University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Rewilding Patagonia

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Rewilding Patagonia

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Copyright 2022 Maria Soledad Altrudi

REWILDING PATAGONIA

by

Maria Soledad Altrudi

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfilment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSPHY
COMMUNICATION

August 2022
ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is customary to begin the acknowledgements section by expressing one’s gratitude toward the
dissertation committee chair and academic advisor, and I am more than happy to partake in this
tradition. Christina Dunbar-Hester is an outstanding mentor and I know that, looking back, I will
think fondly of these past couple of years because of her presence. During this time, she not only
introduced me to literatures that would define the path of my studies but helped me navigate
through the weeds of the “doctoral student experience.” She has been unwavering in her support
and I always knew that I could turn to her whenever I needed help, guidance or a sounding board.
I will miss working closely with her, but I know this is not the end of our relationship.
I am equally indebted to Christopher M. Kelty, a caring and thoughtful mentor—very
generous with his time and intellectual energy—who introduced me to a whole host of literatures
that have profoundly shaped this work. To anyone reading, Kelty is a unicorn in academia, consider
yourself lucky if you get to work with him and treat the opportunity accordingly. I wish we had
had more time to discover coffee shops in Los Angeles and to talk about cats.
Henry Jenkins is a professor to whom a lot of students flock, and for good reason. He
always has an encouraging word and generous, substantial feedback that he offers very promptly
because, as we all suspect, he has either mastered time-travel or there are multiples of him. I will
always be thankful for the support he offered me at a time of need during my graduate studies, and
for allowing me to explore things.
Finally, I am very glad that the Annenberg School brought Jennifer Petersen to me. Even
though she was the last member to enter my committee, her contributions are inversely
proportional to the time spent working together: she has helped me muddle through media studies
iii

and, in her foresight, exposed me to concepts and theories I did not know I needed and which
ultimately became cornerstones of this dissertation.
The support of my friends has also been instrumental to getting me here. Thanks to Dr.
Sophia Baik for always showing us the way and being the best master, and to Dr. Do Own (Donna
Kim) for being the best and most reliable Pomodoro buddy. To my forever friends, Dr. Andrea
Alarcon and Dr-to-be Franny Corry (and the RPC): you have been a solace in this crazy dance,
always making everything fun – even transporting a heavy TV. I am happy that we got to work
together too, but I am mostly grateful for your friendship.
In practical terms, this dissertation would not have happened without the generosity of the
people I encountered in Patagonia, all of whom were gracious enough to share their time with me.
I need to specially thank my fixer, Guido Vittone, for making himself available, fundamentally
helping me map out and structure my stay, and being such a good conversationalist. I would also
like to thank the various family members who offered their support and personal connections,
especially Ruben and Delia who hosted me in Rio Gallegos.
Lastly, in the most fundamental of terms, none of anything, really, would have occurred
had it not been for my husband, Agustin. I am forever indebted to you for everything you have
done for me and all you have had to be (from chef to editor), especially in these last couple of
months. I hope you know that not a day goes by that I do not count my lucky stars.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ..................................................................................................................... II
LIST OF FIGURES .............................................................................................................................. V
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ................................................................................................................ VII
ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................... VIII
PREFACE ......................................................................................................................................... IX
INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................................ 1
CHAPTER 1. PATAGONIA: THE LAND OF ONCE AND FUTURE OTHERS .............................................. 38
CHAPTER 2. EL SUEÑO DE DOUG .................................................................................................... 88
CHAPTER 3. RENATURING THE SUBLIME WILD ............................................................................. 125
CHAPTER 4. REWILDING AS A MEDIA PRACTICE ........................................................................... 161
CHAPTER 5. BETWEEN CARE AND CONTROL: THE PATAGONIAN COUGAR’S TALE ........................ 226
EPILOGUE ..................................................................................................................................... 269
GLOSSARY ................................................................................................................................... 278
REFERENCES ................................................................................................................................ 280
APPENDIX. ON METHODS ............................................................................................................. 318

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure I.1: Map depicting the limits of Patagonia ………………………………………………. 3
Figure I.2: Map of provinces of Argentinian Patagonia ………………………………………... 16
Figure I.3: Photograph of a macá tobiano ……………………………………………………… 18
Figure I.4: Map included in Annex II of P.L # 3306 …………………………………………… 21
Figure I.5: Map of PNP in 2018 ………………………………………………………………... 24
Figure I.6: Current map depicting PNP ………………………………………………………… 28
Figure I.7: Screenshot of a promotional cinematic video ……………………………………… 35
Figure 1.1: Rock paintings in Cueva de Las Manos ……………………………………………. 45
Figure 1.2: Bust of Carlos Maria Moyano ……………………………………………………... 66
Figure 1.3: Bariloche landscape from of Cerro Otto …………………………………………… 83
Figure 2.1: Cañadón Río Pinturas ……………………………………………………………... 108
Figure 2.2: Sign located in Comodoro Rivadavia airport ……………………………………... 111
Figure 3.1: Carts and other agricultural tools …………………………………………………. 139
Figure 3.2: Parque del Viento and proposed expansion of PNP ……………………………….142
Figure 3.3: Screenshot of Proyecto Parque Patagonia ……………………………………….. 155
Figure 4.1: Camera trap in the Strike Force range …………………………………………….. 170
Figure 4.2: Removing memory card from camera …………………………………………….. 170
Figure 4.3: Still of Wolffoshn’s Vizcacha …………………………………………………….. 177
Figure 4.4: Still of “Pampa’s Secrets” VIII …………………………………………………… 179
Figure 4.5: Still of “Pampa’s Secrets” V ……………………………………………………… 181
Figure 4.6: Lotek’s LiteTrack Iridium 420 model …………………………………………….. 187
Figure 4.7: Satellite collar for puma …………………………………………………………... 187
Figure 4.8: Lotek’s Web Service ……………………………………………………………… 192
Figure 4.9: Composite of three stills of Instagram video on puma tacking …………………… 197
Figure 4.10: Still of “Pampa’s Secrets” ……………………………………………………….. 200
Figure 4.11: Composite of two stills of Instagram video on monitoring ……………………… 209
vi

Figure 4.12: Composite of two stills of Instagram videos on monitoring …………………….. 211
Figure 4.13: Still of Instagram video on collaring huemueles ………………………………… 213
Figure 4.14: Still of Instagram video on puma cubs …………………………………………... 213
Figure 5.1: Accommodations in Cañadón Pinturas Gateway …………………………………. 238
Figure 5.2: Glamping tent in Chaco province …………………………………………………. 238
Figure 5.3: Lobby of mountain lodge …………………………………………………………. 239
Figure 5.4: PNP signs …………………………………………………………………………. 241

vii

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

Aves Short for Aves Argentinas
APN Administración de Parques Nacionales
CONICET Concejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas
CAP Concejo Agrario Provincial
CRA Confederaciones Rurales Argentinas
FIAS Federación de Instituciones Agropecuarias de Santa Cruz
FFyF Fundación Flora y Fauna (now Fundación Rewilding Argentina).
FRA Fundación Rewilding Argentina
INTA Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria
PNP Parque Nacional Patagonia
PP Parque Patagonia.

viii

ABSTRACT

At the beginning of 2022, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC), arguably the world’s leading authority assessing the climate change phenomenon, warned
that climate warming was putting a large portion of the world’s biodiversity and ecosystems at risk
of extinction. Without negating this dim reality, this dissertation problematizes how certain actors
in the conservation sphere utilize what now amount to incontrovertible facts to form and sustain a
particular discursive formation, one that crosses international borders.
This work is centered on a specific empirical site in the northwest corner of Santa Cruz,
one of the provinces of the Argentinian Patagonia, where a rewilding initiative is taking place in a
privately owned protected area that might, someday, become part of the recently created Patagonia
National Park. In this context, this dissertation focuses on the concept of rewilding as a
contemporary strengthening reconstitution of wilderness as a discursive formation that, brought
together through a neoliberal logic, merges development and conservation discourses in a way
that, ultimately, opens up the space to neocolonial influences.

ix

PREFACE

Growing up, I do not remember thinking much about Patagonia. And what I do remember knowing
about it is what I was taught in school, of which only the Conquista del Desierto (the military
campaign through which the southern part of the country was “conquered”) stands out as the
historical fact that made a long-lasting impact. When the economic crisis of 2001 hit Argentina,
the main effect I felt as part of a middle-class family living in the capital city was that, the following
year, we did not travel abroad for our vacations. Instead, we went south to Patagonia. I remember
that trip very fondly, but not just because my best friend joined us; rather, I remember being moved
by what I saw, the place creating a crevasse in my brain were it would lodge dormant for years to
come. After that, the political economy of the country settled, I went on to high school and my
family resumed summer vacations abroad. It was not until I started gathering literature for this
project that I realized just how many books on Patagonia I had, unknowingly, accumulated
throughout the years. These contained mostly stories, narrations of different people who, in the
first part of the twentieth century, moved to the region to make a living or were among the first to
fly over it.
What follows is also a story. Sure enough, I have tried to be systematic in my research and
rigorous in my analysis, but I have produced just one possible, if exhaustive, reading of what
currently unfolds in a northwest corner of Patagonia. I distinctly remember the moment when I
decided what the dissertation you are about to read was going to be about: I was sitting on the
couch of my apartment, stressing about the upcoming qualifying examinations, when I discovered
an article in an Argentinian newspaper that talked about a national park in Patagonia where a
rewilding project was scheduled to begin. Certainly, I did not know at that time what shape the
final draft would have, but I was certain that it was going to be about rewilding and that it was
going to have this Patagonian park as its empirical site. This is, in fact, what the introduction picks
up on and the reason why that section is concerned with unravelling the events that precipitated
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my interest in this subject. Like all stories, this one also needed a productive place to start: Once
upon a time, there was a park in Santa Cruz created by a group of people to protect a native bird
and all the people of the land were happy about it, until a proposed territorial expansion pitted
local agricultural producers against conservation practitioners, revealing in the processes how
power and knowledge were (re)produced in an already highly storied region of the world.
Inevitably, this interpretation is influenced by my identity and the various elements that
conform it. On the one hand, I was born and raised in one of the centers of power that delimited
Patagonia, which gives me a first-hand knowledge others might lack, though I am not from
Patagonia and thus some of its aspects necessarily escape me. On the other, at the time of this
writing, I was an ideologically progressive, international graduate student enrolled in an American
University of liberal bias and this normative valence also necessarily comes through the pages:
mine is a strained voice from the periphery that holds environmental conservation as the moral
challenge of our time, and it loudly joins others which decry the extent to which this endeavor has
been coopted by the politics of neoliberalism.
1

INTRODUCTION

Nature is a contested idea, so much so that Raymond Williams described it as “perhaps the most
complex word in the language’, one whose trajectory reveals ‘a history of a large part of human
thought” (2014, p. 164). This work is situated within the line of thought that argues that “nature”
exists in a mutually informing relation with “culture”; that is, the category of nature is not merely
a material one but is always also a product of culture, what Haraway (2003) “natureculture.”
However, mainstream conservation has historically rested on a conceptual distinction that opposes
“nature” and “culture” by regarding them as two separate, incommensurable realms. As Cronon
(1996) has argued, this dichotomy—which clearly manifests physically in protected areas—is not
universal to all people throughout the world but rather particular to Western societies in the modern
era. In this construction, nature is equated with or directly synonymous to wilderness, and the
association is a nominally positive one.
That wilderness is a construction is not a novel statement; however, the work of those who
unpacked that is the basis on which the present analysis stands in order to newly deploy this
concept. Specifically, this dissertation makes the case that “wilderness” is a discursive formation—
that is, a system of statements or representation that brings together various elements, such as
objects, language, practices and other discourses—through which dominant groups in society
impose specific knowledges, disciplines and values upon dominated groups (Foucault, 1972;
Ashcroft et al., 2007). Wilderness as a discursive formation is a historical phenomenon, meaning
that it is a malleable idea that has changed over time and is particular to certain places, as we will
explore. However, what this work demonstrates is that, despite that, the concept retains a
2

performative coherence, meaning that, although reconstituted through different supporting objects,
continues to build the world in a similar dichotomic fashion—ontologically separating “nature”
from “culture”—and to enable certain actors to exert power over others. Sometimes, this power
gets embroiled with notions of care such as when the idea of wilderness is utilized in the context
of conservation or biodiversity preservation. Others, it is couched in development discourses that
read “nature” as either pioneer heaven or touristic destination. What remains constant, though, is
that wilderness as a discursive formation enables higher-order political and socio-economic
formations that further organize the relationships of the human and nonhuman subjects
discursively constituted.
Patagonia as a place exists, factually and materially, but it does not exist outside of
discourse. That is, the territory that stretches over more than 900,000 km
2
between the 39
o
and 55
o

south parallels in South America and falls under the national jurisdiction of Chile and Argentina,
is a highly storied region that has entered the national and international imaginaries as a world
apart. Consequently, its historically othered “wild” nature makes it an ideal site to explore not only
how wilderness as a discursive formation is enacted through time as social configurations change
but also how the primarily American (and European) construction of “the wild” manifests or is
deployed in the Global South. Although this work starts with how a “wild Patagonia” came to be,
it is mostly concerned with what has transpired in the northwest portion of one of its provinces,
Santa Cruz, since the 2010s. Specifically, this dissertation focuses on the concept of rewilding as
a contemporary strengthening reconstitution of wilderness as a system of statements that, brought
together through a neoliberal logic, merges development and conservation discourses in a way
that, ultimately, opens up the space to neocolonial influences.
3

Figure I.1: Map depicting the limits of Patagonia (Redgeographics, 2017).

SAVAGE, REDEMPTIVE, TOURISTIC: THE WILDERNESS IDEA
The main contribution this work puts forth is to categorize the “Rewilding Patagonia” initiative as
a discursive project. This means that, as a contemporary reconstitution of wilderness, rewilding as
enacted in Santa Cruz ultimately constitutes as a discursive formation that produces power and
knowledge in the form of spatial and multispecies arrangements, institutionalization of socio-
economic ventures, reification of authoritative facts about ecosystems and biodiversity, and
legitimation of a neoliberal logic that merges conservation with economic development. As I will
4

explore in the chapters that follow, the ensemble that this discourse elaborates and through which
it is elaborated entails removing certain techniques and technologies, such as sheep-rearing and
fences, as well as instituting others, such as wildlife “research” and national parks; deploying
strategically conceived rhetorical devices that work to discursively create a crisis and erase
competing material “supports”; and conducting particular practices to ensure that Patagonia as a
place subscribes to the destination the rewilding discursive project casts it to be.
“Wilderness” is a fiction, an artificial unity of landscapes and wildlife, mores and moral
claims, political projections and ontological boundaries. As an illusory construction, it is bound to
change as power circulates, that is as the objects and social groups through which this discursive
formation is created change. Below, I will follow Cronon’s description of the wilderness
construction to describe how different historical moments have produced different wilderness
discourses, and I later summarily introduce how this notion applies to the Patagonian case. Having
laid out how the idea of wilderness has changed over time, I end this section with a discussion on
what stays the same in wilderness as discourse, as these elements or constants constitute the
guiding analytical principles or categories this dissertation follows.
THE EURO-AMERICAN WILD
Although at the beginning of this introduction I stated that the conflation of “nature” with
“wilderness” was a normatively positive one, this has not always been the case. As Nash explains,
“for most of their history, Americans regarded wilderness as a moral and physical wasteland fit
only for conquest and fructification in the name of progress, civilization and Christianity” (2014,
p. xv; see also Chapter 1). Against this chaotic, disorderly and repugnant nature stood the pastoral,
agrarian countryside, a “middle landscape” between that wilderness and civilization that was
perceived as an antidote to the ugliness of industrial society as well as the first instantiation of the
5

inevitable frontier expansion by “civilization” before urbanization (Marx, 2000). This had already
been the case for western Europeans, as Marris notes that many European colonizers preferred
towns and fields rather than “a domain of mushrooms and monsters,” which is why “they thought
it progress when the land claimed for civilization expanded and savage nature shrunk” (2011, p.
18). In Europe, it was toward the end of the XVIII century and more promptly in the XIX when
nature in its wildest was embraced as a romantic idea and casted wilderness as an awe-inspiring
place rather than a desolate one.
In the U.S., it was in the late nineteenth century that wilderness became more widely
praised on its own instead of regarded as something to be “civilized,” particularly by a group of
upper-middle-class white men. Probably demonstrating how now mainstream conceptions of
“nature” and “culture” are equal, though diametrically opposed, social constructions, this
“wilderness cult” (Nash, 2014) emerged just as urbanizing and industrializing Americans were
settling down to enough safety, prosperity and leisure. This is the time of Thoreau and Emerson,
who saw in wild nature a space for redemption, and of John Muir, whose ideas about wilderness
as a sacred, pristine space were instrumental in the formation of the American conservation
movement. It is also the time of Theodore Roosevelt, who saw in wilderness a place where
manhood could be tested and forged, checked against the softening effect of civilized life. To these
men, the point of preserving wild spaces was to escape the grind of urban life and see the face of
God in the high country (Purdy, 2015). This sense that wilderness was akin to a landscape where
the supernatural lay just underneath the surface is at the center of what Cronon (1996) calls the
doctrine of the sublime, one of the two sources that propelled the normative transformation of
“nature” as outlined above and that determined the worthiness of landscapes to be protected. God,
then, was found in sacralized wilderness, that is in vast, powerful landscapes, on the mountaintop,
6

in the chasm, the waterfall, the thundercloud, all places that were (and continue to be) typically
associated with the sublime (see chapter 2).
The other source that, according to Cronon, shaped wilderness into the icon it became in
nineteenth century America was the attraction of primitivism embodied in the myth of the frontier.
Other than sacred, wild country was a place of national renewal, the ideal space to experience what
it was like to be a (pioneer) American. As the frontier appeared to be closing towards the end of
the century, alternative spaces had to be crafted for this exercise in Americanness and for
reenacting a simpler and truer world. Consequently, national parks—understood as wilderness
preservation, of the remnants of the American past—became “an insurance policy” to protect “the
nation’s most sacred myth of origin” (1996, p. 7). This post-frontier consciousness also helped
transform wilderness into a place more of reverie than revulsion or fear because, by then, there
was a relative absence of human violence within its boundaries as the Indian wars had ended, and
the original inhabitants of these lands, rounded up and moved into reservations.
Preserving the wilderness experience became crucial to a group of men who, wanting to
escape the “feminine” or debilitating effects of the urban-industrial capitalism that so benefited
them, set out to preserve some remnant of “wild” space where they could go in to be reinvigorated.
What Cronon notes for this point in time is crucial to the analyses that follow in this work:
“Wilderness suddenly emerged as the landscape of choice for elite tourists, who brought
with them strikingly urban ideas of the countryside through which they traveled. For them,
wild land was not a site of productive labor and not a permanent home; rather, it was a
place of recreation. One went to the wilderness not as a producer but as a consumer…”
(1996, p. 9).
These ideas of nature as a wild escape, a place that now stood for the wild freedom of America’s
past and against the artificial modern civilization, and of humans as individuals who get to visit it
for a while to extract some romantic, regenerative, healing or transcendental value from it continue
7

to be at the root of modern conceptions of wilderness. As I will explore in chapters 2 and 5, this is
at the center of Patagonia as a (re)wild(ed) land and of the ecotourism experience one can “obtain”
there. But, as I shall also demonstrate, this idea of wilderness only works for a certain demographic,
namely “well-to-do city folks,” and not others, such as “country people [who] know far too much
about working the land to regard unworked land as their ideal” (Cronon, 1996, p. 9).
This point is shared by Fletcher, who characterizes these wilderness enthusiasts (in an
aggiornate version of Nash’s “wilderness cult,” if you will) as a “small minority, composed, like
adventurers in general, mostly of liberal upper-middle-class whites (and, to a lesser degree,
males)” (2014, p. 121). Like the wealthy sportsmen of the past, these approach wilderness as if
they are entering a pristine and virgin place, a space untouched by humans. As Marris puts it, this
pristine wilderness is a place “somewhere distant, wild and free, a place with no people and no
roads and no fences and no power lines, untouched by humanity’s great grubby hands, unchanging
except for the seasons’ turn” (2011, p. 1). Though part of the appeal, this virginity is entirely a
myth, as environmental history tells us that “people have been manipulating the natural world on
various scales for as long as we have a record of their passing” (Cronon, 1996, p. 13), which is
why Marris also wrote that “in 2011 there is no pristine wilderness on planet Earth” (2011, p. 2).
Just as it is not “untouched,” neither is wilderness an inherently peaceful or restorative
place. On the one hand, as mentioned, these “wild” places were inhabited by people, some of
whom had been inhabiting those for millennia, who were violently removed in the American
Frontier or Indian wars first fought by European governments and colonists in North America and
later by American (and Canadian) settlers. On the other, prior to the Civil War, many enslaved
Africans, who had originally equated “the wild” with “escape from the oppression of white
society”, found themselves subjected to systematic terror by whites following emancipation, thus
8

