left caring for 50 chicks at once, making survival that much harder. Add to that the genetic bottleneck of starting with so few individuals in the wild, and every single bird that makes it into adulthood feels like a victory against impossible odds.

That’s why Emiliana and her team treat each rhea like an individual case study. Every release is followed by weeks of long days in the field monitoring and collecting data. Collars on individuals provide glimpses of survival, but much of the knowledge still comes from old-fashioned ranger work of tracking footprints across the steppe. Their job next will be to spot birds from a distance, asking local police and community members to report sightings to speed up the process.

And yet, for all the setbacks, the progress is undeniable for this team. From a ghost population of just 22 individuals to more than 70 now roaming the Chacabuco steppe, the recovery is indisputable. But numbers alone aren’t enough around here. Survival depends on genetics, and until recently, most of the birds released here had been hatched or raised in captivity. This means they were strong in body, but softer in instinct. This release however, was marking a turning point.

These 15 wild rheas translocated from Argentina to Puesto Ñandú—just a few kilometers from the border—arrived carrying what captive-bred birds could not: diverse DNA, sharper instincts, and that memory of how to live without the aid of humans. While borders divide people, they mean nothing to the animals who cross them freely. Rheas don’t recognize Chile or Argentina, but they recognize habitat. And if this recovery is to last, it will take both nations working together to protect the grasslands they share.

Even with the numbers trending upward, one of the biggest challenges is, of course, social. In nearby Cochrane, Emiliana is known casually as “the choique girl.” People are aware of the project, but they don’t always feel ownership of it. Many still see the park as something created by outsiders, disconnected from their lives. That gap is fundamental, and something the Rewilding Chile team, as well as its other collaborators including Quimán Reserve, CONAF (Chile’s National Forestry Corporation), SAG (Agriculture and Livestock Service) and Carabineros de Chile, are putting emphasis on. Rewilding efforts must be equally about saving species and building genuine relationships with communities or everything done in the field will not be effective.

Being in attendance on that release day, standing in the steppe as the cages opened and rheas burst back into a landscape that once nearly lost them, was something that will never escape our memory. The pride on the team’s faces, the outward relief after months of preparation, the sight of those birds vanishing into the golden grasslands, all felt triumphant.

As Emiliana reminded us, this is only the beginning. In the vastness of Patagonia National Park, surrounded by snow-capped ridges and rivers that once ran through sheep pastures, the work ahead is as immense as the landscape itself. Watching rheas roam free again was proof that rewilding means to restore the past, in addition to defining a new future, where ecosystems can someday thrive without our intervention.

Written by: Andi Cross

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Andi Cross is an explorer, strategist, and extended range diver with Scuba Schools International and Scubapro, who leads Edges of Earth—a global expedition and consulting collective documenting resilience and climate solutions across the world’s most remote coastlines. Her work centers on “positive deviance”—spotlighting outliers succeeding against the odds—and using storytelling and strategy to help scale their impact.

When I think about some of the most impactful conservation wins of our time, the global ivory bans, the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act, or Canada’s phaseout of open-net salmon farms immediately surfaces. But there’s one that seems to present front-and-center for me, especially since I identify as both a capitalist and a conservationist, as being particularly timely. The large-scale rewilding efforts across Chile and Argentina stand out as compelling case studies of what’s possible when bold vision, private capital, and ecological urgency collide. For anyone in business today, it challenges us to rethink what meaningful contribution looks like in a world that can no longer afford business as usual.

The pair behind this effort are Kris Tompkins and the late Doug Tompkins. Doug co-founded The North Face and later Esprit, two powerhouse brands that redefined outdoor and fashion industries. Kris was Patagonia’s inaugural CEO, shaping it into a globally recognized ethical apparel company. Together, they drew a direct line between wealth and responsibility to establish Tompkins Conservation. The organization’s objective was to place focus on and highlight geographical regions or areas that they held personal ties to. Doug stated he would use his fortune to “pay rent to planet Earth.”

Over two decades, Doug and Kris donated more than 3 million acres in Chile and Argentina, creating over a dozen national parks. Before his untimely death exactly 10 years ago from a kayaking accident, Doug’s final vision was the Route of Parks of Patagonia—a 2,800-kilometer corridor linking 17 parks and 60 communities across Chile. It was a radical undertaking aiming to restore entire ecosystems that reconnected wildlife, all while creating livelihoods that didn’t rely on extractive industries like mining or industrial fishing.

