The ATTA Campfire Chat series brings inspiration and vision from dynamic thought leaders whose areas of expertise inform and guide the adventure travel industry. Along with other efforts to regularly engage the global ATTA community in your remote settings, these short virtual interviews hosted by ATTA executives are designed to provide a brief but thoughtful reflection on issues you are facing now that will affect tourism tomorrow.
Adventure Travel Trade Association CEO, Shannon Stowell, hosts Kristine McDivitt Tompkins of Tompkins Conservation for a Campfire Chat about her conservation work, including the extraordinary Ruta de los Parques in Chilean Patagonia.
You will hear her story and the vision behind Tompkins Conservation as they discuss the role tourism plays in conservation. Don’t miss this opportunity to learn about the critical work that goes into ensuring human and non-human communities can thrive together for years to come and how our adventure travel community ca
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Rewilding efforts are returning jaguars, the largest predator in South America, to areas where the species has been driven to local extinction due to hunting and habitat loss.
In Argentina, just 200 Jaguars remain, but a reintroduction programme has returned a mother and two cubs to the country’s Iberá wetlands, 70 years after the species was last observed in the region.
They are the first of nine jaguars which will be released to repopulate the wetlands, which are a protected area covering almost 700,000 hectares and offering an abundance of wild prey for the big cats.
Your own private Patagonia
The condors gave it away.
Instead of soaring in circles on thermals high overhead, a group of Andean condors was traveling low to the ground. Some even landed tentatively before lumbering back up into the air only to touch down again near the same spot near one of the dirt roads that run through the park. These endangered scavengers were clearly feeding and I wanted to see what they’d found to feast on.
As I drove slowly closer, the enormous birds moved a short distance away and after a few careful steps through tufts of grass along the side of the road I saw what they were after: a partly eaten young guanaco, its neck snapped in a signature puma move. Standing there alone with the fresh kill under the watchful, wary eyes of the condors felt like I was in my own personal episode of “Wild Kingdom” with Marlin Perkins.
Rewilding public lands in Patagonia and beyond: Q&A with Kris Tompkins
In the early 1990s, Kris and Doug Tompkins began buying up vast amounts of land in Chile and Argentina and setting it aside for conservation.
Since the early 2000s, their non-profit Tompkins Conservation has donated over 800,000 hectares (2 million acres) of wilderness in Chile and Argentina, which spurred the permanent protection of nearly 6 million hectares (15 million acres) and the establishment of 13 new national parks.
The Tompkins had performed “a kind of capitalist jujitsu move” as Kris Tompkins put it in her 2020 TED talk: “We deployed private wealth from our business lives and deployed it to protect nature from being devoured by the hand of the global economy.”