transforming wilderness into a place of foreboding and fear (Starkey, 2005). As White wrote, “the
memory of ancestors hunted down and preyed upon in rural settings countered my fervent hopes
of finding peace in the wilderness” (1998, p. 378). In time, as Black Americans moved to the cities,
whites’ attraction to the wilderness grew in hand with the demonization of the city, which is why
Braun contends that
“The journey into nature was in part how whiteness was constructed (conversely the city
became a place of darkening, where one risked moral, if not genetic, decline). Nature, then,
served as a purification machine, a place where people became white, where racial and
hereditary habits of immigrants could be overcome” (quoted in Fletcher, 2014, p. 123).
In this sense, white subjectivity is built on the premise that, as individuals, (certain) humans are
alienated from nature, a unique frame started by western Europeans and their descendants. For
those non-European others, no return to nature-as-wilderness is needed because, by definition, they
already were closer to it (Fletcher, 2014).
Entire books could be written (and have) about the idea of nature-as-wilderness and an
exhaustive examination is outside the scope of this work. However, there is one last crucial point
to make or foreground about this construction:
“[W]ilderness embodies a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the
natural. If we allow ourselves to believe that nature, to be true, must also be wild, then our
very presence in nature represents its fall. The place where we are is the place where
nature is not. If this is so—if by definition wilderness leaves no place for human beings,
save perhaps as contemplative sojourners enjoying their leisurely reverie in God’s natural
cathedral—then also by definition it can offer no solution to the environmental and other
problems that confront it” (Cronon, 1996, p. 11).
This is why one of the constant effects of wilderness as a discursive formation as it is enacted in
the world is, precisely, to construct and reify a dualistic reality. And, since rewilding is a
reconstitution of this complex cultural construction, it stands to reason that it does the same work
9

and has the same effect as wilderness, therefore continuing to raise questions about the viability
and utility of conservation projects that stem from it.
THE PATAGONIAN WILD
In 1492, “America” was “discovered” by individuals from whose culture the idea of “wilderness”
as described above would emerge. Patagonia itself was not “explored” until much later, though it
already existed in the imagination of Western Europeans: the legend of the Patagonian giants had
already been recorded in writing in 1448 in the map of Andreas Asperger which referenced the
coast of the new continent to-be with an inscription that read: “Here there are giants fighting
against dragons” (Osses, 2014, p. 137). After contact was established with them in the XVI
century, these monsters from the dark ages emerged as savage, tall people who ate rats and roamed
the land naked. Simultaneously, Patagonia entered the European imagination as the outer limit of
a global imperial, an impossibly sublime and savage landscape. Chapter 1 traces the texts through
which this discourse was created and circulated, highlighting how the idea of wilderness
constructed not only the boundaries between human, monster/savage and animal but also defined
imperial modernity as a new spatial order that imposed new economic practices and a new
hierarchy among social groups. Indeed, by casting Patagonia as an inhabited wilderness, a terra
nullius, the new colonial power (primarily Spain, though different European countries were
competing for domination) violently appropriated this land to extract from it the resources the
metropolis needed to extend its imperial reach.
Chapter 1 also discusses what occurred in Patagonia after Argentina became an
independent nation. Much like the Spaniards, the new elite also regarded the south of the country
as a savage land inhabited by backward peoples who simply were not suited to partake in the liberal
modernity project they sought. The new rulers, then, followed a postcolonial order equally
10

predicated on violently appropriating land. Although the new ruling class consumed the texts
elaborated by European explorers and naturalists, such as Charles Darwin, who casted Patagonia
as a barren, cursed land, they also began receiving (and circulating) a different discursive
construction, one that constituted the space as a place full of opportunities, ready to be reaped by
adventurous pioneers. Consequently, the newly formed State not only orchestrated a military
campaign to materially erase the native inhabitants of the rhetorically emptied space, but also
systematically incentivized individuals to settle in Patagonia and reorganize the land as productive
ranches that would yield raw goods the new nation could export to Europe and thus insert itself in
international trade and finance networks.
Through this settling, the State also wanted to effectively incorporate the Patagonian
territory to what the new ruling class deemed as “the nation.” Because the sheep-rearing
development model failed to substantially populate the region, national parks began to be
fashioned as tools to secure territory. This practice, though, helped support a new imaginary of
Patagonia, one that began valuing the land for its awe-inspiring landscape and touristic potential.
Interpreted as an “alpine wilderness,” Patagonia became a series of panoramas, mountains, valleys
and lakes, a savage and virgin landscape that refused to be conquered. This wilderness with
touristic appeal is fully explored in Chapter 2, which also introduces key new actors, such as
ecophilanthropists and non-profit organizations, that, through conservation and ecotourism, seek
to reincorporate Patagonia into networks of global capital as a destination. Although not
orchestrated by a European metropolis like in the XVI century, nor the Argentinian state like in
the XIX, the neoliberal modernity project assigned to this region is still predicated on grabbing
land, now greenly. And, although it is neither monstrous nor savage, Patagonia as a wilderness
11

experience is still an othered place, a periphery subjected to the economic and political influence
of a “civilized” center.
WILDERNESS AS A DISCURSIVE FORMATION
Meaning is mobilized in the social world in a way that can serve to establish and sustain relations
of domination by bolstering up groups who occupy positions of power (see Thompson, 2013). This
notion is at the center of Foucault’s (1972) analysis of discourse as a system of representation, who
was more concerned with how language was deployed than with narrow linguistic models that
prioritized its formal aspect and reduced knowledge to a simple possession of signs. In this context,
discourse is a system made of statements which have a certain specificity and conditions of
existence to them, and that are in connection and in exclusion with other statements. It is these so
organized that “provide a language for talking about—a way of representing the knowledge
about—a particular topic at a particular historical moment” (Hall, 1992, p. 291). Discourse, then,
is what determines how a topic can be meaningfully talked about and which ideas get to be
implemented through practice. Ultimately, because objects exist meaningfully within the
discourses about them, it follows that discourse is what produces knowledge and meaning, creates
subjects and determines practices.
To elaborate on the idea of discourse as an array or set of elements, I find it useful, like
others before me (Dunbar-Hester, 2013), to draw from Edward’s work on this concept which
defines it as an “’heterogeneous ensemble’ that combines techniques and technologies, metaphors,
language, practices, and fragments of other discourses,” elaborated at multiple sites and by
continually maintaining and constituting “supports” (1996, p. 40). Interpreting wilderness as a
heterogeneous ensemble is a good precursor to understanding it as a discursive formation. Much
like an array of elements, a discursive formation is a system of dispersion; that is, a group of
12

disparate statements brought together to form a certain order. This (dis)unity is made up of objects,
forms, concepts, practices or themes that appear as a result of a series of external circumstances,
or “rules of formation,” that constitute the conditions of existence for any discursive formation
(Foucault, 1972, p. 38).
Therefore, framing wilderness as a discursive formation rather than just “discourse” opens
up the scope of analysis and lets us trace what logics or rules bind these elements together.
Considering this and based on the case study explored, this work ventures that, although the
elements or ensemble that make up the discourse of wilderness change over time in Patagonia,
wilderness as a discursive formation is consistently brought together by specific political
ideologies that link “nature” to capitalism in various ways. To be sure, I am not claiming that these
ideologies are discourses; rather, I am offering that some—like mercantilism, liberalism and
neoliberalism—can explain the unity in wilderness as a system of dispersion through time. This
analytical thread assumes that the construction of wilderness has been integral to capitalist
expansion for centuries, permitting first what Marx (2004) called “primitive accumulation” and
later what Harvey (2005, 2006) termed “accumulation by dispossession.” Taking as a building
block the extensive research that many have done on this, the present work joins the position that
“a critique of capitalism must be at the heart of any meaningful prospects for the future of
conservation” (Büscher & Fletcher, 2020, p. 22; see also Banaji, 1973; Brockington, 2002;
Brockington et al., 2008; Brockington & Igoe, 2006; Büscher et al., 2012; Büscher & Fletcher,
2015; Corson et al., 2013; Duffy, 2010; Fairhead et al., 2012; Igoe & Brockington, 2007;
O’Connor, 1994; West et al., 2006). But, as I shall expose, it is not just capitalism as a mode of
production that creates the conditions of existence for wilderness as a discursive formation; rather,
it is its conjunction with specific political and economic ideologies what creates a binding logic.
13

Secondly, focusing on wilderness as discursive formation also lets us inquire about notions
of knowledge and truth beyond what an analysis rooted in discourse can. In effect, discourse is the
means through which dominant groups constitute a regime of truth, meaning “the types of
discourses it harbors and causes to function as true” and, like discourse, each regime is produced
by power (Foucault, 1977, p. 13). In turn, a discursive formation “sets the context in which
constitutive statements are held to make ‘serious sense,’ to be ‘true’” (Rice, 1992, p. 339).
Consequently, this work posits that while the objects, practices, rhetoric and rules of formation of
wilderness have changed over time, this discursive formation has always been the context in which
the nature-culture divide has been made to make sense in Patagonia. Deploying the idea of
wilderness means to simultaneously craft and reify a set of statements about humans and
nonhumans, culture and nature, civilization and barbarism. In this context, the wild has always
been held as an othered space against which the human has emerged—been discursively
produced—as a subject. In dialectical fashion, “nature” has been constructed against this subject,
either as a place where humans devolve into animalistic natural body or from where they emerge
as virile men. As I will explore, these variations found support in specific imaginaries—Patagonia
as a land of monsters, as a land of promise, as a destination—created and reproduced through
widely circulated texts and socioeconomic practices rooted in power (see Castoriadis, 1993;
Taylor, 2004). But through these, what remains is an ontologically dualistic form of understanding
nature as an other-than place.
Finally, another reason why Edward’s notion of discourse as a heterogeneous ensemble
works as a productive analytical complement to discourse as a formation is because this author
does not lose sight of one the key factors that a Foucauldian sense of discourse focuses on, namely
that there is competition among discourses motivated by power relationships among human
14

groups. In any society, the State is far from being able to occupy the whole field of actual power
relations (Foucault, 1980, p. 122); instead,
“there are manyfold relations of power which permeate, characterize, and constitute the
social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated
nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a
discourse” (Edwards, 1996, p. 37).
In this sense, what this work also proposes is to look at how wilderness as a discursive formation
works to consolidate and implement relations of power that cross international borders.
Specifically, the power that is mobilized through wilderness as a discursive formation both
constructs and legitimizes political arrangements of a higher order—colonialism, postcolonialism
and neocolonialism—that equally impose specific knowledges, disciplines and values upon
dominated groups. In this sense, specific performative discourses of wilderness cross borders to
“politically, sociologically, [economically], ideologically, scientifically and imaginatively”
produce, manage and discipline an international wild that, once again, is constituted against a
particular, cultured center (Said, 1978, p. 3). In so doing, wilderness as a discursive formation
structures a transnational reality that “links individuals to certain types of utterance while
consequently barring them from all others” (Foucault, 1972, p. 226).

REWILDING PATAGONIA: THE STORY
The Argentinian Patagonia extends over a large area of 780 hundred km,
2
which represents a third
of the continental surface of the country, and encompasses the provinces of Neuquén, Río Negro,
Chubut, Santa Cruz and Tierra del Fuego. In the area closest to the Andes it is possible to find high
mountains, deep valleys, green forests and large lakes, while the areas furthest to the Andes to the
east are characterized by extensive steppe plateaus of continental and semiarid climate,
perpendicularly crossed by the aforementioned rivers, issued from the snow that accumulates in
15

the mountains. Following a vertical axis, the Argentinian Patagonia also presents differences. The
northern part, which includes Neuquén and Rio Negro—the region that gained dynamism first in
historical terms given their proximity to Buenos Aires—starts in its westernmost part with typical
Andean vegetation gradually transforms into a wooded mountain range, with large bodies of water.
To the east, this part entails a wide ante-cordilleran strip of valleys and mountainous formations
that extend to Lake Musters in the province of Chubut. To the south of this province, those ante-
cordilleran formations stop and the mountain range gives way entirely to the steppe. This central
region is primarily characterized by Patagonian plateaus, which encompass the entire area between
the Andes and the Atlantic Ocean, descending in stages toward the sea and usually forming steep
cliffs on the coast, which makes it difficult to install ports. This continues southward, where we
find another historically dynamic region: the development of the southernmost part of Patagonia,
south of the Santa Cruz River basin, was influenced by the early and intense navigation of the
Strait of Magellan which connected the two Oceans and thus became the spot where the
quintessential port center of the area was installed.
16

Figure I.2: Map depicting the five provinces that make up Patagonia in Argentina
(Modified by Author from Jaramillo, 2016).

The steppe ecosystem covers 85% of the total area in Santa Cruz and 25% of Tierra del
Fuego, which has thus far limited or otherwise significantly conditioned the forms in which the
spatial, economic and political concerns of European colonialists and national postcolonialists (and
international neocoloniaists) could resolve. In the XIX century, domestic animals like sheep and,
to a lesser degree, cows were the catalysts and enablers of the project of liberal modernity imposed
by the postcolonial State in southern Patagonia. In the XXI, another animal species finds itself at
the center of the story of Parque Nacional Patagonia, Patagonia National Park (PNP), which is
17

now part of project of neoliberal modernity imposed by power international actors. As explained
above, this dissertation unpacks “Rewilding Patagonia” as a discursive formation, hence the
chapters that follow will make what has been argued thus far clearer to the reader. This introduction
offers a starting place by presenting a narrative of what unfolded in the northwest region of Santa
Cruz in the last decade.
PARQUE NACIONAL PATAGONIA
The macá tobiano (hooded grebe) is a native waterfowl species that only inhabits in these southern
parts of the Argentinian Patagonia: although they migrate in the winter to the Atlantic coast, the
central plateau or steppe is crucial to this species because they breed in its basaltic lakes with the
help of vinagrilla (a type of aquatic plant). Though the conservation of this bird and what caring
for it mean will be discussed in the third chapter, I introduce it here because, almost like a boundary
object (Star & Griesemer, 1989), its existence in this region of Santa Cruz was (and is) employed
by different actors to enact a particular form of conservation. And, although it is not one of the
species directly targeted by Fundación Rewilding Argentina (FRA), the organization behind the
Patagonian rewilding project, it was the animal that originally prompted—or provided an
anchoring to—their involvement in the area.
18

Figure I.3: Photograph of a macá tobiano on vinagrilla in a Patagonian lake (Raggio, 2012).
The original idea for the creation of what would later become PNP stemmed from APN,
Administracion de Parques Nacionales (the equivalent of the United States’ NPS, or National Park
Service). Created in the 1930s by the oligarchic elite of the postcolonial nation-state, this
institution has historically conceived national parks as a figure intimately connected with the
practice of affirming sovereignty over the territory, particularly in the southern part of the country
which not only was the last section to be incorporated in the national project of a modern and
independent Argentina, but whose borders remained contested by neighboring Chile for a long
time. Unsurprisingly, the uniforms of first park rangers in Patagonia were the same that the
gendarmes (border patrol officers) wore, with whom they shared duties. Although the borders have
now been settled, this association of the figure of national parks with stark conceptions of
nationalism is something that Guido, my guide in the field site, believed was still transmitted in
19

the training individuals go through to become park rangers and is why he described a typical park
ranger as a “tipo nacionalista” (or patriotic guy, note the gender), “of the kind that gets emotional
when he sees the flag.”
As time passed, however, the conservation facet that national parks entail moved to the
forefront of APN’s mission. In this regard, national parks in Argentina follow in the footsteps of
American national parks which, in turn, subscribe to a “Yellowstone Model” that enacts ecosystem
and biodiversity preservation by setting aside “pristine wilderness areas” where all human
commercial or otherwise productive activities are banned, except those that pertain to tourism. In
this model, national parks should “represent a vignette of primitive America” and work towards
that by maintaining or recreating biotic associations “in the conditions that prevailed when they
were first visited by the white man” (all quotes in Leopold, 1963, p. 4). Although by the turn of
the XXI century there were many national parks in southern Patagonia, there still was an area in
the province of Santa Cruz that APN wanted to protect by declaring it a national park, as it
considered it to be a “biological island,” an “irreplaceable conservation area,” an equivalent to
Noah’s ark but from the steppe (Aizen, 2016). In fact, APN had already identified an area
comprising of 18.000 hectares of public land that was not yet represented in the network of national
parks and that was of great significance for the macá tobiano. That it was important for the bird
became clear thanks to the work conducted by a regional and a national NGOs, Ambiente Sur and
Aves Argentinas, each dedicated to biodiversity conservation in Patagonia and to the preservation
of bird species, respectively. These organizations began actively studying the macá tobiano in
2009 and found that it had become critically endangered (with a population decline of over 80%)
and that it only resided in the Buenos Aires Lake plateau. This formation, known as meseta in
Spanish, is a formidable plain of volcanic origin with an approximated area of 3,000 square
20

kilometers (or 1158.3 square miles), something akin to the area of six consecutive Buenos Aires
cities (Punta Fernandez et al., 2013).
By the end of 2011, a moment of opportunity to create a national park in this region arose
when the mayor of Los Antiguos won a seat as a representative in the state legislature. At that
time, he was approached by the then president of APN who urged him to present a legislative
project to create a protected area in the Buenos Aires Lake plateau. Shortly thereafter, a technical
delegation from APN began to collaborate with the tourism secretary in the town of Los Antiguos
who was tasked by the representative to do the work necessary to bring this project to fruition.
When I interviewed her in her office in town, she explained that, upon consulting the records kept
in Rio Gallegos, the capital of the province, she identified two fiscal plots of interest around a body
of water, Laguna del Sello. The only problem was that they were not contiguous. It was precisely
this territorial disconnection, she explained, what prompted FRA to enter the scene, though at that
time it was still named Fundación Flora y Fauna (FFyF). The idea of involving them came from
Aves Argentinas who suggested, considering that FRA was already financing some of this NGO’s
projects elsewhere, that they could be brought in to finance the purchase of the land in between
the desired plots.
21

Figure I.4: Image of the map included in Annex II of the provincial law No 3306 (Santa Cruz).
The areas marked by left-leaning lines closer together correspond to the fiscal land ceded by the
province to the nation-state. The area marked with right-leaning lines that are further apart
corresponds to land purchased by FRA (Estancia El Sauco) and donated to the national-state.
(SAIJ, 2013)
With the funds secured, the creation of the national park moved quickly. At this juncture,
a word about how national parks are created in Argentina is warranted. Because it is a federal
republic, its 23 provinces and the autonomous district have their own constitutions, branches of
government and authorities. Thus, in order to fashion a national (or federal) park within a
provincial territory, the province’s legislature (specifically, the House) needs to authorize the
transfer of jurisdiction and domain (dominio) over to the nation-state, which then needs to pass a
national law to formally accept said transfer and effectively create the national park. In the case of
PNP the first phase happened in March of 2013, when the legislature of Santa Cruz passed law N.
o

22

3306, which ceded domain and jurisdiction to the national state of 18,000 hectares of fiscal land
plus almost 35,000 hectares of private domain to be donated to APN (see Figure I.4). Then, in
December of 2014, the nation-state through its own legislative branch passed law N.
o
27081, which
accepted the transfer of jurisdiction and domain of both types of land and created the Parque
Nacional Patagonia in its three first articles for a total of 52,811 hectares (see Parque Nacional
Patagonia. Creación, 2014). Those hectares of private domain were the lands that FRA had
purchased to donate, which had formerly been an estate called El Sauco that, at the time of the
purchase, was no longer commercially active. Today, this is a common sight in Patagonia as many
of the traditional sheep ranches, established around the time the region was incorporated to the
national territory in the late XIX century, began to be abandoned when the sheep wool commerce
dwindled and the land started to show severe signs of deterioration. However derelict though, this
post-agroindustrial landscape is still under private ownership and funding was necessary for this
patch to become a national park.
Up until this point, all the parties involved in the creation of the national park were in total
agreement and everything was done with full consensus of the involved stakeholders (Basalo,
interview in Los Antiguos, 2020). Even the general public seemed to be in favor of this park: in
2013, an article written by members of Aves Argentinas, Ambiente Sur and FRA (then FFyF)
reported that, in 2007, a group of Los Antiguos’ locals had written a letter addressed to the national
authorities asking to have the Lake Buenos Aires basin declared a national park to protect the water
resources and the cultural values of the region (Casañas et al., 2013). Although the letter did exist,
it was not directly related to the creation of PNP but rather repurposed by the party orchestrating
the project as evidence that the intended park did, in fact, have popular support. As my informant
explained, that letter not only preceded the park creation but referred to an adjacent area of the one
23

plotted for the park, a region that, according to APN’s official response to the letter at the time,
did not have the necessary characteristics to become a national park. But the plateau did, and it
was right next to the lake. Thus, while it is not possible to ascertain the popular support the park
project itself truly had, it is admissible to say that it did not, at least, have any significant opposition
(see also Redacción La Nación, 2014). As noted, this initial projection entailed fiscal lands
(therefore removed from commercial development) and only one abandoned estancia, and was
primarily sustained by the promise of protecting the macá, a bird that stands as a beloved species
in the region (Aizen, 2016), one whose photograph graces the windows of some shops and whose
various commercial reproductions sit atop those shops shelves.
The purchase of El Sauco was entirely supported by Swiss philanthropists Hansjorg Wyss,
though at the time his identity was unknown as FRA only referred to an anonymous donor.
Conducted through his own foundation, The Wyss Foundation, this acquisition was partly
motivated by the “Wyss Campaign for Nature,” a “$1.5 billion investment to help communities,
Indigenous Peoples, and nations conserve 30% of the plane in its natural state by 2030” (Wyss
Campaign for Nature, n.d.).
1
In other words, Wyss is personally invested in setting aside “natural”
spaces, that is supposedly “untouched” areas for conservation—in fact, during my fieldwork it was
confirmed to me by FRA staff that he “only cared” about establishing a national park, which is
why the Foundation has had to seek additional funding for developing public-use infrastructure.
But, as the reader will see later, Wyss was personally motivated to acquire tracts of this land
because it worked to fulfill a dream that his now deceased friend, Douglas Tompkins had shared
with him. The two of them constitute two of the most relevant actors in the story of PNP, but it is

11
For reference, the metric that the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has for
protected areas is that these should cover at least 17% of every nation’s land, while neoconservationists
strive to turn 50% of the planet into a protected area (Wilson, 2016).
24

Tompkins (and his wife, Kris McDevitt Tompkins) and all the organizations under his (now her)
umbrella who constitute the main powerful actor vying to “rewild” Patagonia.

