work

Buying=Saving

Countryside exhibition @Guggenheim, New York, 2020

Project by: Cookies.lol

Assisted with: infomaps, illustrations, image editing as shown below

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This was a research visualization of Douglas Tompkins shift into conservation activities.

Douglas Tompkins, founder of the North Face and Esprit clothing brands, visited Chile first in 1968 together with Yvon Choui- nard, founder of Patagonia. They travelled from California to Patagonia looking for places for surfing and climbing. Douglas came back to Chile in the early nineties, after a successful run in the retail industry, and started acquiring large patches of land for conservation. The Tompkins foundation has been responsible for the conservation of more than 8000 km2.

Since then there has been an explosion of private conservation initiatives in Chile. Although these private conservation initiatives are expanding the ecosystems preserved, they rarely follow areas of high endemism and biodiversity and they tend to be based on cheap opportunities of land acquisition and personal aesthetic appreciation. Areas of high biodiversity are scarcely represented by both state and private conservation initiatives as these areas coincide with high productivity zones and are therefore more costly.