Born from Tompkins Conservation, both Rewilding Chile and Rewilding Argentina were created to carry out Doug and Kris’s mission, but more so to ensure these efforts evolved beyond the individuals themselves. They made a deliberate choice to hand the work to local leaders who understand these ecosystems as home. Today, those leaders and their counterparts are both honoring Doug’s legacy and expanding Kris’s vision in ways only they can. That has even meant taking their work beyond the two country borders.

This year at Climate Week in New York, Kris inspired the launch of the Jaguar River Initiative, which is a continental-scale rewilding effort stretching across Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay. It’s one of the most ambitious ecological restoration projects in the Global South, led by on-ground conservationists who understand these landscapes as more than boundaries, but as a single, continuous living system.

Directed by Deli Saavedra, the vision is to rewild the river corridors that function as the connective tissue of a million square mile ecosystem. In doing so, this will restore the movement of jaguars, giant river otters, anteaters, and other keystone species, while addressing the cascading pressures of climate change and habitat loss. Drought, wildfires, industrial encroachment, agriculture, and deforestation have fragmented this region for decades. However, the success of Argentina’s Iberá Wetlands—where jaguars have returned after more than 70 years and local communities built an economy around restoration—proved that recovery at scale is not only possible, but replicable.

The concept is to take what worked in Iberá and apply the concept elsewhere. It’s the essence of “positive deviance,” or identifying what’s working against the odds, understanding why, and helping others replicate and adapt it in their own contexts. This initiative is the genesis of my work with Edges of Earth, where we seek out ready-made solutions already succeeding locally, and help these organizational stories reach the world so there’s opportunities to scale both locally and globally.

Over nearly eight weeks, Adam Moore—our expedition operations lead—and I, immersed into the worlds of Rewilding Chile and Rewilding Argentina to see their impact firsthand. In Patagonia National Park, we saw why rewilding matters. As we crossed sweeping valleys filled with guanaco herds and climbed ridgelines where Darwin’s rhea now roam after teetering on the edge of extinction, the vision that Doug and Kris championed felt like a promise made, and kept, to Chile.

The park’s rewilding story continues: Running Wild: The Return of Patagonia National Park’s Rheas

A place Doug loved so deeply it now carries his name, Pumalín Douglas Tompkins National Park, showed us a completely different face of Patagonia. At Caleta Gonzalo Lodge, designed by Doug and Kris themselves, the scenery shifts from the iconic windblown steppe to a world of fjords, waterfalls, glaciers, ancient alerce trees, and volcanoes that rival the Pacific Ring of Fire. This was Doug’s living laboratory, where he tested the radical idea that conservation could be run with the same rigor and ambition as a business empire. By 2018, that experiment became history. When 1,063,000 acres were protected in the largest private land donation ever made to any government, Kris proved that when vision meets capital, an entire nation’s map can be redrawn.

On the other side, Rewilding Argentina has created and/or expanded 10 national and provincial parks through the donation of 464,098 hectares of land. Altogether, their work now protects an extraordinary 1,611,413 hectares—an area so vast it’s almost hard to comprehend. And at the heart of it sits the Iberá Wetlands, one of the world’s largest freshwater ecosystems. Argentina’s most powerful rewilding success story.

Traveling with Marisi López, who has been part of this movement since the earliest days, we learned just how improbable this transformation once seemed. Iberá was not always a wildlife stronghold. For decades, much of the region was hunted out, fragmented by agriculture, heavily deforested for industrial purposes, and degraded by invasive species. The land once felt empty, without critical keystone species keeping the balance in check. Today, we moved through landscapes that had once been silent, only to be met with an explosion of life featuring jaguars relaxing in dense underbrush; giant river otters carving patterns through the water and; capibaras rolling around on the dirt road blocking our car from moving much more than an inch at times.

Yes, the return of wildlife makes this story impressive. But perhaps even more critical has been the return of identity. Communities that once relied on extractive industries or had no work opportunity at all, now have alternate livelihoods. The success of Iberá is what sparked a continental ripple after decades of working towards it. Today, it serves as the blueprint for rewilding across the Americas, and perhaps beyond.

It’s important to recognize that the Tompkins legacy has inspired a new generation of conservationists to launch their own initiatives and chart their own paths. Edges of Earth partnered with Por el Mar, a grassroots marine conservation group working to protect the region’s cold-water ecosystems, especially its pristine giant kelp forests.