Figure I.5: Image published in a news article in 2018 presenting the current and future PNP,
including the Chilean PNP. The darker green regions (in both countries) represent what was at
that time a proper national park, while the lighter green marks the projected extension of PNP.
Finally, the orange lines represent “tentative ecological corridors.” (Fundación Flora y
Fauna/LA NACION, 2018).

In 2016, a popular magazine reported that what motivated FRA to continue buying land
was what APN (and, reportedly, Wildlife Conservation Society too) had found, namely that the
plateau of the Buenos Aires Lake represented an irreplaceable conservation area and so the
25

Foundation wanted to purchase more campos (fields) to restore and donate them (Aizen, 2016).
This was replicated in other news articles, where Sofia Heinonen, FRA’s CEO, was quoted stating
that the expansion represented “a continuation of the work” started in 2012 (Paez, 2017). But, as
this work will discuss, that statement belies a much more complex situation, one where making a
statement about the opposition this projected expansion of the park faced is much more than
admissible.
PARQUE PATAGONIA
Since that initial purchase, FRA continued buying estancias: La Ascensión, La Elisa (formerly Los
Toldos), El Sauce, La Tapera, Laurak Bat, Los Molles, San Rafael, and El Unco. The first one
mentioned, La Ascensión, was one of the biggest and most lucrative ranches of the region and was
operative at the time, while La Elisa (formerly Los Toldos) was the private land on which Cueva
de las Manos—a very important archeological site that became part of UNESCO’s World Heritage
in 1999—still stands today (Gaffoglio, 2016). Additionally, in El Unco, FRA established its
“biological headquarters”, while it “loaned”
2
another acquired estancia, 9 de Julio, to Aves
Argentinas so that they could establish their own biological station for their work on the macá.
As stated, the goal with these purchases was to increase the acreage of PNP, nominally to
preserve more of this biodiverse land but also to fulfill Douglas Tompkins’ dream of creating a
binational Patagonian Park between Argentina and Chile, where the Tompkinses had already
managed to establish a very large homonymous PNP. Indeed, what surfaced in the years following
the creation of PNP was something that had already been mentioned, although almost in passing,
in that 2016 magazine article. There, the journalist reported that

2
The exact term would be “loan for use” or commodatum (also known as commodate), a gratuitous loan
of movable property to be used and returned by the borrower.
26

“The dream is, eventually, to be able to create a large binational park that includes Valle
Chacabuco, that is just beyond the border with Chile (a paradisaic place), and the area that
extends from the Buenos Aires Lake plateau and the Rio Pinturas Canyon” (Aizen, 2016,
p. 41, emphasis added).
It was after PNP was officially created that the broader objectives of FRA and its land purchases
began to be more clearly expressed and debated. As a result of the conflict that ensued, FRA has
not been able, to this day, to incorporate any of those additional purchases to PNP, which is why
they now form Parque Patagonia (PP) and not PNP.
Chapter 3 explores the political struggles that the expansion of PNP prompted in detail, but
it is useful at this stage to surface one element. In 2017, FRA had significant political leverage at
the national level, manifested in a close contact and ease of reach with the national executive office.
Leaning into this support, FRA labored to get a law passed in the legislature of Santa Cruz so that
the House would cede domain over the newly acquired lands. Except, that they were more
ambitious: rather than request that the province hand over the jurisdiction of the hectares for which
FRA already had domain (roughly, 100,000), FRA and the federal government pressured the Santa
Cruz House of Representatives to pass a law that would cede provincial jurisdiction over many
more hectares (roughly, 500,000) including some over which FRA did not have domain yet. Let
me state that again: FRA wanted the province of Santa Cruz to hand over to the federal government
the jurisdiction over provincial fiscal lands—meaning, lands owned or whose domain belonged to
the province—as well as private lands—meaning, lands owned or whose domain belonged to
private individuals.
FRA’s advance was met with stiff resistance from local agricultural producers who
interpreted this as an assault on their way of life. Chapter 3 also follows their movements and
analyzes how, in their way, this social group was also trying to go back in time: rather than
retrocede to a wilder Patagonia like FRA, they attempted to bring discourse (hence, reality) back
27

to a productive Patagonia, one that remediates wildness with pastoral development. As a result of
this power (hence, discourse) competition, FRA could not officially extend the surface of PNP
which, to date, is still confined to those original 53,000 hectares. Instead, most of those estancias
became “wild natural reserves,” a legal figure created in 1994 that enables the national government
to protect areas of considerable extension that “preserve the wild quality of their natural
environment unaltered or very little modified and whose contribution to the conservation of
biological diversity is particularly significant” (Reservas Naturales, 1994). Interestingly, the fact
that this legal figure was applied to estancia La Ascensión, the ranch which at the time of purchase
was still one of the most productive in the area, prima facie shows the discursive nature of
wilderness: if, despite all those years of agricultural production, the area is considered to be
“unaltered” enough to become a wild natural reserve, then there is no need to re-wild nor altogether
remove the economic activity. In practical terms, declaring these ranches as wild natural reserves
was the only move FRA had left because this type of protected areas is crafted by executive order
and therefore does not require Congress approval. Because these areas were ceded by FRA to the
national state and, as “wild reserves’ are considered under national jurisdiction as well, it is APN
who is in charge of their upkeep.
28

Figure I.6: Current map depicting PNP Patagonia in Chile and Argentina. The darkest green
color represents both PNP and PP, while the orange color marks the “Rewilding Argentina
Reserve,” meaning lands currently owned by FRA. (Fundación Rewilding Argentina, 2021a).

In the figure above (Figure I.6), it is possible to appreciate how FRA has dealt with this
political reality. Whereas in Figure I.5 PNP had its own color, the green hue chosen here merely
stands for “Patagonia Park,” though that brand encompasses qualitatively different protected areas:
on the Chilean side, the green solely represents their Patagonia National Park, even if there is no
white label identifying it as such in this map, while on the Argentinian side, the green stands both
for the actual PNP—the lower colored area with an accompanying white label—as well as La
Ascension—the upper, smaller green colored area which is a wild natural reserve and not a national
park. Both PNP and La Ascension are managed by APN and represent two of the three available
29

portals or gateways into “Patagonia Park,” though the southmost one in the map (PNP) has yet to
develop any public-use infrastructure and has received a very limited amount of visits since it was
established.
3
The orange-colored area represents land currently owned by FRA that stands as a
privately protected area and where the third portal to PP, Cañadón Pinturas Gateway/Portal, is
located. Moreover, looking closely, the reader will notice that there is a little square of a lighter
green hue; this is Cueva de las Manos, the archeological site in UNESCO’s world heritage, which
stands as a little island of provincially protected land inside the privately owned FRA land. This
site has been historically managed by the town of Perito Moreno and, since it is one of the most
visited places in the area (if not the single most visited by tourists who happen to pass by in their
way to or from Chaltén or Bariloche, two of the most touristic cities of Argentinian Patagonia)
represents a good revenue source and therefore the province has no interest in ceding jurisdiction
over this to the federal government so that it can become a national park. Additionally, it is in these
“orange” lands where FRA can easily practice “rewilding” or actively manage species without
interference or oversight from APN. To be sure, FRA requests the appropriate permits from the
local authorities
4
to do so but they would likely have a harder time enacting this if the area were
to be a national park, as a key APN informant told me “as a park ranger, as the administrator of a
national park, I’d be very cautious, very zealous about how to manipulate… because we are talking

3
According to a park ranger interviewed in a recent documentary, PNP (meaning, the actual national park,
not La Ascensión or Cañadón Pinturas/Los Toldos) received a total of five visitors for the summer season
of 2019 (during the winter, the national park is not accessible) (see Colleselli’s statement in Dickinson,
2021).

4
This is not without conflict either. According to the Concejo Agrario Provincial’s Wildlife Director, FRA
requested and received permits to conduct ecological studies of certain species in their privately owned
lands, following what is stipulated in Resolution N
o
861 (2008). However, when I spoke to her, she
mentioned that neither had the Foundation communicated their change of legal name nor had they
mentioned “rewilding” as a practice they were seeking to pursue.
30

about manipulating fauna, and you have to be very cautious with that because there is no margin
for error” (Agnone, interview in La Ascension, 2020).
REWILDING
In 2020, Fundación Flora y Fauna changed its name to Rewilding Argentina because, believing
that rewilding is what modern conservation needs, they have made it its mission. According to its
CEO,
“before, to conserve you only needed to put fences and isolate a park. Today, that is not
enough anymore because the populations of wildlife are very reduced and many species
have become extinct. It is necessary to bring back species; it is necessary to help these
populations raise their numbers quickly; it is necessary to stop the erosion of some basin…
and that is what we call rewilding” (Heinonen, quoted in Dickinson, 2021).
Considered to be a transformative approach in biodiversity conservation, rewilding is broadly
understood as “the repair or refurbishment of an ecosystem’s functionality through the
(re)introduction of selected species” (Pettorelli, Durant, & du Toit, 2019, p. 1).
This term emerged in the 1990s and was originally employed to refer to a large, connected
wilderness area that would support wide-ranging keystone species, like apex predators, due to their
fundamental role in trophic cascades (Foreman et al., 1992; Soule & Noss, 1998). Although its
meaning has grown to describe restoration more generally, recent literature shows that the term
has experienced exponential growth in the last decade and is presently believed to represent a cost-
effective solution that permits reinstatement of vegetation succession, reactivation of top-down
trophic interactions and predation processes as well as improvement of ecosystem service delivery
(Pettorelli et al., 2018; Pettorelli, Durant, & du Toit, 2019). According to this literature, there are
three main themes in current understandings of rewilding, including the resumption of
“wilderness,” so that areas currently degraded regain biodiversity and continue to autonomously
develop without interference; the aforementioned reintroduction of extirpated species, with the
31

goal that an ecosystem will recuperate its former functionality; and the self-sustaining functionality
of an ecosystem, implicating either a restoration or reorganization to provide ecosystem services
with minimal intervention, including supportive, cultural and regulating services.
Fundamentally, rewilding as a conservation strategy that seeks to restore an ecosystem is
predicated on turning back in time, to a moment when all the species native to that space were
thriving and no damage, such as eroded soils, could be detected. Because of this concern with
repair, with remediating the impacts of humans and their activities, and with revering something
presumably lost, rewilding should be more accurately referred to as a restoration practice.
Typically, conservation biology is focused on preserving what is and preventing further loss while
restoration ecology refers to the scientific study of repairing disturbed ecosystems through human
intervention. However, projects focused on rewilding can also entail some preservation practices
and the literature and its practitioners use conservation and restoration interchangeably: for
example, The Rewilding Institute (2008) calls it a “comprehensive, often large-scale, conservation
effort focused on restoring sustainable biodiversity and ecosystem health.” This work follows suit
and equally uses the term conservation to refer to rewilding.
Those working on this concept in the 1990s determined that the entire pre-Columbian set
of carnivores had to be reintroduced to restore eco-systemic health, thus moving the ideal baseline
for rewilding back to the Pleistocene. This point in time represents a “deep past” before megafaunal
extinctions and before the Homo sapiens evolved and extended its roam over the planet (Donlan,
2005). Given that it is not currently possible to resurrect a woolly mammoth, these proponents
suggested taxonomic substitution using proxy species from other continents (horses, camelids,
cheetahs, elephants, lions) to serve the functions of those extinct megafauna. Essentially, these
species are crucial because they help originate trophic cascades, meaning “indirect species
32

interactions that originate with predators and spread downward through food webs” (Ripple et al.,
2016, p. 846). As apex-predators, these species limit the density or behavior of their prey and
thereby enhance survival of the next lower trophic level, ultimately indirectly benefiting and
increasing their prey’s prey (Silliman & Angelini, 2012).
These earlier propositions fueled criticism on many grounds and ended up serving as a
thought experiment that ran its course in the literature given its abundant logical flaws and practical
problems of implementation (Svenning et al., 2016). However, rewilding as a conservation tool
continued its path in conservation ecology and was adapted to emphasize function over taxonomic
resources (du Toit, 2019). Thus, “trophic rewilding” has emerged as one adaptation which,
discarding the historical benchmark of the Pleistocene, retains the main theoretical approach of
restoration of megafaunal processes given their key role in top-down trophic effects and associated
trophic cascades that promote self-regulating biodiverse ecosystems. This strategy also assumes
that the natural processes that ensue from applying this rewilding approach can generate and
maintain high biodiversity without human management (see Svenning, Munk, & Schweiger,
2019).
5

5
There are two other main frames for rewilding recognized in the literature, “passive rewilding” and
“ecological rewilding.” The first applies to abandoned post-agricultural landscapes that are no longer being
actively managed and proposes a notion of management by nature, that is a “leave it to nature” philosophy
that seeks to minimize human intervention and to rely on “natural” processes to determine which species
colonize the space that remains after agricultural use or activity has ended. The expected outcome of this
“purest form of rewilding” is spontaneous restoration of mainly native vegetation after domestic livestock
grazing has been removed, as well as a return to full trophic processes through the in-migration of birds,
insects and native mammals (see Carver, 2019). Similarly, ecological rewilding involves limited active
management to facilitate naturally occurring processes, which is why this is usually referred to as passive
rewilding too. What this general approach seems to minimize is the role of active management required
given that while domestic species removal or control might require limited intervention, the management
of non-native or invasive species is often quite intensive and requires “aggressive” treatments over extended
periods of time. Moreover, the recovery that occurs might not be in the direction deemed “desirable” in
their composition or provision of ecosystem services, especially considering land-use legacies, which again
prompts active restoration (see Miller & Hobbs, 2019).
33

This is the type of rewilding FRA is actively pursuing. As FRA’s scientific director
explained to me,
“we are not talking about a Pleistocene rewilding at all; here, what we are trying to do is
to go back to the historical numbers reported by early naturalists that reported seeing
animals everywhere all the time” (Donadio, interview, San Martin de Los Andes, 2020).
And yet, as I will explore in this dissertation, FRA is very much concerned with erasing traces of
human activity from the land, bringing it as close to an untouched and pristine wilderness as
possible. Thus, while there might be different reference points, as a restoring strategy, rewilding
is necessarily predicated on recovering something that has been “lost” (D. Jørgensen, 2015).
Above, I discussed how “wilderness” was constructed as a virgin and untouched place, even
though environmental history tells us it is neither. Rewilding as a conservation strategy is built on
and reifies this fiction because it presents us with a notion of an entirely self-repairing “nature”
that only needs a little help, a jumpstart, from humans so it can restore itself back into a separate,
pristine realm. What this notion belies is that the maintenance of a rewilded place over time
requires just as much intervention as “setting nature in motion” does.
This is why Marris states that “a historically faithful ecosystem is necessarily a heavily
managed ecosystem” making it the case that, if we continue to equate wild with unmanaged, then
the ecosystems that look the most pristine might just be the least likely to be truly wild (2013, p.
12). One of the most salient examples of rewilding is the case of the Oostvaardersplassen (OVP),
a publicly owned polder north of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, where herd horses and cattle
(mostly taken from zoos) were introduced as an experiment of rewilding (to simulate prehistoric
times) that would resist efforts towards proactive management. However, compromises had to be
reached soon given the pressure mounted by journalists, animal welfare campaigners and
politicians as a response to the (widely circulated) sight of starving or dead animals. Among those
34

is the presence of a wildlife ranger armed with a rifle and a silencer that started to patrol the OVP
to identify and subsequently kill the animals who indicated (based on bodily condition and
behavior) that they were in no conditions to survive the winter (see Lorimer & Driessen, 2014).
This example shows that while rewilding’s ideal might aspire to minimal intervention—and indeed
its recent popularity is in part due to its perception as an alternative to more human-controlled
approaches—in practice, it requires intensive management, a significant part of which involves
carefully separating rewilded animals from human habitation.
Ultimately, rewilding is a costly initiative that, in cases such as the one discussed here
where FRA is keen on “reintroducing” and “actively managing” species, requires intense human
manipulation. Crucially, a significant part of the labor that this conservation strategy entails is done
through wildlife tracking technologies. FRA is very much aware of them, which is why these
technologies are at the forefront of their discursive and material practices. At the time of my visit,
FRA’s rewilding project targeted pumas, guanacos, chinchillones [Wolffsohn’s viscacha], Andean
condors and gallinetas [Austral rail], though they have since incorporated huemules [deer],
Pampas cat and coypu [large rodent] (Fundación Rewilding Argentina, n.d.). Specimens from the
first two species have since been fitted with satellite collars, others from the third species have
been fitted with radio collars and some gallinetas have had rings attached to them. In this context,
camera traps and satellite collars as well as their digital outputs become some of the key objects
that sustain or otherwise support wilderness as a discursive formation, which is why Chapter 4
follows them and explores how, by mediating experiential reality in particular ways, these
technologies discursively construct what is observable, knowable and, ultimately, alive.
Furthermore, the videos and photographs posted on FRA’s social media platforms—which
extensively borrow from tried-and-tested tropes of wildlife documentaries—evidence how the
35

technologies and their outputs, from photographs to satellite data clusters, are actively bringing
forth a specific animal subject to be looked at as well as a human subjectivity predicated on
accessing and manipulating “nature.”

Figure I.7: Screenshot of a promotional cinematic video created by FRA and available on their
YouTube channel titled “Patagonia Park Circuit,” which reads “travel in time.” Slightly under
two minutes, this video depicts the different points of interest available to tourists (the only
humans depicted in an otherwise fabulous wide landscape inhabited by a wide array of wild
animals) and invites its audience to “explore greatness” and, “travel in time,” “feel the pulse of
the land” and “know the extraordinary.” (Fundación Rewilding Argentina, 2019b)
To rewild quite literally means to make wild again. Because this project is steeped in the
idea of wilderness as described above, returning to the wild means, as stated, to make the land as
pristine as possible materially, by removing signs of its productive past such as fences or
introduced tree species formerly used for shelter by ranchers. It also means to discursively make
the land as authentically wild and sublime as possible, which manifests in casting it as a
geographically and ontologically distant land where abundant and varied wildlife roams and were
humans are only seen momentarily, trespassing only to visit and take pictures. Despite the chasm
between humans and nature that wilderness as a discursive formation produces and rewilding as
36

its reconstitution reifies, this conservation/restoration (re)positions some humans “in the wild” as
agents of care.
Chapter 5 explores in-depth what rewilding as a conservation practice rooted in care means,
following an approach that interprets care as an organizing principle that cherishes some forms of
life while excluding others. Prompted by a biodiversity crisis, FRA is working to protect the
species native to Patagonia—caring for them by actively preserving those present, like the puma,
and reintroducing those locally extinct, like the huemul—and to remove those considered
introduced, such as cattle. Relying in the technologies previously described rewilding as a
discursive formation thus includes in its ensemble fragments of discourses that decry the loss of
animal life in Anthropocene and propose a scientific approach to remediate it. However, because
this rewilding initiative is enacted through the support of private donations and embedded in a
neoliberal logic, the notions of care that articulate this conservation work are perpetually in
tension, if not superseded, by concern for attracting tourists and their money. Based on this
particular empirical case, Chapter 5 also discusses rewilding as development as evidenced in
FRA’s desire to habituate pumas to the presence of humans so that their bodies can be put to work
in the service of ecotourism.
̶
The account of rewilding this work offers is particular to northwest Santa Cruz, Argentina, where
there are specific conditions of existence that entangle this conservation practice in a context
marked by neocolonial relations, which might certainly not be the case for other places where
rewilding initiatives unfold. However, the neoliberal logic evidenced here is an integral part of
what today amounts to mainstream conservation, understood as “a particular historical and
37

institutional strain of Western conservation, practiced and promoted by especially large, powerful
international conservation organizations and agencies” (Brockington et al., 2008, p. 9; see also
Büscher & Fletcher, 2020, p. 18). Considering that the Patagonian project is being touted as a
“laboratory—if not a model—for rewilding worldwide” (Franklin, 2018) and that FRA’s
“manifesto” on “rewilding Argentina” has very recently found its way into the pages of Nature
(Donadio et al., 2022), an academic journal known to carry a certain level of prestige which can
spur grant funding and attention from mainstream media (see, for example, “Una Fundación
argentina…, 2022), its relevance as a site where the future of biodiversity is being played out has
never been as high. In this context, problematizing a model that places Patagonia on a global stage
is not only timely but, given its implications for the future of environmental conservation
worldwide, utterly necessary.

38

CHAPTER 1. PATAGONIA: THE LAND OF ONCE AND FUTURE OTHERS

History reproducing itself becomes Farce.
Farce reproducing itself becomes History.
Baudrillard, 2002.

Que el futuro está en el sur, hace tiempo nos dijeron.
Y aquí estamos esperando, mucho bla-blá compañero.
6

Argentino Luna, n.d.

