A recently opened salmon processing plant in southern Chile is raising concerns about whether environmental regulations were properly carried out to prevent contamination of marine ecosystems and clean drinking water.…
PUERTO NATALES/PUNTA ARENAS, Chile — Pristine waters, partially covered in sea ice, reflect the early morning light while a flock of flamingos basks in the warmth of the sun near…
“As a boy, my father killed pumas,” says Vincente Navarra, whose family has been raising sheep against the backdrop of Argentina’s Patagonian wilderness for generations. Navarra, a 71-year-old rancher who…
A hydroelectric dam complex in southern Argentina, one of the country’s largest energy projects, is facing backlash from conservationists and Indigenous communities who are worried about its impact on the…
A forest fire that has been spreading for weeks in Chile’s Tierra del Fuego is threatening the ancestral land of an Indigenous group and destroying some of the world’s highest…
Fungi account for around half of the living organisms in our soils, yet we tend to only notice them when a conspicuous mushroom or toadstool pops up and draws our…
In the early 1990s, using the money they earned from their leadership roles at Patagonia Inc., The North Face, and Esprit, Kris and Doug Tompkins began buying up vast amounts…
Like much of the world, Argentina remains locked down, its citizens more or less homebound due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Amid the torpor, Yamana Gold, a Canada-based mining company,…
Patagonia’s huemul is an agile herbivore of which only about 1,500 may remain at 100 or so scattered sites between sea level and the Andes; it is being buffeted by complex interrelated stressors.
It’s difficult to formulate a description of someone like Kristine Tompkins. A pioneer in the outdoor industry during her time as CEO of Patagonia and one of the preeminent conservationists…
Swimming 4 meters per second, a feeding blue whale swings open its jaws and, in four seconds, swallows 140 percent of its mass—a volume of water and krill the size…
One of the world's most controversial mega-dam projects met its likely end this week when Chile's Committee of Ministers voted to cancel the permits for the HidroAysén project. Costing around…
A gray zorro (Pseudalopex griseus) in Patagonian Chile. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. This canine has many names: the gray zorro, the chilla, and the South American gray fox. Despite…
The wild rivers of Patagonia may soon never be the same. Last week, Chile's Aysén Environmental Review Commission approved the environmental assessment of a five dam proposal on two rivers.…
The Andean cat. © Jim Sanderson, PhD/Small Wild Cat Conservation Foundation. The elusive Andean cat (Leopardus jacobita), which until the late 1990s was only known to scientists by a couple…