For three weeks, we traveled with their team from Tierra del Fuego to Santa Cruz, living aboard a small sailing vessel and diving into some of the last intact underwater forests like this on the planet. These ecosystems, towering and ancient, are now threatened by warming seas, industrial fishing, and invasive species all over the world. But here, this team has been instrumental in protecting giant kelp up and down the coast, mitigating the crisis the best they can before it’s too late.

Co-Founder & CEO Martina Sasso, along with some of her founding team, emerged from the Rewilding Argentina network. People once touched by the Tompkins philosophy but determined to create their own impact. Their work blends science and community outreach, building stewardship for ecosystems that have long been overlooked. In many ways, Por el Mar represents the natural evolution of the Tompkins vision, by helping those who have turned their back on natural resources to see their value once again.

I also must acknowledge that the Tompkins’ work wasn’t without criticism. They were accused of land grabs or of not involving local communities early enough, for example. And when you speak with the people who lived through those early years of building the Rewilding teams, they don’t sugarcoat the struggle. Trust had to be earned and deep, emotional tension showed up everywhere. But standing inside these restored ecosystems today, the outcome is simply undeniable.

Pride is a word we’ve heard a lot of over the course of those 8 weeks. It’s returned to places once written off and places that were hardly on a global map. And the closer we’ve gotten to the teams on the ground, the more we’ve come to learn that the number one driver of success has been local ownership. Rewilding only works when communities see themselves in the future of these landscapes and must never feel displaced by it.

After traveling through 45+ countries, 250 locations, and speaking with nearly 3,000 people working towards a more sustainable future, I’ve come to realize growth means nothing if it harms the communities and ecosystems that make it possible in the first place. The people doing the hardest work—fishers, farmers, Indigenous leaders, grassroots conservationists—have shown me that true progress is defined by how that scale shapes the world around it.

So what can the next generation of business leaders learn from this?

Use capital as a lever: The Tompkins treated wealth as a tool. Money, in their world, was something to deploy with intention. They redirected their financial success outward, not inward. Imagine how differently our world might look if more business leaders viewed their balance sheets as a means to shape healthier futures?

Stretch your timeline: While most companies obsess over shareholder value, the Tompkins were thinking in generations. They invested in ecosystems knowing they might not live to see the impact. And yet, that long-range mindset is exactly why the work is still expanding. The businesses that will endure the next century are going to be the ones building with an eye on what a sustainable horizon looks like.

Lead by releasing: Their greatest measure of success was what Doug and Kris gave back. Donating millions of acres to the public did not show up as a loss or a tax write off. It was actually the whole point. Sometimes the most powerful form of leadership is knowing when to hand over the keys.

Don’t wait for perfection: The Tompkins and their teams were criticized, and rather harshly for that matter, early days. They made mistakes and were categorically misunderstood. But that fueled the fire. Progress was the most used word when talking to the on-ground teams about what Doug stood for. If you’re waiting for a flawless plan or unanimous approval, you’ll never do anything meaningful.

I’m currently writing this somewhere between Argentina and Brazil, on our final week in the field with the Jaguar Rivers Initiative. I’ve found myself rethinking what power and influence are actually for as we drive through these countries once so wild we can hardly visualize what it means in our modern world. Hearing those who knew Doug describe the kind of leader he was has forced me to look inward. At the kind of impact I want to leave behind. We spend so much energy in business chasing perception—titles, property, status, awards. But what does it all mean if the resources beneath our feet disappear?

Legacy is built through the choices we make about where our skills, capital, time, and effort go. It’s built by uplifting the communities who need it most and inspiring others to carry the work forward long after we’re gone. The question no longer is whether we can make a difference. We already know how. It’s whether we will rise up and choose to do so.

Written by: Andi Cross

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Andi Cross is an explorer, strategist, and extended range diver with Scuba Schools International and Scubapro, who leads Edges of Earth—a global expedition and consulting collective documenting resilience and climate solutions across the world’s most remote coastlines. Her work centers on “positive deviance”—spotlighting outliers succeeding against the odds—and using storytelling and strategy to help scale their impact.

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MEET THE LEADERS BEHIND THE LEGACY

REWILDING CHILE

REWILDING ARGENTINA

POR EL MAR