One sunny afternoon in February, I descended from a local bus that took me from Los Antiguos,
the town known as the “capital of the cherries” of the country and where I was staying, to the
closest neighboring town, Perito Moreno,
7
around forty minutes away. There, a thin woman with
glasses, who I shall call Celia, was waiting to pick me up and drive me to her house where we
were going to have some tea. Celia knew I was a student pursuing a doctorate in the United States
and so, when we sat down at her living room table for tea, she offered me some cookies known as
“Donuts”—in reality, they are nothing like a pastry doughnut, though they have a ring shape to
them—so that I “would not miss much” of what she envisioned was a typical staple of my newly
found American diet. I had arranged to meet with her because, as a former sheep rancher born and

6
Trans: That the future is in the south, they told us a long time ago. And here we are waiting, it is all blah-
blah mate. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Spanish are my own.
7
A word of caution to the reader: even though this town is called Perito Moreno, this is not where the
famous glacier, also called Perito Moreno, can be found. The glacier is inside Los Glaciares national park,
located in the province of Santa Cruz as well but around 186 miles south from this town. Interestingly,
although the location for Perito Moreno is accurately provided by Google Maps if one searches for it, the
image that appears associated with this town search is that of the glacier, even though the immediate text
available describes what was explained here in the previous sentence.
39

raised in Santa Cruz, her land was considered of interest in FRA’s initial territorial projection.
During our conversation, I was telling her about my experience hiking and camping on the steppe
when I suddenly heard myself saying, like many before me, “everywhere I looked there was
plateau and… nothing.” I immediately tried to rectify it, but the faux pas had been made and Celia
reacted: You know, she said,
“starting at least with the Hudson,
8
there was this idea that Patagonia had to be the garden
of the world, garden in the sense that we should just let it be, as is. And even before then,
everybody would say: ‘There’s nothing in Patagonia.’ But guess what? Here, there’s metals,
including gold and silver because the entire Patagonian macizo is full of them, oil, water,
shores… just amazing shores.” (Interview, Perito Moreno, 2020).
This brief exchange contains two imaginaries of Patagonia that have dominated its history from
the XVI century until the last quarter of the XX, namely that of a barren desert and that of another
El Dorado. Likewise, the idea of Patagonia as “the garden of the world” refers to yet another
imaginary that has been ascribed to the region starting in the 1970s, one that sees it as a wild and
pristine landscape for the entire planet rather than as a national resource, though that one will be
developed in the following chapter. In this context, the notion of “imaginaries” is used to refer to
sets of shared understandings and interpretive frameworks that naturalize practical engagements
with the world (Taylor, 2004). These collective systems are discursive and material because the
values, beliefs and norms that imaginaries embody and produce effectively organize societies’
decisions and practices (Castoriadis, 1993). Crucially, these imaginaries are invariably mediated
by power as it is only certain agents who do the “imagining” while others typically remain at the
receiving end of those imaginations. These power differences, then, mediate imaginaries and thus

8
This refers to the eruption of the Hudson volcano, one of largest eruption events in Chile in the 20
th

century, which occurred in August of 1991. As will be discussed later, this supposedly was the last nail in
the sheep-rearing economy coffin.
40

can enable or foreclose different sets of actions, with one dominating over others in a particular
time and space.
Altogether, these imaginaries worked as supports around which wilderness as a discursive
formation was constructed and organized. Here, I am drawing from Edwards (1996) again who,
closely following Foucault’s conception of discourse, refers to “supports” as objects around which
a collection of fragments is anchored. In this case, these imaginaries worked to imprint conceptions
of “wilderness” onto the Patagonian landscape and, in so doing, they constituted Patagonia as a
knowable place and determined how this newly defined wild space could be talked about at
different historical moments. Firstly, the European colonization of America and, specifically,
Patagonia brought with it the notion that equated wilderness as a moral and physical wasteland, a
savage place full of other-than-human creatures. Constituted as a dangerous and unruly wild,
Patagonia needed to be civilized in the name of Christianity and its territory needed to work in the
service of the Spanish imperial project. In its footsteps, the ruling elite of the emancipated
Argentina, steeped in a Eurocentric “illustrated” positivist scientism and paradigm of progress,
continued to regard Patagonia as a backward place that needed to be conquered and civilized.
Later, from this group of men emerged some figures who began to regard Patagonia as an attractive
wilderness that needed to be protected for national security reasons but that could also be visited
for economic development purposes. This is the how the imaginary of wilderness as a sublime,
wild place open to human leisurely exploration begins to be deployed in or articulated around
Patagonia and effectively charts the course for the idea of a preserved, pristine wilderness with
touristic appeal to be fully developed in the later half of the XX century.
Because discourses are “heterogenous ensembles” (Edwards, 1996, p. 40), this chapter
explores not just the construction of the idea of wilderness that changes over time, but also
41

describes the technologies, literary texts, economic practices, territorial organizations,
multispecies arrangements and fragments of colonial and postcolonial discourses that combined to
determine how Patagonia could be made sense—or exist meaningfully—at different, though
pivotal, historical moments. Furthermore, because this chapter is concerned with identifying
wilderness as a discursive formation in Patagonia, it also offers an analysis of the conditions of
existence for this to come together and suggests that mercantilism and, later, liberalism are some
of the logics that form the contingent unity of statements, practices, knowledge and forms of
knowing.
As Núñez has argued, Patagonia is a never-ending enigma “because it has been recognized
by what it is not: desert, emptiness, promise. Because, conceptualized from an exogenous center,
it appears permanently incomplete” (2018, p. 109) Against this, the wilderness ideas coalesced
around imaginaries outlined above have produced different Patagonias, and each one has given
way to a definite set of practices geared towards achieving the region’s goal so defined; that is, to
traverse the path of progress that promised modernity to an eternally othered region. At each
intersection, these imaginaries have been primarily constructed by powerful agents supported by
foreign capital whose language and practices determined who the appropriate subjects were and,
crucially, who the “backwards” subjects were. In this context, regarding wilderness as a discursive
formation crates analytic space to trace how the power it mobilizes works to constitute political
arrangements of a higher abstraction or order that equally create othered subjectivities and places
that need to be managed.
OF NATIVOS, COLONOS AND CRIOLLOS, A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE INITIAL DISPLACEMENTS
In what follows, this chapter presents a historical account of Patagonia, from the moment it was
first visited by humans to more recent times that find it a little less cold and a little more inhabited.
42

Notwithstanding that, this racconto dedicates more time and space to the Patagonia of the turn of
the XX century because it was then that the socioeconomic characteristics of the province of Santa
Cruz were delineated. This is of crucial importance, considering that it is the contemporary
reverberations of this past what FRA, Parque Patagonia and the rewilding initiative are positioned
against. Furthermore, it is then that the imaginary constructed by European settlers and explorers
begins to shift or, rather, is complicated by a new perception of Patagonia, instigated by local
authorities and elaborated by Argentinian explorers, as a southern version of the North American
far west.
IN HOLOCENE TIMES
Unsurprisingly, much has been written about the history of Patagonia and, although a full overview
of the centuries throughout which this unfolds is beyond the scope of this work, a brief excursion
into its past is de rigueur. Most narratives about the region tend to start with the expedition of
Ferdinand Magellan, who brought along the Italian chronicler, Antonio Pigafetta, believed to be
responsible for establishing in print, popularizing and, consequently, solidifying the name under
which the region is now globally known. While the historical racconto with which this chapter
begins will certainly get to these explorers, to choose their intervention as a starting point is to
reproduce the story that settler colonialism has created and the Argentinian state legitimized. As
such, even though it requires going further back in time and thus farther from the epoch in which
we find the main characters of the rewilding story this dissertation tells, it still constitutes a
necessary effort.
The “time depth” for humans in South America has been a point of contention and,
consequently, the history of the early human exploration of Patagonia was debated for some time
too considering that, as the last major continental land mass to be settled by human beings, it
43

carries implications for when and how people lived and gives a baseline against which all
interpretations of the timing of man’s entry into the Americas must be compared (see Borrero &
McEwan, 1997). There is evidence that suggests that the first human populations in Patagonia
occurred during the late Pleistocene, about 13.000 years B.P., and early into the Holocene for its
southernmost points in tandem with a process of deglaciation and milder climate conditions
(Borrero, 1999; Miotti & Salemme, 2005)
9
. Archeological evidence also suggests that these human
immigratory contingents came from the north before the Bering land bridge disappeared,
10
and that
this was a slow and gradual southward movement carried out by small groups in search of new
fields to hunt the last remnants of the large herbivores of the Ice Age present in the area, such as
ground sloths, American horse, extinct and modern camelids, South American deer and ostriches,
pumas and extinct and modern foxes. In Santa Cruz in particular, there is evidence of human use
before the Pleistocene-Holocene transition and of a more intense and repetitive occupation during
the early Holocene, as well as of the presence of the guanaco as the dominant large vertebrate
(Borrero, 1999).
Around this time, from 13.000 to 7.000 B.P., small groups of hunters and gatherers found
shelter in rock caves, where traces of animal skin and bone were found, as they searched for routes
that would lead to water and food. According, to Boschin (2002), the second stage of human
migration occurred between 7.000 and 2.000 B.P., when the aforementioned climate changes
caused the further retreat of the cordilleran glaciers, making new territory available and favoring

9
This “official” record is being contested by scholars such as Steeves (2021) who makes the case that
people have been in the Western Hemisphere for more than 60,000 years (as opposed to having
“appeared” in America at the beginning of the Holocene). Furthermore, this particular work has been
written from an Indigenous perspective and offers a critical and decolonizing discussion of archeology’s
development in the Americas.
10
There exists a theoretical position that suggests that human settling in South America could have come
from a different entry point, such as by sea from the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean, thus avoiding glaciers (see
Miotti, 1996).
44

a more regional settling. This is when the first populations begun to concentrate in more favorable
areas, such as near rivers or ocean shores, and when more specialized hunting and related tools
dominated. Lastly, between 2000 B.P. and the XVI century, there was a final stage marked by
territorial expansion and delimitation of hunting areas, interethnic relations, goods exchanges, and
the development of more complex skills (including archery and pottery). The archeological
evidence found throughout Patagonia thus suggests that the social organizations and power
structures of these early populations is much more complex than originally believed. Most of these
remains are scant, yet there is one archeological site that contains an exceptional assemblage of
cave art where, along more than 200 meters of rock wall, it is possible to observe a long sequence
of three main stylistic groups of pictographs that began as early as the 10th millennium B.P. and
ended around 700 A.D (see Figure 1.1). Known as Cueva de las Manos (Cave of the Hands) and
part of UNESCO’s World Heritage, these rock shelters display stenciled outlines of human hands,
overlapped along the years, as well as depictions of animals (primarily, guanacos) and hunting
scenes where prey and hunter are shown interacting in a dynamic and naturalistic manner. Because
of its richness, Cueva de las Manos is considered to be “one of the most important sites of the
earliest hunter-gatherer groups in South America during Early Holocene” (Cueva de Las Manos,
Río Pinturas, n.d.).
11

11
The classification Gradin (1977; Gradin et al., 1976, 1979), a surveyor and archeologist who studied the
Cueva extensively, has offered of the paintings overlaps with the stages described above and adds further
details about these populations. For example, the first stylist group he identified was associated with a lithic
cultural technology that reveals that these early “settlers” were long distance hunters of guanacos that
provided them with its flesh, skin, bones and tendons. In the second stylist group, which he dated as
occurring some time before the year 7,000 B.P. and up to the year 3,000 B.P., hunting scenes are replaced
by single figures of guanacos who are motionless and have protruding bellies, as well as by roughly 800
hands of children, youngsters and adults, and the art becomes more schematic and stylized. The last stylistic
group is characterized by abstract geometric figures and schematic silhouettes of men and animals, while
continuing with the hand stencils.
45

Figure 1.1: Image depicting rock paintings in Cueva de Las Manos, an archeological site
located in Cañadón Río Pinturas in the northwest of Santa Cruz province, which was included in
UNESCO’s World Heritage list in 1999 due to the exceptionally large assemblage of cave art it
holds (Author photo, 2020).
According to the archeological evidence and the reconstructions done by researchers, such
as Casamiquela (1998), who have dedicated their life’s work to learning more about the native
peoples of Patagonia, the last inhabitants of this cave were the ancestors of the first tehuelche
people of Patagonia, long-limbed and long-haired peoples casted in history as the archetypal
Patagonians. This ethnic group inhabited the area of what is now Santa Cruz province, neighboring
with mapuches (or araucanos) to the north and onas (otherwise known as selknam) to the south,
and were the “Indians” that the first Spanish colonizers were going to meet. Expert guanaco
hunters, these tall tehuelches were nomadic and thus relied on rock shelters during the winter and
travel-friendly tents made of the sewn skins of guanacos when the weather was more benign. These
skins were also utilized in the fashioning of footwear and quillango, the clothing that males and
46

females wore. They also made use of the naturally occurring stones, such as obsidian, granite and
basalt to create knives, projectile points and other various objects to treat or otherwise work the
hunted animals’ leather. Organized in small familial groups, it is believed that these tasks were
performed by the females of the group while the men mostly performed hunting duties, and all
were led by a prestigious chief supported by a small council of older males and a shaman, a witch-
doctor figure held in high esteem (Bandieri, 2014; see also González-Jose, 2003).
As Casamiquela (1998, p. 129) once wrote, “the history of the indigenous settling of
Patagonia is still just as imprecise as its concept as a region.” While a significant amount of
research about this history is available, there is still not a sufficient grasp on the centuries that
passed between the beginning of “present time” and the year when the first Europeans set foot on
the territory. What is known, though, is that the word tehuelche, which is by far the most
widespread term in scholarly research to refer to the different indigenous groups that inhabited
Patagonia before it became known as Patagonia,
12
does not belong to the tehuelche language but
rather comes from the language spoken by the neighboring araucanos and roughly translates to
“the bad-tempered people of the barren south.” This is but one example of the phenomenon to be
explored here, that is that naming and referring to the local entanglement of people, territory and
nonhumans with exogenous terms is ubiquitous in and particular to Patagonia. At this juncture,
then, it is inevitable to jump a couple of centuries forward from where the above description of the
tehuelche people ended to when the future settler colonialism finds its origins.

12
Referring to a “tehuelche complex” is more precise to encompass the physical and linguistic differences
(see Escalada, 1949; Casamiquela, 1998),
47

TERRA INCOGNITA, TERRA NULLIUS
Even though America was “discovered” in 1492, the land already figured in some form in world
maps before Columbus’ first voyage. In fact, the first sea voyages to this unknown land had their
naval foundations in a cartography whose origins can be traced back to ancient times, just like the
legend of the Patagonian giants had already been recorded in writing in 1448 in the map of Andreas
Asperger which referenced the coast of the new continent to-be with an inscription that read: “Here
there are giants fighting against dragons” (Osses, 2014, p. 137). Not to mention that, even though
he probably did not sail anywhere near Patagonia, the account of Amerigo Vespucci of the “torrid
zone” beyond the equator created the expectation that sailors who made it to the far south were
going to find naked, wild, cannibalistic and large people (Moss, 2008).
13
By the XVI century,
Spanish sailors had significant cartographic knowledge of America but they were still looking,
with full support of the monarchy, for a passage that would connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans
and thus grant Spain access to the world of spices, silk, porcelain and ivory described by Marco
Polo. Convinced that there was such a pathway in South America, Magellan garnered the support
of Charles V and set sail, in 1519, with a fleet of 265 men (only 18 would return three years later),
enough heavy artillery to combat any marine monsters and dragons, and enough bells, knives and
mirrors to gift to and thus impress the natives (Markic, 2010). Antonio Pigafetta, an Italian sailor
and chronicler, known to be a man educated in philosophy, mathematics and astrology, boarded
Magellan’s ship as his helper, though he would later act as cartographer and translator. The book
he published just a couple of years later after returning from the voyage, Navigation et
decouvrement,
14
is the earliest printed account describing the inhabitants of the then still mostly

13
Zukas (2005) further demonstrates how the maps of the European imperial age, by displaying and
graphically depicting terra nullius, mediated the experience of the colonial world for Europeans.
14
The first edition of these travel chronicles was published in French in 1525 and later followed by Italian
and English editions, published in 1536, 1550 and 1555, 1577 respectively. See Davies, 2016).
48

unknown Patagonia, one that “enjoyed extraordinary success in Europe” (Duviols, 1997, p. 128).
By way of the gross exaggerations and exoticizations in the text, this widely reproduced travel
chronicle gave origin to a long-lasting European myth of the proto- or liminal men known as the
Patagonian giants.
The first indigenous individual the crew saw was “a giant, who was on the shore of the sea,
quite naked, and was dancing and leaping and singing, and whilst singing he put the sand and dust
on his head” (Pigafetta, 2010, p. 49). Characterized as friendly, this giant was
“so tall that the tallest of us only came up to his waist; however he was well built. He had
a large face, painted red all round, and his eyes also were painted yellow around them, and
he had two hearts painted on his cheeks; he had but little hair on his head, and it was
painted white. When he was brought before the captain, he was clothed with the skin of a
certain beast, which skin was very skillfully sewed. This beast has its head and ears the size
of a mule, and the neck and body of the fashion of a camel, the legs of a deer, and the tail
like that of a horse, and it neighs like a horse. There is a great quantity of these animals in
this same place. This giant had his feet covered with the skin of this animal in the form of
shoes, and he carried in his hand a short and thick bow, with a thick cord made of the gut
of the said beast, with a bundle of cane arrows, which were not very long, and were
feathered like ours, but they had no iron at the end (…) …then they showed him some
things, amongst others, a steel mirror. When the giant saw his likeness in it, he was greatly
terrified, leaping backwards, and made three or four of our men fall down. After that, the
captain gave him two bells, a mirror, a comb, and a chaplet of beads and sent him back on
shore, having him accompanied by four armed men” (Pigafetta, 2010, pp. 50–51).

As Davis (2016) has noted, Pigaffeta’s description harbors the multiplicity of interpretative
frameworks through which a European observer could apprehend a tall person, which is why the
native man is described as a giant, a somewhat unintelligent creature that it is mesmerized by
trinkets such as bells and a comb but one that also demonstrates signs of civility as seen through
their clothing and the arrows that are feathered “like ours” though without iron. Yet, it is a
grotesque description of these men, who ate “large basketful of biscuit and rats without skinning
them, and they drank half a bucket of water at each time” (Pigafetta, 2010, p. 55) and women, who
49

dressed like the men and had “the breasts half an ell long” (p. 51), what predominates and what
would be further promoted by the European travelers of the following centuries, as well as
entrenched in the nomenclature on maps for the giants of South America in cartographic circles
across Iberia, Normandy, the German lands and the Low Countries (Davis, 2016).
As I shall explore in this chapter, the initial incarnation of Patagonia as the outer limit of a
global order conceived by Pigafetta constitutes a phenomenon that has stuck to the region like a
shadow through time and up to the moment of this writing, sustained by different formations of
political and economic power. Indeed, this voyage was pivotal for two main reasons. Firstly,
research suggests that the native populations who lived between the Chubut River and the
Magellan Strait (meridional Patagonia) called themselves aonikenk and they might have had a
name for Patagonia, even if this one is not known. Yet it was the name given by the European
explorers what defined this place and its subjects for posterity, demonstrating “the violence of the
written word that shows itself by silencing the spoken word, and by imposing a new mental
imagery” (Benites, 2005, p. 77). In the book, the Italian writes that “the captain named this kind
of people Pataghom” (p. 55), Pathagoni in French and translated as Patagonians in English, while
he denominates the land to the south of the strait, Regione Pathagonia. To date, it is still unclear
why Magellan chose this name, though there are several theories that have attempted to explain it.
The most popular one suggests that the name stems from the big feet of the “Indians” the
Europeans found, who were not only taller than them but also wore rudimentary shoes made of
guanaco skin that left large imprints (thus, patagon or patagão would be an augmentative form of
“pata,” meaning foot). Another theory suggests that it was their rustic and rough appearance what
garnered the name of patán, in Spanish, patão in Portuguese (Magellan was, in fact, a Portuguese
working for the Spanish king) or pathaud in French. Finally, a third theory posits that the name
50

originates from a popular Spanish chivalric romance published in Salamanca in 1512, titled
Primaleón, that described an island inhabited by wild men dressed in skins where a large creature
or monster with a dog’s head and the feet of a stag, named Patagón, roamed. This seems to be the
preferred one among specialists considering that the popularity of the novel meant that the more
educated part of the crew would have read it, therefore connecting these “giants” with the monster,
and that Pigafetta did not dedicate any lines to explaining the name, probably because he
considered it needed no further explanation. Additionally, the chronicles themselves follow an
Italian courtly tradition of Renaissance travel writing that would have appealed to many of the
same readers as Primaleón (Davis, 2016), which is likely why García Márquez (1982) considered
that Pigafetta’s short and fascinating book contained “the seeds of our present-day novels.”
Secondly, naming this region “Patagonia” worked to seal its fate, considering that
toponyms not only “make anonymous [to some] locations significant elements of the cultural
landscape but also offer strong suggestions about a region’s character and ethnic allegiance”
(Monmonier, 2014, p. 110). As Livon-Grosman (2003, p. 50) has argued, the name of the region
carries a “fictional and literary dimension” since its baptism because, whereas before this
expedition Patagonia was an unnamed land imagined to be inhabited by medieval monsters, after
Magellan and Pigafetta it became a known yet heavily imagined place, forever bearing the “double
mark of exaggeration” of the natives and of the sublime dimension of its scenery. This
denominating power would, in other words, determine “particular and long-lasting ways of
imagining this land’s outline,” casting it as an extreme desert populated by giants that were the
embodiment of a cultural antipode (Harambour, 2019, p. 62). In so doing, Renaissance Europeans’
encounters with “hitherto unknown peoples and animals and their attempts to understand them re-
shaped the concept of the human, the genealogy of humanity, and the boundaries between human,
51

monster and animal” (Davis, 2016, p. 149). Thus, together with the geopolitical power that
discovery of the strait would bring and the people, lands and resources that enabled capital
accumulation, these images of Patagonia as the uttermost part of the earth and as a primordial, pre-
historical space created by the imperial geographical imagination would help define imperial
modernity as “a new spatial order that led to the imposition of a global economy and the
hierarchical ranking of the peoples that inhabited the world” (Nouzeilles, 1999, p. 36). As such,
this casting of former terra incognita as Terra de Patagones marks the first instantiation of
othering that this land and its people have seen, a move that, by casting these indigenous
communities as irrational and abnormal creatures—with more in common with the literary monster
Patagón than with European humans—legitimated the Spanish conquest and domination, and
dialectically marked Europeans as the exclusive bearers, creators and protagonists of modernity
(Quijano, 2000).
After Magellan’s discovery, the coasts of Patagonia were host of several reconnaissance
expeditions from European sailors of various provenances, though the Spanish were the first who
effectively tried to colonize the territory in 1535 with a 250-men fleet that attempted to settle in
the newly created Gobernación del Estrecho and even tried to reach the Pacific by foot through
the steppe, but spectacularly failed. There was another attempt in 1584, when Sarmiento de
Gamboa held a mass, tried to delineate a town and even gave orders to build the first houses with
the wood from the damaged ships, though it also spectacularly failed. Two years later, Thomas
Cavendish, the English explorer who famously circumnavigated the globe, landed in Patagonia
searching for another interoceanic passage and found the only three survivors from the 1584’s
colonization attempt, who then showed him what was left of that endeavor. The sight was so jarring
that Cavendish named the site Port Famine, and the event as a whole worked to seal a European
52

perception of Patagonia as a “cursed territory” impossible to colonize (Bandieri, 2014, p. 40).
Consequently, during the XVI and XVII centuries, different European fleets explored and further
denominated the coasts (e.g.: channel Le Maire, Cape Horn, Isla de los Estados, Falkland Sound)
while the inner territory remained largely unexplored and shrouded in mystery.
This started to change in the XVIII century because, prompted by the thread that a constant
“foreign” presence represented to the Spanish throne, now held by the House of Bourbon, new and
more frequent expeditions set sail through the Atlantic Ocean, and more contact with the native
populations began to be sought out. Yet the first thorough account of the inner territory and the
native populations (though circumscribed to northern Patagonia, around the parallel 45
o
) came
from an English Jesuit missionary, Thomas Falkner, who published A description of Patagonia,
and the Adjoining Parts of South America in 1774, a book that generated much geopolitical interest
in the British monarchy because it posited that the tehuelches were capable of peaceful trade and
that an alliance with them could unsettle the Spanish hold to the south of Buenos Aires. Falkner’s
work is significant in this chapter’s narrative of Patagonia because, despite the nuances it offered
about the feared inner territory, it further reified the figure of a vast and homogenous Patagonia by
applying just the one name to the stretch of land from Rio Negro to Cape Horn, and from the arid
Atlantic coast to the lushness of the Pacific (Livon-Grosman, 2003, p. 67) . Furthermore, by
highlighting the need for a strategic base from where England could control its commercial
interests in both Oceans, it contained the kernel of what would then be the appropriation of the
Malvinas/Falkland Islands which, in turn, would be the entry point for the colonization of
Patagonia by English capital, men and animals in the postcolonial state.
Before fully jumping into the XVIII century, a note on imperial colonialism and its
unfolding in America is necessary. A couple of years after Columbus famous journey to what he
53

thought would be the Indies, the Portuguese and Spanish empires signed the Treaty of Tordesillas
to organize the newly discovered lands outside Europe by dividing trading and colonizing rights.
Columbus’ voyage had a strong economic motivation, shared by the Catholic kings, which is why
he conducted a thorough search for precious metals and valuable objects of commerce. According
to this document, which itself emerged from the 1490s papal bulls of the Spanish pope Alexander
VI who granted Spain and Portugal the right to conquer and subdue native peoples in the Americas
for the purpose of Christianizing them, all the lands to the west of the meridian traced 370 leagues
west of the Cape Verde Islands belonged to the Crown of Castille. Consequently, by the late XVI
century, Spain had a “legal” hold on Central and South America and no Spaniards other than
Castilians were allowed to trade with the “new world.” The gold found in the Antilles and the
silver in Mexico and Peru were crucial “in an age when treasure was supposed to provide the key
to wealth and power,” and induced one of the most rigid mercantile systems of regulation of
colonial trade (Hamilton, 1948, p. 41). Furthermore, a central tenet of mercantilism as a political
and economic doctrine was a positive trade balance: nations were supposed to export more
commodities than they were to import, which is why securing resources from colonies became
key. In other words, it was mercantilism what fueled the imperialism of this era as well as the
rivalry and warfare among the great powers of Europe, “which were at peace in only a single year
during the period from 1600 to 1667” (Spiegel, 1991, p. 98).
As was explained above, these lands were certainly not uninhabited (and had not been for
millennia) by the time these Europeans travelers “discovered” them, yet they apprehended this
previously terra incognita (unknown land) as terra nullius or “empty land” (alternatively, “no
man’s land” or “land without owners”) which refers to the Roman legal concept Western
Europeans and Euro-Americans adopted during the XVI century to justify the conquest of these
54

foreign lands (Zukas, 2005). Terra nullius, in turn, derives from the Roman legal argument of res
nullius (or “things without owners”), which sustained that “all ‘empty things,’ which included
unoccupied lands, remained the common property of all mankind until they were put to some,
generally agricultural, use. The first person to use the land in this way became its owner” (Pagden
quoted in Benton & Straumann, 2010, p. 6).
In this context, the discourse of wilderness as “a domain of mushrooms and monsters”
(Marris, 2011, p. 18) and an otherwise repugnant and savage place helped sustain the political
denomination of terra nullius and, in turn, legitimize colonialism. Ideologically, the analytic of
wilderness as a discursive formation illuminates not only that Spaniards felt they had a moral duty
to bring those irrational giants into Christendom, but that they were entitled to do so because those
proto-humans they found upon getting off their ships did not constitute a settled population in the
European usage: their nomadic nature meant they demonstrated no examples of significant
agricultural practice (in the European sense of visibly transforming the surrounding landscape),
did not operate with the idea of private property, had no claim to any particular territory and,
consequently, had no political sovereignty. Declaring a place empty means that it is available for
the taking and, since mercantilism was predicated on monopolistic trade, overseas colonies needed
to be solely possessed by the metropolis, barring other European interests from the land. In
practical terms, the Spaniards enacted political authority by means of the Requirement, a formal
declaration read aloud from a written text to the natives (Seed, 1995) as well as through a series of
acts such as planting the Spanish and Papal flags, celebrating mass, erecting buildings and gallows,
setting up a court of law and sentencing some law breakers.
15
These were the practices through

15
For example, Puerto San Julian in Santa Cruz, where Magellan and Pigafetta first found a “Patagón,” was
the place were the first Spanish sovereign act in all of what would later be Argentina was held: it was where
the first European settlement was located (Magellan’s crew spent the winter there, waiting for better
55

which Spaniards sought to remediate the negative aspect of the Patagonian wild so conceived, but
they also helped to establish dominion over a land that was to be exploited as a trade resource.
While other regions in the “new world” allowed Spain to reap a bullion harvest, possessing
southern Patagonia gave the Spanish fleet monopolistic control over a crucial trading route.
As the might of the Spanish fleet decreased and the British Empire rose as a world power,
the situation in the colonies changed. At this time in what would later become Argentina in
particular, the first Spanish colonizers and criollos (those of Spanish descent born in America)
settled in small urban centers, surrounded by
“floating groups of natives of the conquered region, subjected to the harsh systemic
regime of encomienda or mita through which the Spaniard lord directly benefited from
their labor; and, while they tired their bodies tilling the land or working the mines, they
endured the intellectual onslaught of the missionaries who tried to induce them to
abandon their old cults and adopt Christian beliefs” (Romero, 2013, p. 29)”
This conflictive situation between colonos and native people or nativos, punctuated by intermittent
crude fighting, continued well into the XVIII century, when a small but significant bureaucracy of
Spaniards and criollos had formed and the first estancias (estates) of landowners had been erected.
The more these men advanced, the more the indigenous populations retreated to the “deserted”
and “frontier” lands of the Pampa plains and the Patagonia steppe. By 1776, the Spanish colony in
(future) Argentina had advanced significantly in population growth but, fundamentally, it had
managed to successfully insert Buenos Aires and its port in the international routes of trade: by
then, more established estancias exported leather, tallow and jerky, and the customs control that
would soon be created rendered the traffic of slaves profitable for the city. Although the

conditions to resume sailing south), where the first executions occurred (two crew men were killed by sword
for having instigated an uprising against the captain) and where the first white man was killed by a native
(see Markic, 2010, for further details).
56

strengthening of the Atlantic commercial route was an important reason for the renewed hold of
the House of Bourbon on the colonies, this was more fundamentally prompted by the value that
land as a resource had garnered in Europe with the advent of the Enlightenment. In particular, the
sway of the mercantilist economic theory was being destroyed by the beliefs put forward by a
group of French writers known as physiocrats, who proclaimed that human economy was governed
by natural law and that the products of the land were the only source of wealth (Herr, 1958, p. 52).
This is important to underscore because the belief that land itself was the basis for wealth explains
why “[t]erritoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element” and why the settlers’
invasion is a structure and not an event, considering that after laboring to dissolve native societies,
this mode of violent appropriation “erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land base”
(P. Wolfe, 2006, p. 388). Finally, the last factor that prompted the Bourbon’s reforms during the
XVIII century—the most salient one being the creation of the Virreinato del Rio de la Plata—
were security concerns, as Falkner’s book had increased English interest in the region.
16

IN POSTCOLONIAL TIMES
A thorough history of Argentina’s emancipation from Spanish rule is certainly beyond the scope
of this work, which is why what transpired between 1776 and 1862 will be omitted here. However,
the story of the nascent nation-state is relevant to this chapter’s historical racconto because it
represents another stage in the discursive formation of the Patagonian wilderness as an empty place
or deserted frontier: whereas the liminal Patagonia of the XVI century helped define imperial

16
The English did, in fact, attempt to invade Buenos Aires in 1806 and 1807. During these occupation
attempts, the Spanish Viceroy fled the city but the local population managed to organize a successful
resistance. However, although the English failed in their colonizing attempt, their presence had a significant
effect because, during their brief rule, they reduced the duties the colony had to pay and freed trade. The
reversal of that situation became untenable, even more so in the context of the ideas of liberty and freedom
spread by the American and French revolutions.
57

modernity, the Patagonia of the XIX aided in the construction of the postcolonial nation-state, also
done through territorial conquest and expansion. Thus, this moment in time constitutes another
instantiation of displacement of indigenous populations to solidify a new political unit (a nation-
state instead of colony) ruled by a new governing class (criollos instead of Spaniards), a new
political subject (a citizen instead of a barbarian, or an Argentinian instead of a tehuelche) and the
consolidation of a liberal development model centered in extensive livestock rearing for export
driven by foreign capital. Following postcolonial studies, this means that, although the XIX
century marks the end of imperialism understood as power exercised by metropoles over their
dominated though distant territories, it also signals the beginning of a new colonialism (a
postcolonialism) whereby the postcolonial nation-state equally exercises power through invading
and settling in those same territories (Said, 2012). This is what Quijano (2001) refers to as
colonialidad or coloniality, a concept that marks societies that retain or assume characteristics of
the previous (European) colonos, even when they have become nominally independent.
Consequently, while the territorial divisions drafted during the Spanish rule sustained the
basis of the postcolonial territorial reclamations, an obsession with “all things European” nurtured
the ideology of the new settler elites of Latin America. Generally, these groups traveled to Europe
(and the United States) in search for models to shape their national projects and ignored their own
countries beyond the capitals, ultimately viewing their own reality through social Darwinism,
positivist Europeans and North American writings about race, psychology and history, and
identifying “more closely with Europeans than with their fellow countrymen” (Helg, 1990, pp. 37–
39). Argentina in particular became a paradigmatic case of white settler colonialism (see Gott,
2007, who argues for the inclusion of Latin America as a case of a white settler society),
considering that, by the turn of the XX century, it had become the example to follow and a decisive
58

contribution to the diffusion of European racial and economic theories in the area. Furthermore,
by the XIX century, Europe had already left mercantilism behind and was following economic
liberal principles to organize its trade, developed during the Enlightenment. Now, instead of tariffs
and monopolistic control, international commerce was organized by notions of free trade and open
competition enabled by the intervention of national governments to guarantee property rights.
However, by the mid-XIX century, Argentina still had open frontiers and, as such, its political
sovereignty as a new nation-state over the territories it desired was far from complete. On the one
hand, there were still political borders to be resolved, which is why Argentina and Chile signed a
treaty in 1856 legitimizing the imperial divisions of 1810, although the reality of a shared frontier
that extended over 3,169 miles of uncharted territory, one rhetorically discussed as empty yet
practically inhabited by “irreducible indiadas” (Alfonso Aguirre Humeres quoted in Harambour,
2019, p. 52) and weak state presence, threw a wrench in that juridical fiction.
17
On the other,
Argentina as an emergent nation-state also had to contend with the “internal frontier” that divided
“civilization,” located in the cities and estancias where an exclusionary ideal of modernity was
slowly taking shape, from “la barbarie,” the unruly and backward “Indians” who, despite the
contradiction, inhabited “the desert” and were believed (and rhetorically constituted) to be nothing
more than a prehistoric race. This idea of the “internal frontier” was a deeply normative construct
that had no empirical bearing: as Bandieri (2014, p. 56) expertly demonstrated, the culture of the
indigenous populations had not remained closed off from that of the Spanish and criollo colonizers,
especially in the northernmost part of Patagonia. Rather, the 300 years of contact resulted in an
acculturation phenomenon evidenced in the natives’ significant orientation toward livestock—as

17
This would be followed by an 1881 Treaty that defined the high peaks of the Andes as the physical border
between the two countries. However, seven more treaties and protocols would be signed in the next two
decades as both countries launched themselves into a frenzied arms race.
59

Europeans had introduced new species—and incorporation of the horse
18
—also introduced by the
Europeans. This also entailed incorporating “new cultural elements, such as iron and silver,
European cereals, leather from domestic livestock, the importance of pastoral life and an
increasingly complex social, political and military organization of the communities.” (Bandieri,
2014, p. 56). This is not to say that these populations had “improved” or “progressed” as a result
of these contacts but rather that, based on the ideologies that circulated at the time, these practices
could have been legible as indicators of “modernity.” Instead, the notion of the “internal frontier”
was the racialized fiction that the prominent intellectuals of the time concocted and upon which
they sought to build the national state, one that saw in the “Indians” the most challenging enemy
of Argentinian civilization.
These racial and territorial fantasies found fertile ground in Patagonia which, at the time of
the formation of the new nation-state, was still regarded by the new colonos as mainly barren plains
inhabited by anthropophagous giants. This image was perpetuated by Charles Darwin who,
together with captain Fitz Roy, extensively traveled through the region and later published The
Voyage of the Beagle (1839), a book widely “read and consulted by the Argentine and Chilean
state officials of the XIX century on [the matter of] the coasts of the extreme south” (Harambour,
2019, p. 65) and whose compelling repertoire of images and tropes has ruled the system of
representations of Patagonia until today, making it the primary source of the modern definition of
Patagonia as non-place (Nouzeilles, 2007). When he was in the mouth of the river Santa Cruz in

18
The incorporation of the horse by the northern Patagonian tehuelches was quite quick: by the end of the
XVI this native group had significantly increased their mobility, granting them access to the province of
Buenos Aires and central Pampa, which they visited to hunt livestock. By the second half of the XVII
century, the horse had spread southward to the rest of Patagonia with the exception of Tierra del Fuego (see
Bandieri, 2014).
60

1834 (roughly 354 miles from where the Foundation has built its mountain lodge) beyond which
the country was “completely terra incognita,” Darwin wrote:
“The country remained the same and was extremely uninteresting. The complete similarity
of the productions throughout Patagonia is one its most striking characters. The level plains
of arid shingle support the same stunted and dwarf plants; and in the valleys the same
thorn-bearing bushes grow. Everywhere we see the same birds and insects. Even the very
banks of the river and of the clear streamlets which entered it, were scarcely enlivened by
a brighter tint of green. The curse of sterility is on the land, and the water flowing over a
bed of pebbles partakes of the same curse. Hence the number of waterfowl is very scanty;
for there is nothing to support life in the stream of this barren river” (2008, pp. 163–164,
emphasis added).
Darwin described Patagonia as a succession of dry plains, a geological landscape in ruins that,
combined with “the dryness of the climate” and the “occasional hostile attacks of the wandering
Indians” explained why the result of all the attempts to colonize “this side of America south of 41
degs.”—highlighting the infamous Port Famine one—had been miserable, and why the Spanish
colonist were compelled to leave their half-finished buildings (150). Darwin also described the
natives as wretched men that belonged in the animal world: considering “how wide was the
difference between savage and civilized man: it is greater than between a wild and domesticated
animal” (187), “one can hardly make oneself believe that they are fellow-creatures, and inhabitants
of the same world” (195). These early descriptions of Patagonia were complemented by the work
of George Musters, another traveler whose book, At home with the Patagonians (1871), constituted
the first exhaustive account of what laid in the Patagonian steppe and constituted the cartographic
basis for future English settlements. With the mention of this last publication, the reader has now
been exposed to the triad of foreign explorers (Falkner, Darwin, Musters) whose appreciations
were uncritically adopted by the local intelligentsia and, consequently, will be in a good position
to understand why Harambour (2019, p. 66) has categorically stated that “the dominant
ethnogeographic knowledge of the expansion was built by three British, with the authority of the
61

Empire and natural science.”
19
Ultimately, these images and knowledge of Patagonia as a cursed
land, an arid and barren region inhabited by irrecoverably uncivilized creatures would decant in a
geographical imagination that casted this “desert” as an ominous void whose obliterating power
resisted human intervention. Coupled with the racist, Euro-centric ideology of progress that the
XIX century bourgeoise espoused, this imagery of Patagonia as a desert became the cornerstone
of a genocidal state policy aimed at curing the “disease from which the Argentine Republic
suffered,” namely “its own expanse: the desert wilderness surrounds it on all sides and insinuates
into its bowels; solitude, a barren land with no human habitation” (Sarmiento, 2003, p. 45).
Consequently, if the frontier in the colonial era was a porous place punctuated by sustained
interactions and an interdependent daily life between natives and whites, the frontier of the
postcolonial state was a site of ideological and material contestation because, as the idea (and
infrastructures) of modernity advanced in the country, so did the competition for land. By the
middle of the XIX century, the power block (Poulantzas, 2001) in Argentina was clearly defined,
made up of a bourgeoisie of estancieros (estate owners) and men of liberal professions with shared
experiences and private interests that sought to strengthen the country’s position in the
international commercial sphere as a producer of commodities and food products, an agricultural-
export model that required new productive (and extensive) areas and a decisive social ordering
(Romero, 2013; Bandieri, 2014). In this context, the “constitutional political liberalism” (Alonso
& Ternavasio, 2012) or “conservative liberalism” (Morresi, 2010) of the new nation espoused an

19
Arguably, these European travel writers are what Mary Louise Pratt (2008, p. 151) might call “the
vanguard,” whose normative task was to “reinvent America as backward and neglected, to encode its non-
capitalist landscapes and societies as manifestly in need of the rationalized exploitation the Europeans
bring.” Furthermore, the liberal statemen of the XIX century in Argentina (known as Generation of the ’80,
as the text will promptly explain) evidence the phenomenon Pratt calls “transculturation,” as they were a
subordinated or marginal group (not internally but in the wider international context) that selected and
invented from materials from a dominant, metropolitan culture.
62

economic liberalism predicated on the rule of the free market and the protection of private property,
and that placed export agriculture as the predominant economic activity. In fact, the exports of
primary goods—primarily wool and, later, refrigerated cow meat and cereals—was such a
vigorous development engine that the growth the Argentinian economy saw during 1880-1916
“transported it from a marginal position to becoming a promise destinated to occupy in South
America the place the United States occupied in North America” (Rocchi, 2014, p. 1). This export
boom needs to be contextualized as part of a broader internationalization process of trade prompted
by the development of industrial capitalism: some nations were industrializing which prompted
the need for primary goods and foodstuff, provided primarily by non-European countries, as well
as the need for markets to sell the excess manufactures and where to invest the excess capital. In
this scenario of international capital, goods and labor exchange, Argentina had one particularly
abundant resource: land.
The pressures that sociopolitical and economic matters put on the land were the catalysts
for the infamous Conquista del Desierto (the Conquest of the Desert or “Desert Campaign”)
orchestrated by Julio A. Roca (who would later become elected president) during 1879-1885, one
of the founding epic tales of the Argentinian oligarchic state that effectively decimated the native
populations south of Buenos Aires. Essentially, this was a heavy military mobilization—financed
by those who were to benefit the most from the “freed” lands—to advance over the Pampa and
Patagonia lands and thus expand the frontier westward and southward, which was effected by
subduing entire native groups. By 1884, the “national territories” of Neuquén, Rio Negro, Chubut,
Santa Cruz y Tierra del Fuego (that is, Argentinian Patagonia) had been effectively incorporated
to the sovereign orbit of the state by law N
o
1,532—itself inspired by the United States’ Ordinance
of 1787, which established a government for the Northwest Territory and outlined the process for
63

admitting a new state to the Union—and the idea of Argentina as a “nation graced by Nature and
by God, predestined for power and greatness,” born. (Rock, 1987, p. 228). Because these military
campaigns entailed physical elimination, concentration practices, deportation, enslavement,
identity cleansing of children, and cultural destruction Delrio et al. (2010) have effectively
conceptualized this political process as genocide.
Discursively, the presentation of this conquest as a fight for civilization obscured its
genocidal nature and contributed to the myth of extinction (crudely reified by school textbooks
widely circulated until the 1940s, see Teobaldo & Nicoletti, 2007) that would later disavow the
lives of indigenous populations. In practical terms, it produced a new modality of occupation of
the Patagonian space, one where the State appropriated enormous land tracts and then transferred
the ownership to a select few. Ultimately, the Conquista del Desierto points to something
fundamental: because it constitutes the last territory to be ideologically and materially conquered
by the nascent nation-state—which, in fact, came to be a complete sovereign entity because of that
territorial dominion and through its organization as an agriculturally productive, white space—
Patagonia is deeply woven in the identity of Argentina as an independent Republic (much like the
trope, space and problematic aspects of the Far West are constitutive of the American identity, see
Massip, 2012 on this), and this is something that future development projects in the region, like
the one that this dissertation discusses in the next chapter, would have to contend with.
The Conquista del Desierto emptied a territory that was presumed empty only to “make
room” for the desired population, the one who would, unlike the natives that belonged to a
primordial past that did not square with the modernity projected by the nation state, bring progress
to the land and, through their agricultural practices and exports, would help concretize the Republic
that the XIX century elite—known as “Generation of ‘80”—so desired. One of the most salient
64

members of that “Generation of ‘80” was Juan B. Alberdi who published a very influential book
(Bases y puntos de partida para la organización nacional de la República Argentina or Starting
points for the political organization of the Argentine Republic, 1852) which explained that,
because the country had huge swaths of desert land—again, desert was equivalent to “void of
subjects who mattered”—it was mandatory that it attracted immigration. To this generation, “to
govern [was] to populate” the emptied territory, though it also meant to introduce moralizing
agents who would “transplant” those sought-after practices. One of the most reproduced
paragraphs of Alberdi’s work reads:
“Do we wish to plant and acclimatize in America the English freedom, the French culture and
the industriousness of the man of Europe and the United States? Let us bring living pieces of
them in the practices of its inhabitants and place them here. Do we want the habits of order,
discipline and industry to prevail in our America? Let us fill it with people who thoroughly
possess those habits. They are communicable; next to the European industrialist soon will the
American industrialist form. The plant of civilization does not grow from seed. It is like a
vineyard; it takes on from a cutting” (2007, p. 97).
This “open door” policy, which had already been enshrined in the Constitution in 1853, was
reinforced with the 1876 Immigration and Settlement Act (Ley de Inmigración y Colonización)
and was meant to attract immigrants from northern Europe (though, in practice, the country
managed to attract a majority of Spaniards and Italians) because those populations were considered
to be “the key to economic development, through their racial superiority and because of their
education and skills” (Hennessy, quoted in Gott, 2007). Anglo-Saxons were regarded by the creole
intelligentsia as a superior race made of individuals who had the faculties needed for self-
government and democracy, and demonstrated altruism, joy and industry.
This “enlightened” whitening of the burgeoning republic was a fast process: while natives
represented 5% of the population in 1869, by 1895 they were only 0.7% of almost 4 million
inhabitants, and total net immigration added over 3 million inhabitants between 1880 and 1930
65

(Helg, 1990). While the majority of the immigrants that effectively crossed the Atlantic were
Italian and Spanish (motivated by worsening socioeconomic conditions in Europe and the high
demand for cheap labor driven by the outstanding commercial performance of Argentinian cereals
and meat), the case of Santa Cruz is different because there, the governor, Carlos Maria Moyano,
launched his own colonizing campaign in 1880, recruiting capitals and settlers from the
Malvinas/Falkland archipelago which was, since 1833, under the control of the British monarchy.
While not many arboreal species can thrive there, the islands humidity and frequent rain nurture
large meadows with excellent pastures, which is why sheep rearing became the primary economic
activity since said occupation, carried out in the large establishments of Falkland Islands Company
Ltd., a reduced group of landowners or the British Crown itself. After a failed settling attempt that
entailed families of Argentines and immigrants from Buenos Aires, Moyano offered excellent
conditions to malvinenses/Falklanders who wanted to lease land and populate the continental area:
initially, the tehuelche lands in Santa Cruz were almost free for the taking for European settlers
who committed to bringing 100 sheep per 2,500 hectares from Malvinas/Falklands over the course
of three years and to building pens and other facilities, as well as taking care of the costs of land
measuring and surveyor services. Exchanges such as these were, in fact, common at the time: after
the nation-state increased its fiscal patrimony, it sold significant tracts of those lands to secure the
new frontiers by populating them, considering that the Argentinian sovereignty over the newly
acquired Patagonian territory was constantly disputed by Chile, and created a legal scaffolding to
support economic development.
In practice, however, and despite the prevalent geopolitical thinking and rhetoric, the
period is characterized by two contradictions. On the one hand, the terms of sale that were set
made access to the land impossible to those who did not have enough economic or social capital
66

(see Bandieri, 2005).
20
Consequently, the territory was firstly sold to the urban elite of Buenos
Aires, who purchased it for speculative purposes (thus did not develop the land but waited to sell
after the “ordering” and pacification had ended), and later to a few foreign individuals who, in
Santa Cruz, were primarily of British origin.
21
In effect, between 1885 and 1900, the majority of
the concessionaires of large areas of land ceded by the state came from the southernmost part of
Patagonia and would nurture the future elite santacruceña (Bandieri, 2014, p. 170).

20
The postcolonial territorial reorganization was also characterized by the corrupt and influence peddling
practices typical of the Argentine oligarchic nation-state of the time, which is why Harambour (2017, p.
558) has stated that “the European capital and the local nation-state were reciprocally constituted and that
their articulation as a form of individually identifiable yet joint sovereignty (that of capital and that of the
state) occurred on the basis of corruption and the trafficking of favors.”
21
Commercial ties between Britain and Argentina had existed since the beginning of the XIX century, but
the expansion of the railways in the 1880s and the modernization of the cattle industry around 1900
expanded the web of contacts between British and Anglo-Argentines merchants and British landowners,
and the Argentine elites; in fact, by the late 1920s this community “became the largest group of British
expatriates outside the British Empire with the exception of the USA (Rock, 2008, p. 53).
67

Figure 1.2: Image depicting the bust of Carlos Maria Moyano, the first governor of the newly
minted National Territory of Santa Cruz, presently located in the town of Los Antiguos at one of
the extremes of the boardwalk that faces Lago Buenos Aires. (Gonzales, n.d.)

The second contradiction pertains to the effect of compounding those racist immigration
policies and elitist conditions of land ownership with the very nature of the economic activity
sought after by the nation-state and enabled by foreign capital, extensive livestock farming: the
accumulation of land in a small group of estancieros derived in poorly populated latifundios (large
estates) primarily inhabited by sheep and only secondly by seasonal laborers. In this context, the
sheep themselves became the primary postcolonial agent deployed to effectively seize the recently
acquired national territories. To be sure, the ovis aries species (or, sheep) was not new in the
territory as it had already been introduced by Spain, which, together with England, represent two
European nations with some of the most extended histories of sheep farming. The success with
which European nations introduced species in America was highlighted by environmental historian
Crosby (1989, p. 106) who characterized European imperialism as an ecological imperialism
marked not only by “the decimation and demoralization of the aboriginal populations of Canada,
the United States, Argentina and others” but by “the stunning, even awesome success of European
agriculture, that is, the European way of manipulating the environment in the Lands of the
Demographic Takeover.” In fact, the “inundation” of animals from the Old World in Argentina
was singled out by this author, who wrote that “[b]y 1600 enormous feral herds of horses and cattle
surged over the pampas of the Rio de la Plata” (p. 107) and that “[t]he region of Argentina and
Uruguay was almost as radically altered in its flora as in its fauna by the coming of the Europeans,”
just as the cropping of indigenous grasses by the thousands of imported quadrupeds “opened the
whole countryside to European plants” (114). These details notwithstanding, Crosby’s argument
is that the success of the colonists was automatic the moment they put their fast and fertile animals
68

ashore, an action Belcourt also reads as the gesture through which animality [was] made
intelligible and material in the settler imagination” forever tying these colonial animalities to this
colonized space (2015, p. 3). Ultimately, these works help elucidate the multispecies nature of
colonialism—which can be easily extended to postcolonialism, as I suggest here—and to the
instrumentality of domesticated animals to the project of imperialism as a whole.
Consequently, that sheep farming practices found their way in Patagonia is not by any
means surprising. However, what is salient is the political and economic role these animals had in
postcolonial times: considering both the high international commercial demand for food products
that required extensive land to grow and the weak presence of the newly formed nation-state,
“the pioneer front advanced in step with the herds. Anyone who arrived in Patagonia with
the desire to occupy land had to necessarily orient their efforts to sheep farming, the only
tool that enabled access to the entire territory. Among the newcomers, those who lacked
the means to become ovejeros [sheepherders] would undoubtedly make a living in some
link in the ovine production chain, either as peón [simple laborer], carter, shearer, installing
fences or—after 1905—as an employee in a cold storage plant. They most likely were paid
in pounds and managed by an English speaker.” (Coronato, 2010, p. 32).
The “sheep boom” (Sabato, 1989) had started earlier in the most fertile areas of the country, the
Pampas, just north of Patagonia after the civil pacification of Argentina in the 1850s and, crucially,
the establishment of infrastructures such as fences, new techniques in cross-fertilization of breeds,
and the availability of labor. When cooling technologies arrived in the 1870s, cold storage plants
(also largely sustained by English capital) settled in the major ports, pushing the sheep south of
the Pampas that now favored cattle and cereal production. This constitutes the second (northern)
route through which sheep arrived in Patagonia, enabled by the terrestrial communication the
Conquista del Desierto opened and guided by the Englishmen who were settling in the south of
Patagonia (a journey that, in 1887, lasted around two years and during when more than half of the
animals could be lost, see Rivera, 1998). Overall, between 1885 and 1901 the wool exported by
69

the country increased by 100,000 tons (from 128,393 to 228,358, Gorla, 2006) and by 1914 the
sheep population grew six or sevenfold, aided by the construction of the infrastructure that the
project of modernity required, such as roads and bridges, which were privately developed by the
estancieros instead of the nation-state as the governors of the National Territory of Santa Cruz had
little effective power.
Certainly, this historical account has omitted certain events and characters, and this period
is clearly not where the story of sheep farming in Patagonia—nor of Patagonia as a loaded
imaginary space—ends. However, as explained above, there are two main reasons that explain
why this chapter has paid so much attention to what transpired in Patagonia at the dawn of the XX
century. Firstly, because it was during that time that the Patagonian society of Santa Cruz was
constituted, built around the ovine production chain and characterized by extremes, with
landowners or estancieros on one end, organized in the famous Sociedades Rurales (Rural
Societies), and peones on the other, organized in Federaciones Obreras (unions) (see Coronato,
2015). In Bandieri’s words, this economic model of extensive livestock was the “guiding activity
of the settlement process” in most of the Patagonian territories, which ultimately “conferred the
physiognomic characteristics it still maintains today: large spaces distributed among livestock
establishments, significant population gaps and few irrigable valleys, more densely populated,
intended for intensive agriculture” (2014, p. 178). Considering Crosby’s argument, it is also when
the multispecies arrangement that persists today in Santa Cruz was established, an ensemble of
varying numbers of guanacos, pumas, sheep, horses, pastures and not-many-humans, among
others. Bracketing its Eurocentric nature, Juan B. Alberdi’s notion of civilization as something that
sprouts from a cutting better than a seed, meaning as something that is more successfully implanted
from living specimens rather than attempting to locally breed original ones, became true in this
70

moment in time, when the primarily European immigrants that made their way to Patagonia
imprinted on the region a defined set of agricultural practices that would then be taken up by new
generations of locals that, even if with significant differences of magnitude, still carry those
forward today. It is, then, the contemporary reverberations of this past what FRA, Parque
Patagonia and the rewilding initiative are positioned against.
Secondly, because these years mark the moment when the geographical imaginary
surrounding this land shifted: as the image of the cursed Patagonia began to recede, another of
Patagonia as a promised land not unlike the American far west (Harambour, 2019) took its place.
22

To be sure, this space still had remnants of indigenous populations who began hunting sheep for
food as the guanacos lost ground against the herds of the domestic animals brought by the new
landowners, thus giving “cause” for the latter to violently hunt the former. But, whereas before
this desert was empty and cursed, it now unfolded as a promised land before the new historical
subjects, “the pioneers, a multiethnic deluge with thousands of differences and one common
denominator: an unwavering conviction of transforming Patagonia into a powerhouse”
(Casamiquela, 1998, p. 147).
To the rest of the country, these national territories truly remained terra incognita, which
is why one the major newspapers in Buenos Aires—La Nación, which exists to date—
commissioned Roberto Payró in 1898 to travel south and write about them. The result, a
programmatic 700-page volume called The Argentinian Australia, was the first attempt to
symbolically incorporate Patagonia to the nation-state, reconfiguring its predominant imaginary
by displacing the constructions popularized by foreign travelers, especially Darwin. Payró does so

22
In fact, President Roca (1885) used the expression “Argentinian Far West” in a presidential speech
before the Legislative Assembly in 1884.
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by citing other travelers, generally Argentinians, such as Francisco P. Moreno—a crucial figure in
Patagonia, as we shall see later—with whom he agrees in reading Patagonia as “an immense space
with available fertile lands and deposits of raw materials, suitable for raising agrarian colonies and
industrialized cities” instead of the sterile plain described in The Voyage of the Beagle (Ferrante,
2017, p. 115). This Argentinian chronicler was also embedded in the positivist scientism and
paradigm of progress characteristic of the time, and thus singled out the needs to populate, to
establish better communications and to strengthen state presence. However, rather than focusing
on the barbarie of the desert, Payró provides a more generous and complex account of the natives
and overall posits Patagonia as an enrichment and development destiny ready to be seized by
immigrants who would form, our of that melting pot of nationalities and as a result of the physical
medium itself, a new race that would “Argentinize these regions whose cultural detachment and
geographic distance situated these lands outside of the state’s domain” (p. 120).
IN MORE RECENT TIMES
As described above, the sheep industry was the activity that determined the salient characteristics
of the spatial organization of Patagonia during a significant stretch of its history, when it
represented not just the main income source for the region but also was the only possible one given
its territorial vastness. As Coronato explains, “sheep farming was developed by and for the
capitalist market economy” (2015, p. 8). While the imaginary of Patagonia that sustained this
stage, one that saw it as a quasi-El Dorado or a land of promise to be forged by pioneers, continued
into the XX century, there was a shift in the arrangement of actors. This last section describes how
the economic profile of the province shifted and how, consequently, the relative power of the
agricultural producers comparatively dwindled. This description demonstrates how discourse itself
72

rather than the subjects who speak it produces reality, and how different social configurations can
still make meaning around the same support object.
In 1916, the national government ceased granting public land ownership in order to
strengthen its presence in Patagonia and combat the “unproductive” large estates and uncontrolled
grabbing that had in fact occurred. This land freeze coincided with the “sheep boom” that the First
World War brought, which meant that the “pioneers” that continued to enter this now profitable
market had to resort to land-leasing contracts. But the legal landscape was now different: whereas
renters at the end of the leasing contract in 1903 could purchase half of the plot or up to 20,000
hectares if they had invested in soil infrastructure and technologies, such as wells, water tanks or
fences, by 1920 renters and “occupiers” had lost those options.
23
The precariousness of land titles
that derived from the new laws established by the national government significantly burdened
regional development because the uncertainty and lack of security discouraged any long-term
investment or sustainable management practices. It is worth mentioning as well that, while the
First World War itself boosted the sheep sector as there were armies to dress and feed as well as
explosives to make from lanolin, the postwar economic crisis that ensued plummeted the price of
wool while upholding the production costs and loosened the hold of British capitals in the region,
what Coronato calls the “Anglo-pastoral establishment” (2010, p. 61). Altogether, these various
elements led to the prioritization of short-term profits and, consequently, to the overworking of the
ranches, thus setting the conditions for the soil desertification that was to come.

23
During this time, Santa Cruz became a true melting pot as 67% of its inhabitants were foreigners who,
incidentally, brough ideas of anarchism and bolshevism. This also explains why the province saw its first
strike in 1914, which was violently repressed. In fact, Patagonia as whole witnessed many labor strikes and
revolts during this time, all suppressed by the army, which have been studied at length elsewhere (Bayer,
1980, 1998), including a very famous film, La Patagonia Rebelde.
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While the number of sheep in Patagonia continued to grow until 1937 as a result of the
sustained European demand, by 1920 the role of these animals had changed: whereas before the
pioneer front and state presence had advanced in step with these herds, it was now oil, discovered
in 1907, what led the way. On the one hand, the First World War revealed the value of oil as fuel
for military ships, tanks and airplanes, which unleashed an “oil fever” that, in Patagonia, was
marked by the massive influx of foreign capital (like Standard Oil and Royal Dutch; the national
YPF would be formed in 1922). On the other, the financial crisis of 1929 disjointed the production
chain and exports, adding to the alterations the sector had already suffered due to the opening of
the Panama Canal which isolated Patagonia by changing maritime navigation routes. This
notwithstanding, the occupation of the Patagonia territory was completed during the 1930s, even
if the sheep now shared the space with cows up north, oil wells in the central part and guanacos
and pumas everywhere. The national government’s intervention in the region that had started in
1916 intensified after the Second World War, a time that coincided with the country’s second
military government (which introduced Juan Domingo Perón to the political scene) who perceived
Patagonia to be too exposed to foreign influences. Later, during the Peronist governments, even
though the “agrarian reform” was primarily deployed rhetorically, new tax measures were indeed
taken to break up large estates and divide the land into units meant for work rather than financial
speculation. By 1952, the maximum amount of sheep and people Patagonia ever saw had been
reached: 20 million individual sheep tended to by a couple thousand people (the ratio was roughly
1500:1, see Coronato, 2015). And, by 1954, those who had occupied, worked and resided in the
southern parts of Patagonia were finally recognized as definitive owners of the land. However,
despite the number of sheep and people reaching its apex during the 1950s, the relative weight of
the sector in the regional economy kept decreasing later into that decade as well as in the early
74

1960s, years that witnessed an oil boom brought about by the introduction of multinational oil
corporations in Patagonia. It was around this time that populations and cities grew near the oil
fields, such as Comodoro Rivadavia, a city that, to date, is the closest destination to PNP one can
fly into (in fact, the airport was developed as a result of the oil industry). To this, other industries
were added such as fishing and coal, as well as fierce competition from synthetic fibers and other
international producers, such as Australia and New Zealand.
The aforementioned change in the legal ownership of the lands occurred in tandem with a
change in the legal status of Patagonia itself: between 1955-1958, almost all of what were known
as “national territories” were converted into provinces (excluding Tierra del Fuego), effectively
shifting the locus away from a central power that governed entirely remotely. By then, the
hydrocarbon activity had been consolidated, something that not only deepened the gradual
replacement of the development model centered on extensive livestock exploitation, but also
reinforced the economic and demographic concentration of areas other than the ones that hosted
the population more closely associated with that development model. Towards the end of the
1960s, the newly created regional governments begun acting on what had become by then the most
significant socio-environmental problem of Patagonia—soil desertification—created by an
agricultural system that was not exactly appropriate for a fragile ecosystem. With the help of the
newly minted National Agricultural Technology Institute (INTA), it became clear that, because of
the optimistic overload that occurred early into the (post)colonization of Patagonia, the
deterioration of the fields made it increasingly difficult to sustain a sheep load that would turn a
profit. Consequently, the “cycle of territory occupation by sheep that began at the end of the XIX
century and that was dazzling until the 1910s, wavering during the 1930s and stagnant in the 1950s,
had entered its downward phase” (Coronato, 2015, p. 13). During this time, it was mostly new
75

owners of smaller and less productive plots that had to endure the consequences, as well as
different individuals considering that the ownership of those latifundia of yesteryear exchanged
hands, going from primary British capital to Argentine capital, in a domino effect that started in
the 1970s. This means that, although the sheep industry had always been perceived as a
nationalistic trait in Patagonia, it was not until the activity entered its downward slope that locals
became owners of the land that was now vacated from the foreign capital that, always following a
profit logic, had originally fashioned it into being.
The 1980s and 1990s continued to be poor years for the activity, during which producers
had to deal with a particularly harsh winter that killed several animals, causing many to repopulate
the surfaces further overloading the soil, as well with the eruption of Mount Hudson in 1991, which
covered the steppe in ashes, caused the death of thousands of animals and rendered pastures
useless. This was accompanied by a pronounced fall of the price of wool: in 1993, producing one
kilo of wool cost in Patagonia US$3.5 while the selling price was US$1.5 (Bandieri, 2014). All of
this combined with the perennially unstable national economy and the soil desertification
phenomenon, prompted the abandonment of many estancias that, despite public subsidies and the
technical support of INTA, had turned economically unviable. Since then, many public policies
have been rolled out to help recuperate the vitality of the soil and help sustain and modernize
agricultural production, including, among others, the PAN or National Action Program to Fight
Desertification, Soil Degradation and Drought Mitigation, which, though created in 1995, was
updated in 2019 to reflect the goals established by the United Nation’s 2030 Agenda for
Sustainable Development; PROLANA, a national program created in 1994 that seeks to assist
sheep producers in the improvement of the wool’s quality, presentation and selling conditions; and
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SIPyM, a Price and Market Information System that supplies the almost non-existent information
available to Argentine wool producers.
According to the most recent official productive report for the province of Santa Cruz, a
significant recovery of the provincial sheep stock and a repopulation process of the properties
began in 2005 (Bevilacqua et al., 2018). Today, some estancias continue to be large—23% have
more than 5,000 sheep—but the majority are smaller, with 39% of establishments reporting
between 1,000 and 5,000 sheep, and 38% less than 1,000 sheep. In 2016, the province reported a
total of 2,890 million sheep, roughly 20% of the national total, and 8,800 tons of wool, also 20%
of the national total. The total amount exported in that year represented US$ 32.6 million, and
sheep meat was the primary good exported, amounting to 90% of the national total of sheep meat
exported. Put in context, the weight of the sector is not too large: while the foreign currency that
entered Santa Cruz from agricultural production represented 1,6% of the provincial total, what
came in for the mining sector represented 67%, an exported total of US$ 1.4 billion. Out of the ten
most exported products for 2016, gold was first, bringing in US$1.1 billion; frozen whole prawns
was second, bringing in US$ 370.1 million; crude oil was fourth, accruing US$ 149.5 million; and
wool was eighth, representing an input of US$ 22.6 million (Bevilacqua et al., 2018). Considering
both gold and silver, Santa Cruz represents around half of the entire quantity extracted in the
country, which is why it is the main economic activity. These minerals are primarily concentrated
in the Macizo del Deseado, the very place that Celia, the woman who got me Donuts, mentioned,
all of which is situated to the east of Route 40.
24
In terms of oil, the province of Santa Cruz

24
In 2009, the provincial legislature of Santa Cruz passed a bill that clearly demarcated an area of
“special interest” for the mining sector (see Area de Interés Especial Minero, 2009). This law
allows the mining sector to work to the east of Route 40, while it forbids any mining enterprises
west of Route 40.
77

represents 20% of the national oil extraction total, though the most recent official report mentions
that this production has been receding since 2013. Thirdly, the activity and outputs of the fishing
industry in Santa Cruz, which is heavily oriented toward exports, make it the third fishing province
after Buenos Aires and Chubut.
The last economic activity mentioned in the report is tourism, which is described in tandem
with the national parks the province hosts. In general, by the end of the XX century Southern
Patagonia had become an iconic center for ecotourism, conservation and protected areas.
Specifically, Santa Cruz is the province with the most territory dedicated to protected areas: it
contains seven national parks (which amount to 954,828 hectares) and twenty-seven protected
areas (amounting to 140,633 hectares) (Garmendia, 2016). Among this, there is one national park
that stands out, Parque Nacional Los Glaciares, which is the largest national park in Argentina (it
extends over 727,927 hectares), is a UNESCO World Heritage site and the second most visited
national park in the country (after Parque Nacional Iguazú, home to the homonymous waterfalls)
with an estimated 710,000 annual visits (“Día de los Parques Nacionales en la Argentina,” 2021).
This park is located in the southwest part of the province, a region that contains two locations
entirely developed by and for tourism, El Calafate (the closest city from where to access Los
Glaciares) and El Chaltén—it is right next to Mount Fitz Roy—the main destination for
mountaineering and trekking—it is, in fact, known as the national capital of trekking. The tourism
that the province attracts is rooted in yet another imaginary associated with Patagonia, one that,
once again, reads it as a wilderness. Except that this “wild” Patagonia, though still mystical, is not
to be feared: it is to be visited and “experienced.”

78

OF SUBLIME BEAUTY AND WILDERNESS, THE GREEN DISPLACEMENT PART I
Above, I explored how the export-oriented agrarian modes of production established in Patagonia
were charged with the double task of inserting the newly formed independent country in the
international routes of commerce, but also to effectively populate and thus secure the territory
disputed by neighboring Chile. I also described that, in practice, huge tracts of land for livestock
farming were consolidated in the hands of a few land barons, thus failing to accrue dense
populations that would sustain the Argentinian claims to territorial sovereignty. It is in this context
that the development of national parks needs to be understood: recognizing the failure of the
development model and eyeing international tourism as a new vehicle for (post)colonization,
security and capital accumulation, “the Argentine government founded a national park
administration and carved out a set of protected areas in geopolitically sensitive areas in Northern
and Southern Patagonia” (Mendoza et al., 2017, p. 100). Consequently, the nationalism of the early
XX century found in nature “a symbolic incarnation of the patria [homeland] to be offered for
civic worship” (Scarzanella, 2002, p. 6). This was confirmed by the superintendent of PNP, Pablo
Agnone who, in conversation with me, stated that “starting in the year ’34, the goal, beyond
conservation, was to safeguard and secure the frontier, and deal with issues that had to do with the
demographic development in what pertained to settlement in the national territory.” (Interview, La
Ascensión, 2020). Nahuel Huapi, the first national park established in 1934 under Law 12,103,
was followed by four others (Lanín, Alerces, Perito Moreno, Glaciares) in 1937, all along
Argentina’s southern border with Chile.
PRESERVING WILDERNESS
Scarzanella (2002) has argued that there was a significant American influence in the way
Argentinian national parks came to be, materialized first in the form of individual contacts between
79

politicians—for example, President Theodore Roosevelt visited northern Patagonia in 1913
accompanied by Francisco P. Moreno—and in institutional relations between specialized agencies
or services later—the National Park Service, founded in 1916 and Administración de Parques
Nacionales (APN), created in 1934.
25
Furthermore the law that gave birth to national parks, drafted
by Exequiel Bustillo, a member of the upper, land-owner class who had a significant fondness for
the southern part of the country (and owned an estancia), was directly inspired by the American
and Canadian national parks legislation. By then, what would later become shorthand for a
standardized explanatory frame for conservation history was forming: the so-called “Yellowstone
model,” which involved central state designation of vast areas of scenically monumental land,
removal of indigenous people, and development for tourism (Jacoby, 2003).
It is certainly the case that American and Argentinian national parks worked to “enmesh
the unclaimed and undeveloped wilderness lands of the American West into the social, political
and economic networks of Eastern capitalism” (Grusin, 2004, p. 11). But, though equally crucial
in both cases, the idea of the wilderness encapsulated in American national parks differs from the
desert identified in Patagonia. In the former, wilderness was mixed with the pastoral, understood
as an “inchoate longing for a more ‘natural’ environment” that marked a contemptuous attitude
toward urban life (L. Marx, 2000) which was becoming more prominent for a significant group of
Americans by the 1890s. As Nash explains, by the time American national parks entered the public
sphere, “[n]o longer did the forest and Indian have to be battled in hand-to-hand combat” and “the
qualities of solitude and hardship that had intimidated many pioneers were likely to be
magnetically attractive to their city-dwelling grandchildren” (2014, p. 143). With the “real”

25
Originally, the name of the new public office in charge of administering the development of national
parks was named Dirección Nacional de Parques, though this chapter adopts APN as the single
identificatory name for simplicity.
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frontier closed in 1890, a rhetorical frontier begun to be cultivated, one that centered a masculinist
pioneering as the antidote to the mediocrity and “flabbiness” of the overcivilized man by offering
expansive preserves that would continue to put urbanites in contact with the extinct primitive
conditions of the vanished frontier, contributing to the virility and greatness of a nation that thus
distanced itself from its European origins. Therefore, to the group of American men behind the
formation of parks, from John Muir to Theodore Roosevelt, the point of preserving wild spaces
was to escape the grind of urban life and see the face of God in the high country (Purdy, 2015).
In contrast, in the Argentina of the 1930s, “too much civilization” was not at the root of
the nation’s difficulties. Rather, the National Territories conquered only a couple of decades ago
were still underpopulated—as a result of the economic model that took hold—and underdeveloped,
considering that sheep farming had declined in value by then, affected by the wars and the
economic crisis. Certainly, the notion of the internal frontier developed echoed the Far West
frontier of American origin: both were a quick and effective material and rhetorical means to
nationalize territory by pushing out the native populations. Consequently, the tropes of the desert,
the frontier and the advancing civilization helped to forge the unity and identity of these two
independent nation-states of America, and it is clear that the cultural figure of “national parks”
developed in the United States heavily influenced the formation of those in Argentina. Theodore
Roosevelt’s trip to Patagonia found fertile ground in the figure of Francisco P. Moreno, who was
deeply influenced by the wilderness cult the American president represented and thus asked the
state to actively administer the natural and scenic resources of the National Territories to prevent
private exploitation.
26
However, in the American case, national parks worked to preserve a (white)

26
Zusman (2011) has argued that these American ideas pertaining to conservation, namely the wilderness
cult and the figure of national parks as quasi-sacred land, were actively exported by American statemen and
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wilderness where the moral fiber and identity crux of what America (United States) was, and which
embodied what Americans were—an overall rugged way of pioneering that was now read as cure
to the emasculating city life. In the Argentinean, the construction of national parks was also a
racialized political project but it paralleled and sought to reinforce other policies of the time,
including attraction of immigration, settlement and infrastructure development.
Thus, though still rhetorically casted as apart from (or, in contraposition to) the project of
sociopolitical modernity the nation-state was seeking, the first national parks in Argentina were “a
procedure at the service of initiatives linked to territorial appropriation [that] identified the nation-
state as the only legitimate agent” to create them, and where conservation was implicit “in the
sense of maintenance or recuperation of public ownership of the land and its resources, a necessary
condition to determine its future use in regional development as well as in the economic, social
and spiritual progress of the nation” (all quotes in Fortunato, 2005, p. 334). This crystallized in the
figure of Exequiel Bustillo, who espoused an “eclectic vision” (Bustillo, 1971) steeped in the
territorial expansion logic that wanted to demographically consolidate the Patagonian frontier with
Chile, but that also aspired to preserve land and, crucially, to attract tourism. In this vision, adjacent
towns or cities were important, not only as touristic destinations but as sites of permanent
occupation of the border, places that ultimately would irradiate economic development.
Consequently, the first victories of Bustillo’s APN of the late 1930s included the creation of what
today remain among the most visited cities (known as touristic villas) of Patagonia, namely San
Carlos de Bariloche, La Angostura, Traful and Llao-Llao (including a homonymous hotel, a 5 star
“Golf-Spa” which today remains “the most exclusive resort in Argentine Patagonia” with a

intellectuals as part of an expansionist policy that sought to develop a “common worldview,” an ideological
Pan-Americanism that paved the way for American commercial and political influence in South America.
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“Bustillo wing” of rooms, see Llao Llao, n.d.). The built infrastructure entailed roads (with the
enlisted help of the army), hotels (through low-interest loans offered by APN itself) and train
connections (financed by the State).
What this point in the history of Patagonia reveals is that the socioeconomic and political
reasons that prompted a number of Argentinian explorers and travel chroniclers to reimagine the
Patagonian desert as the new El Dorado also worked to begin reconfiguring Patagonia once more,
bringing it closer to what Mendoza (2017) calls an “alpine wilderness” regional imaginary. Before
the turn of the XIX century, the Argentine Society of Geographers extended the practice of
referring to the landscape and resources of the oriental side of the Patagonian Andes as the
“Argentine Switzerland,” but Bustillo strategically relied on that moniker to transform this
Patagonian space into a place with a particular set of assigned meanings. Therefore, while the idea
of “la Suisse sudaméricaine” preceded Bustillo and was originally conceived to refer to an agrarian
utopia that failed to materialize, it was reconverted into something more akin to a touristic postcard
(Navarro Floria, 2008), marked by a visually stunning chain of mountains surrounded by the bluest
lakes and the greenest forests (see Figure 1.3).
27
This Argentinian Patagonia was imagined as a
series of panoramas, mountains, valleys and lakes, a savage and virgin landscape that refused to
be conquered. In visual terms, this area in the northern part of Patagonia (in the provinces of
Neuquén and Rio Negro) was similar to the Swiss Alpes, the landscape with which the Buenos

27
It is astounding just how much currency the imaginary of Patagonia as another (or “an other”)
Switzerland still has. In January of 2018, Chile and Tompkins Foundation reached a deal, signed by
Michelle Bachelet (then president of Chile) and Kristine McDivitt (the widow of Douglas Tompkins), that
constituted “the largest public/private national park donation in history.” In the promotional video, the 4
million hectares (or 10 million acres) organized as national parks are said to constitute “an area larger than
Switzerland.” The video is accessible in the Tompkins Conservation channel on YouTube
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_wedyEllOM). It can also be accessed through the Patagonia, inc.
website (https://www.patagonia.com/stories/los-parques-patagonia-y-pumalin-se-suman-al-sistema-de-
parques-nacionales-chileno/story-71679.html).
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Aires elite of the time wanted to identify with, but it was further transformed by them to fit the
image associated to that European destination by establishing hunting reserves similar to those that
aristocrats had traditionally created in their properties. However, though Patagonia continued to
be perceived as an empty and vast landscape, Mendoza (2018) has noted that the wilderness
fashioned by the national government only extended to the Andean zone, which was more
aesthetically valuable. What was left was a vast steppe and monte desert marginalized from early
conservation efforts because, given their lack of aesthetic value for parks and tourism, “the steppe
and monte were an extensive natural area earmarked for livestock farming and extractive industries
such as mining and oil production” (Mendoza, 2018, p. 28). In Santa Cruz, this is the area where
FRA helped create PNP and where it has been creating its Parque Patagonia brand, as I will
explore in the following chapter.

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Figure 1.3: Photograph taken from the viewing platform of Cerro Otto in the summer, a
mountain that offers hiking, biking and seasonal cross-country ski trails. Easily accessible by
cable car, this Cerro is located in San Carlos de Bariloche, which was imagined by Exequiel
Bustillo, the first president of the Argentinian Park Service, as a future St Moritz, the famous
Swiss alpine resort. (Author photo, 2020).
Before doing so, it is important to foreground how, at this stage of the formation of the
Patagonian wilderness, the imaginaries and modernity projects attached to the region throughout
the years relied not just on human bodies, economic capital and political institutions. To create a
true Suisse sudaméricaine, exotic animal species were introduced in the region—salmon,
steelhead, sequoias, deer, wild boar, hare—as well as plant species—like rosehip—which managed
to occupy 100% of the urban area of Bariloche at a certain point (Dimitriu, 2001). Consequently,
the northern Patagonia of the 1930s was sustained by a multispecies entanglement that depended
on the inclusion of the desired animals and plants alongside the desired human visitors. Logically,
this extends to the rest of Patagonia as well: Archibald et al. (2020) have expertly demonstrated
how the social imaginaries enacted in southern Patagonia explain or otherwise frame the socio-
ecological processes associated with the introduction of species and the management of their
biological invasions. In agreement with Crosby, they found that the colonization period that
occurred between 1850 and 1930 (meaning, the period described above during which the State
attempted to build the nation through European colonization and settlement) was marked by the
introduction of Eurasian species valued in the European culture as food sources (cows, pigs, goats,
rabbits and sheep), labor (dog and horse) and companionship (dog and cat), which increased the
habitability of the landscape for these immigrants. In the following period, which the authors locate
between 1930 and 1980, they discuss the introduction of trout species, pelt-bearing species like
the North American beaver, muskrat and mink, and reindeer (though this one failed) because of
their economic values vis-à-vis food, fur/fiber industries and recreational activities.
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But, as the basis of the Patagonian imaginary shifted from one of production to one of
admiration, the lens that valued animals for their productive value changed to one that appraised
them from their aesthetics, namely because they truly belonged in that landscape and thus
enhanced the authentic wilderness experience that ecotourism would later capitalize on. This is
visible in the last period Archibald et al. discuss which extends from the 1980s until present time
and, because it prioritizes conservation of the ecosystem, is characterized by multiple control
attempts of some of the invasive species previously introduced for their development potential,
such as the North American beaver, muskrat and mink, Chinook salmon, European rabbit, feral
dogs and horses. The authors attribute the shift this period demonstrates to the influence of the
emerging sub-discipline of invasion biology as well as the increasing influence of international
conservation NGOs and the tourism industry. Although they do not explicitly mention it, what
logically follows from these authors’ argument is that, just as introduced species were subject to
control strategies, native species were subject to conservation strategies.

CONCLUDING REMARKS
This chapter has explored how, through time, the region and the idea of Patagonia have served
similar discursive and material purposes, even as the characterization of this land as a wilderness
changed. Firstly, even though humans had been living in it for millennia, the Europeans of the XVI
century simultaneously thought of it as empty and inhabited by fantastic creatures, and, although
the medieval monsters disappeared after the “visits” of the first explorers, their narrations would
cement Patagonia as a heavily imagined place. At that time, the Patagonian imaginary constructed
by the European settlers worked to justify imperial colonization and its liminal state helped define
imperial modernity. Later, the Patagonia of the XIX century aided in the construction of the
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postcolonial nation-state, also done through territorial conquest and expansion, as it continued to
present native peoples as unruly and backward “Indians” whose barbarism condemned them to
become nothing more than a prehistoric race.
However, while those who inhabited Patagonia at this time were still considered barbarians
by the new ruling elite, the land itself, partly thanks to the new writings of new Argentinian
explorers, no longer seemed so scary. It was still mysterious, but what had been occupied by
monsters and giants before was now brimming with promise, a frontier land ready to be reaped by
pioneers. The political elites of the young nation-state wanted to populate Patagonia with yeoman
farmers that would cultivate livestock for the world market, particularly with sheep that would
facilitate that international and national Patagonian integration. As we saw, in practice, the policies
put in place consolidated the power of foreign capitalists who developed oligarchic control over
latifundia, as well as over other commercial activities such as those pertaining to frigorificos
(cooling infrastructures). In practical terms, these colonos or settlers were drawing from the land
resources for substance living as well as cultivating livestock to be sold in Atlantic ports for the
world market. In political terms, they were functioning as “agents” of the postcolonial state’s
colonization project; both this set of humans and this set of animals were pushing the frontier
forward, attempting to conquer empty/emptied savage, brutal, backward space. One hundred years
later, these colonos would become the new backward.
Before that, though, this modernity project expanded over Patagonia, reaching its apex in
the 1950s and slowly loosing relative weight amidst other economic activities that were now far
more lucrative, like mining, fishing and oil production. Acknowledging some of the limitations of
the applied model, starting in 1930, the upper-class conservationists of the Buenos Aires elite
promulgated the creation of a system of national parks located in geopolitically sensitive zones,
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like Patagonia, where the border with Chile was far from settled. As explained, while politically
motivated, the elite also regarded parks as mechanisms for tourism-led development based on
urban centers, hence why Exequiel Bustillo (the president of APN) referred to his vision as an
“eclectic” one. It is in this context that the imaginary surrounding Patagonia and, therefore, its
standing as a wilderness starts to shift once again, from a land to be reaped to a landscape to be
admired and visited by privileged tourists. Because the ruling elites were still very much oriented
towards Europe and steeped in Eurocentric values and fashion, Andean Patagonia was
aestheticized as a local version of the Swiss Alps. The less aesthetically pleasing parts of
Patagonia, those that failed to meet the spectacular wilderness criteria, were not turned into
protected areas and, in fact, carried on in the form of agricultural ranches. That territory and others
like it in Patagonia are deeply woven in the identity of Argentina as an independent Republic, and
its people carry with pride their ancestors’ history as pioneers. This analysis lays the groundwork
necessary to understand how the third imaginary that I will expose in the following chapter works
as a support object for a discourse that became “a starting point for an opposing strategy”
(Foucault, 1980, p. 101), an altogether different instantiation of wilderness as a discursive
formation.

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CHAPTER 2. EL SUEÑO DE DOUG

As the story goes, Hansjörg Wyss, a Swiss billionaire and personal friend of Douglas Tompkins
was invited one day in April of 2011 to tour the surroundings of Tompkins estancia “Valle
Chacabuco” in the south of Chile. The plan Tompkins had devised entailed crossing the border to
Argentina through the point of entry located in Los Antiguos and drive through the semiarid terrain
until they reached a more alpine-like landscape. Out on the road, the two friends and their wives
managed to cross the border but their gray Nissan got stuck in Santa Cruz due to snow. As reported
(see Mantero, 2018),
28
Tompkins’ friend Wyss had recently climbed Denali, the highest mountain
peak in North America, which is why the prospect of walking 26 kilometers until the next
Gendarmeria post (an equivalent to U.S. Customs and Border Patrol) did not seem too grueling,
despite the fact that he was then 76 years old. So, the party of four reportedly walked for five hours
through the Patagonian immensity, framed by snowed peaks on one side and the binational Buenos
Aires/General Carrera Lake on the other. That night, after the arduous day, sitting around the
campfire and revisiting the trip that was coming to an end, the article reports that Wyss said:
“ – Why don’t we make a binational park?
– What do you mean?, asked Tompkins
– Well, that we extend Valle Chacabuco Park to Argentina; that we get these two nations
to come together through this project in common.” (Mantero, 2018).
At that time, Tompkins was already buying up land in Chile with the intent to donate them to the
State and create PNP-Chile. Thus, Wyss decided that to turn this idea into a reality, he would
allocate a portion of his 5.8-billion-dollar fortune—obtained from founding and chairing Synthes,

28
Please note, the author of this newspaper article Luciana Mantero who is a journalist but also the wife of
Marcos Peña who, at that time, was serving as Chief of the Cabinet of Ministers (equivalent to the U.S.
White House Chief of Staff) and had worked closely with then President Mauricio Macri since 2003. This
is the only article
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a medical device manufacturing company—begin buying land on the Argentinian side until both
PNPs met and formed a “peace park.” Tompkins thought that that was a fantastic idea, which is
why “he grabbed a piece of paper and a map, and they started to identify properties, make copies
of maps, study the landowners and analyze the costs… In half an hour, everything was planned”
(Mantero, 2018). It is impossible to know whether this colorful story has some truth to it, though
it is the narrative FRA’s CEO has described in a recent documentary (see Dickinson, 2021) and
what a reputable medium has published (see Mantero, 2018). But it certainly is the mythical origin
story that people in Santa Cruz read and the only approximation to the character of the individual
whose fortune was shaping the landscape where some of them still made their living.
In this story, I argue that Wyss and Tompkins act as if this part of Patagonia was still terra
nullius. Even though, in the retelling, they acknowledge that the land was owned by someone,
these individuals appear equally “mobile,” “unrooted” or otherwise easily removable as the native
populations appeared to the Europeans first and to criollos later. Both cases are enactments of
similar power arrangements, each sustained by different discursive formations centered on a
fictional “wild”: in one case, the postcolonial state seeks to (re)claim a swath of arable land for
nation-building and economic development purposes while, in the other, an international actor
operating in a neocolonial fashion wants to (re)claim the same swath of a now pristine land for
conservation and ecotourism purposes. What is different is the means through which this is
enacted: if the breech-loading Remington rifle was instrumental in the removal of those who lived
in southern Patagonia in the XIX and early XX century, it is philanthropic capital delivered in U.S.
dollars what oils the displacement machine of the XXI. .
Although much of the discourse about rewilding tends to focus on “letting nature do its
thing” so that it can, presumably, become wild again, this is still a conservation practice and, as
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such, it is fundamentally spatial. As Adams (2019, p. 789) has noted, at the core of conservation
as a sociopolitical practice lies “the demarcation of spaces as protected areas within which rules
control what humans (and non-humans) do.” Indeed, conservation has always been about making
or producing space (and time) (Hughes, 2005), aiming to secure territory for nonhuman lives, and
implementing new management practices that tend to be in detriment of people living in or near
them who are in excess of the defined interests of the conservation planners or administrators.
Thus, re-centering re-wilding within the fold of conservation highlights its inherently political
nature: forming national parks, managing species in the territory and establishing tourist lodges
are forms of ordering society and nature or, given the historic plasticity of Patagonia and its
dwellers, about re-ordering people’s lives, environments and futures. Connecting back to the
previously described history of Patagonia, this chapter argues that the PNP/PP/Rewilding project
constitutes another instantiation of accumulation by dispossession, one that, though tinted green,
nonetheless imposes spatial arrangements, conservation practices and a specific economic model,
opening up nature to new economic actors.
Furthermore, the Patagonia that Wyss and Tompkins in that quoted excerpt are trying to
protect by creating a binational park is a wild space that can be explored, walked, toured or
otherwise joyfully visited. This amounts to an experience that, by reconnecting the visitor to its
very own wild side, can be transcendental and so transformative that can bring that individual “in
touch with that primal self that has been lost in humanity’s descent into modernity” (Braun, 2003,
p. 194). This conception of Patagonia as a wilderness experience or a wilderness with touristic
appeal is at the root of the third imaginary which, though introduced in the previous chapter, will
be explored here. Just as the previous two imaginaries discussed, this representation of Patagonia
works as Foucauldian support, an object-idea around which a collection of fragments is anchored,
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though it works to sustain and enact a different discourse. Consequently, this chapter outlines the
different set of spatial arrangements; new techniques and technologies; different language and
fragments of other discourses; and distinct economic practices brought together by a different logic
that altogether make up the contemporary discursive reconstitution of wilderness I identify as
“Rewilding Patagonia.” To be sure this is not an exhaustive account and some elements that
constitute this heterogenous ensemble will be developed further in the following chapters. Here, I
specifically focus on how this discourse seeks to greenly (re)incorporate Patagonia into networks
of global capital by foregrounding how the protected areas FRA is sponsoring in northwest Santa
Cruz are key conduits for further commodifying a region that has been made to enter global
capitalism as a destination.

OF SUBLIME BEAUTY AND WILDERNESS, THE GREEN DISPLACEMENT PART II
Douglas Tompkins, Hansjörg Wyss, Ted Turner, Ward Lay (Pepsico), George Soros, Luciano
Benetton, Joseph Lewis, Sylvester Stallone, Sharon Stone and Christopher Lambert are some of
the most prominent international figures—celebrities, billionaires, industry tycoons, etc.—who
own land in Patagonia (Argentina and Chile). Although they are all part of what Holmes (2011)
calls a well-connected and networked transnational elite, some of these individuals are single-
handedly shaping conservation discourses and practices in a structural and influential way. Their
powerful stance responds to a broader context that, since the 1970s, has been actively linking
capitalism and conservation, effectively shifting the focus from “how nature is used in and through
the expansion of capitalism to how nature is conserved in and through the expansion of capitalism”
(Büscher et al., 2012, p. 4). In effect, since the consolidation of neoliberalism, new approaches to
conservation have appeared, ones that sought to move past the more traditional state-centered
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“fortress” style management (Brockington, 2002) at the same time that they became increasingly
steeped in a neoliberal ideology that aimed to subject political, social and ecological affairs to
capitalist market dynamics (see also Chapter 5).
One of the ways through which this convergence of neoliberal capitalism and conservation
manifests is ecotourism, the type of adventurous travel Wyss and Tompkins were described as
doing in the opening excerpt. This economic practice connects tourism and wildlife conservation
and it is at the center of the new modernity development model pedaled by FRA. Certainly, this is
“a very crude link” and Chapter 5 will explore in depth the irreparable tensions that emerge
between conservation-as-care for other species in an Anthropocene marked by biodiversity loss
and conservation-as-development. Yet, ecotourism is introduced here because, in the northwest
region of Santa Cruz this dissertation is concerned with, FRA is laboring to position this and its
related activities and practices (namely, different entrepreneurial ventures from horseback riding
offerings to baked goods) as a legitimate, progressive and sustainable—both financially for the
local “entrepreneurs” and environmentally—path forward for the province. As such, although
exploited in non-material ways (e.g. “experiences,” like “Let the Wild discover you” (Fundación
Rewilding Argentina, 2021b) or photographs), these areas remain capitalist spaces to be consumed
in the global marketplace (Brockington et al., 2008; West & Carrier, 2004), further demonstrating
how the neoliberalization of conservation manifests in the Global South.
GRABBING GREEN
The term “grabbing” usually goes in tandem with appropriation and accumulation, following a
Marxist understanding of “primitive accumulation” (see Banaji, 1973; Marx, 2004). More
commonly deployed, though, is the term “accumulation by dispossession”—“the enclosure of
public assets by private interests for profit, resulting in greater social inequity” (Bakker, 2005, p.
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543)—which David Harvey (2005, 2006) has argued represents the continuation and proliferation
of accumulation practices under neoliberalism. As was explained above, the appropriation of
Patagonia as a terra incognita presumed nullius in the XVI century ordered power relations
following a colonial scheme that accumulated wealth for European metropolises by taking
possession of an entire new continent, while the re-appropriation of Patagonia during the late XIX
and early XX centuries sustained a postcolonial formation meant to strengthen the nascent national
state and insert the young republic as a natural resource-heavy international economic partner by
dispossessing native peoples of their land.
Recently, the appropriation of land for environmental ends has become popularized as
“green grabbing,” a term that is employed whenever “green” credentials, particularly the ones
flashed by “conservationists with deep pockets” (Vidal, 2008), are called upon to justify
appropriations of land. Interestingly, the journalist who coined this term clearly connected it to
colonialism, even if he omitted the postcolonial experiences of the “poor countries” he referred to:
“First colonialists took control of [poor] countries and communities in order to expropriate their
resources, then the conservationists came and did exactly the same thing,” though in the name of
saving the environment (Vidal, 2008). Almost presciently describing FRA’s future work in
Patagonia, this author described environmental non-profits as groups that are now suddenly
allowed to “collect money, employ police, build hotels and (…) dictate how land inside the parks
should be used” as well as “whether communities can live or hunt there” (Vidal, 2008).
While neocolonialism necessarily operates through global capitalism, protected
conservation areas already operated under a capitalist logic before. In Büscher et al. words,
“protected conservation areas, while commonly framed by proponents as bastions of
pristine nature standing opposed to the base forces of predatory capitalism, have, in fact,
always been connected with processes of capitalist commodification, particularly in the
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form of the nature-based tourism (e.g. safari trips, trophy hunting) commonly promoted
inside them. Yet in the neoliberal age, this commodification has intensified and
transformed to a degree unimaginable in those halcyon days of yore. Hence, one of the
first moves of Nature
TM
Inc. was to magnify and transform this nature-based recreation—
now labeled ‘ecotourism’—as an ostensibly ‘nonconsumptive’ (and thus sustainable) form
of income generation” (2014, p. 12).
The difference, then, is that the commodification that the natural environment already evinced was
intensified and re-purposed as a sustainable way forward, a means by which capitalism could
continue to reproduce itself through the negation of its own negative impacts on the physical
environment and those humans and non-humans that inhabit it—what (Büscher, 2012, p. 29) calls
the “paradoxical idea that capitalist markets are the answer to their own ecological contradictions.”
In this context, green grabbing (and the conservation enclosures it gives way to) is not just
about physical land grabs; given the neoliberal fiber that runs through this concept, it also entails
“the privatization of rights to nature, the creation of new commodities and markets from
nature, the green sanction for otherwise declining forms of capital accumulation and the
disabling of institutions that could pose threats to expanded accumulation” (Corson et al.,
2013, p. 264).
As these new ventures take place, notions of what and who is green (and what and who is not)
come to be defined and mobilized in particular ways, effectively restructuring the rules and
authority over access, use and management of resources (Fairhead et al., 2012).
“Green,” then, is the new commodity in Patagonia, much like “sheep” used to be. The same
land that was organized as estancias in the XIX century is now being (re)enclosed through green
grabs that “operate under the guise of addressing the global environmental crisis,” and that are
“cultivated beyond the state through transnational networks of public, private and not-for-profit
organizations that reproduce, within domains of international environmental policy-making, the
conditions crucial to accumulation” (Corson & MacDonald, 2012, pp. 263, 264). Certainly, the
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history of this region, explored in the previous chapter, demonstrates that land grabs are not a new
phenomenon, though there is novelty in “the new mechanisms of land control, their justifications,
and alliances for ‘taking back’ the land, as well as the political economic context of neoliberalism
that dominates this particular stage of the capitalist world system” (Peluso & Lund, 2011, p. 672).
Part of the novelty also lies in the actors who are now grabbing land in “faraway places.”
One element that has significantly contributed to the neoliberalization of biodiversity conservation
is philanthropy, which in the U.S. is predominantly associated with rich individuals—who tend to
be white, male and Western, although otherwise heterogenous—that redistribute their income and
whose foundations epitomize the idea of using the benefits of enterprise for the long-term, large-
scale modernization of society (Gross, 2003; Rogers, 2011; Vogel, 2006). As many have argued
(Brockington & Scholfield, 2010; M. Edwards, 2011; Igoe et al., 2010; Vogel, 2006), philanthropy
makes capitalism look good, brushing aside its negative effects, and facilitates its continuation and
expansion by reducing opposition to that presented vision of capitalism as a positive force.
Philanthropy in the U.S. (and Western Europe) is also commonly synonymous with “wildlands
philanthropy” which is solely concerned with the conservation of “wild country” (Butler et al.,
2012). This is due to the fact that, traditionally, conservationists have favored the idea of a “green
environment” that operates on a stark nature/culture divide and thus actively excludes any human
contribution (other than rhetorically mobilizing the anthropogenic negative effects on the
environment) or potential for benefit. This type of environmentalism rests on ideas of pristine
nature and wilderness, which is why much of the conservation activities sponsored by this
“wildlands philanthropy” include the protection and extension of wilderness areas as well as the
creation of new ones (see Wolmer, 2007).
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Chapter 5 specifically outlines the role that non-traditional actors such as Foundations or
NGOs play in modern conservation, but those organizations typically start with a set of wealthy
individuals who believe in the basic tenet of philanthropy, that that private wealth accumulated in
a capitalist economy under the law of competition morally needs to be used for the greater good,
and thus redirect a portion of their profits to endowing them. Brockington outlined the character
of these wealthy conservationists as “independent individuals who set out to pursue their own
agenda because they believe it to be right, or because it makes good business sense as part of
tourism ventures,” and urged more consideration of their role in conservation because “they have
the scope to do what they want in many countries, and the resources to quell or dissuade most
opposition” (2009, p. 103). Consequently, this chapter pays special attention to Douglas Tompkins
and chapter 5 does the same with his wife, Kris Tompkins, because their philosophies, visions,
desires and values have functioned as the guiding principles for all the work done and attempted
in Patagonia. However, these individuals are representatives of a transnational conservation elite
that, by way of their economic, social and political capital, get to set agendas and influence policies
by exploiting some of the structural weakness of countries in the global South (see also Chapter
3), exemplifying why “global conservation continues to function as a neocolonial enterprise”
(Kashwan et al., 2021, p. 15). Furthermore, they get to assert discursive hegemony over key ideas,
terms, representations and practices of what good conservation is and should look like, and to
position themselves and the many foundations and other nonprofits they sustain as good. Thus,
they are key to this story because they are the primary actors through which “Rewilding Patagonia”
as a discursive formation produces knowledge, human and nonhuman subjects and through whom
power is relayed.

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THE DREAM
Douglas Rainsford Tompkins, who was born to descendants from the Mayflower and raised in
New York City’s Greenwich village, was an excellent salesman. In 1965, he created The North
Face, a company that produced and sold outdoor gear and apparel, which he named after his own
way of approaching life: “I prefer the more difficult side. The hard, icy face, The North Face is a
more difficult challenge. I take that route in life” (Franklin, 2021, p. 16). Founded when he was
twenty-one years old, this was just the first of two brands he would create and turn into
international corporations. After selling The North Face, he created Esprit de corps, which was
the “cool teens” label during the 70s and 80s and where Tompkins was the “image director”
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given that he excelled at designing the retail and brand experience. By the late eighties, just as his
company was struggling financially and his marriage was about to end, Tompkins had reportedly
grown disillusioned with the fashion industry and the effects of consumerism on the planet. This
is when he “immersed himself in books about deep ecology, which called for a broader
understanding of ecosystems and a less human-centric view of nature” (O’Donnell, 2021). Within
months of selling his shares in Esprit, Tompkins endowed the Foundation for Deep Ecology, “a
private charitable foundation dedicated to supporting conservation activism” (Milestones, 1991-
present, n.d.) with US$50 million which was, coincidentally, the maximum initial tax-exempt
endowment admissible under California law. The nonprofit was designed as a vehicle to invest his
and others’ fortunes in environmental causes through seed capital grants, activist conferences and
wildland preservation campaigns. The philosophy behind this Foundation was an eco-centric one
that derided the human hubris that prioritized one species above all others and failed to see that

29
In fact, his attention to detail and expertise in crafting brand identity was such that Steve Jobs would later
mold the early Apple flagship stores as an indirect tribute to the retail experience crafter by Esprit (which
it was known for) and ordered his team to buy copies of the six-pound book Tompkins wrote, Esprit: The
Comprehensive Design Principle (Franklin, 2021, p. 96; see also Singer, 2015).
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“the dream of perpetual economic growth on a finite planet would inevitably lead to environmental
catastrophe” (Franklin, 2021, p. 101).
This fueled Tompkins’ land purchases in Chile, the first part of Patagonia he decided to
own in order to preserve and where he first envisioned his “shrine to nature—a 500,000-acre park
in the wilds of Patagonia (…) ‘the largest private nature reserve in the world’” (Franklin and
Tompkins quoted on Franklin, 2021, p. 147).
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Tompkins then continued to purchase land in Chile
from the Pacific Ocean all the way up the Andes to the border with Argentina, to the point that his
holdings had chopped Chile in two halves. What Chileans read as a threat to their sovereignty
Tompkins regarded a random by-product of his conservation dreams, something his wife would
mockingly remember in 2016 when she stated that “we were famously called the couple that cut
Chile in half” (Outside TV, 2016).
What made locals uneasy was not just that they distrusted his promise to return the land to
the nation-state, but that Tompkins did not demonstrate a clear strategy because it seemed, and
with reason, that he purchased land whenever he saw something that he liked. Amidst simultaneous
projects and multiple properties purchased, in 2014 Tompkins had what his biographer calls “his
wildest idea yet” (Franklin, 2021, p.63): rebranding the disparate ecosystems he owned as a single
entity and pitching it as the Route of Parks (see also Chapter 4). This meant that, preparing to cede
their properties to the Chilean government to finally create national, the couple decided to “bundle”
their fungible properties “into a single take-it-or-leave-it offer to the government.” In material
terms, the Chilean park service would receive this mega-donation for which the government had
to, in exchange, create five new national parks and enlarge three existing ones. The Tompkins offer

30
Using the upper floor of the local Esprit, Tompkins sketched out a park half the size of Yosemite based
on the maps he had gathered, a park that would, after decades of bitter political struggle, officially became
Pumalín National Park in 2018 (see McDivitt Tompkins, 2018).
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was eventually accepted by President Michele Bachelet, though it happened after Douglas
Tompkins died in a kayaking accident in Chile in 2015.
Encompassing seventeen national parks, this vision is none other than a political stake on
the organization of the territory of a foreign country. Casting aside 1,700 miles of “pristine
landscapes, fragile ecosystems, and diverse local cultures” is not just a conservation project, as I
explored in the previous chapter. “Bundling” all these lands together not only makes Douglas
Tompkins’ legacy more striking but also more alluring to the local governments by offering “a
buffet-style offer to tempt the world,” “an exceptional menu from which to pick and choose”
(Franklin, 2021, p. 264). Ramutsindela et al. (2011) have argued that to understand the
international flows of philanthropy, particularly North-South, one must pay attention to the motive
of the giver as well as the global project the philanthropic capital is being funneled to. Therefore,
while the Route of Parks made each park more valuable from an economic point of view, the idea
of creating a binational park—otherwise known as a peace park and, generally, one of the more
ambitious projects in conservation—also made each of the two Patagonia Parks more valuable and
offered political legitimacy and gravitas to Tompkins Conservation. In fact, peace parks or
transboundary conservation areas are typically packaged through sustainable development
discourse as spaces that will generate private sector investment and become means for the
empowerment of local communities (Wolmer, 2003).
In Santa Cruz, although most locals were caught off-guard when FRA and the national
government attempted to gain jurisdiction over 500,000 hectares in Argentina, the vision behind
this expansion had already been announced, albeit almost in passing, in the press. In 2016, a
popular magazine reported that what motivated FRA to continue buying land was that the plateau
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of the Buenos Aires Lake represented an irreplaceable conservation area, though it also mentioned
that
“The dream is, eventually, to be able to create a large binational park that includes Valle
Chacabuco, that is just beyond the border with Chile (a paradisaic place), and the area that
extends from the Buenos Aires Lake plateau and the Rio Pinturas Canyon” (Aizen, 2016, p.
41, emphasis added).
In fact, before the controversy around the project became untenable, an earlier webpage for
Fundación Flora y Fauna, the previous incarnation of FRA, stated that
“Our dream is that, one day, this park will join the Patagonia National Park being created
in Chile so that a great binational park and touristic destination can be formed between
the two countries, in what could be the Yellowstone of South America” (Fundación Flora
y Fauna, n.d.)
This quote demonstrates a clear minimization of the historical political processes of the region,
considering that Yellowstone is a park that encompasses three states within the same country and
not two different countries who, coincidentally, have a bitter shared history in what pertains to
establishing their identities as nation-states through the occupation of Patagonia. In terms of
“peace-building,” it is unclear (and never developed nor rhetorically deployed) why this initiative
would give way to international collaboration considering the aforementioned sociopolitical
context, on top of the fact that protected areas already typically engender conflicts over space and
other normative disputes. In terms of “biocorridors,” a common justification for this type of parks,
much is unknown about Southern cougars (see Chapter 5), one of the primary terrestrial animals
targeted by the Foundation, and it is therefore unclear how successful these migratory routes might
be. This is why, ultimately, scholars have posited that transboundary conservation can be a
mechanism that enables “already powerful actors to further advance international conservation
agendas while ignoring the lessons learned from national park planning,” especially when it comes
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to the role of “external foundations and NGOs in shaping social and ecological policies in the
developing world” (King & Wilcox, 2008, p. 229).
The Foundation’s intentions in Argentina became clearer as PNP was officially becoming
a national park, when in different meetings with local people they unveiled “the dream,” as Marina
Basalo, the tourism secretary in Los Antiguos who was a key figure in effecting the original PNP
explained. As mentioned in the introduction of this work, in order for a national park to be created
in Argentina, two laws need to be passed: one at the provincial level, which transfers jurisdiction
and domain over a specific portion of the land, and one at the national level, which accepts that
donation and effectively creates the park. Between the approval of the corresponding laws at the
provincial and national levels, FRA invited APN and Basalo to discuss a management plan and
communication strategy around the park. That meeting was the first time that she learned about
“the dream,” “the vision”: a protected area that started from the neighboring town of Perito Moreno
to the east and went past Chile to the west. For her,
“that is when they started with this territorial expansion strategy, it was obvious that there
was a territorial goal and not so much a conservation one like with the case of the lagoons
high up the plateau, which is where the macá tobiano nests and is what we understood to
be an inalienable responsibility of the province of Santa Cruz” (Basalo, interview, Los
Antiguos, 2020).
Cordoning off a part of the province to create a national park made sense to her because caring for
the macá was perceived as a duty, seeing as the bird only nests in a few spots in the plateaus of the
province. This is not uncommon, as non-human life is primarily thought about at a national level,
as a “ward of the state” (Neumann, 2004). Thus, when FRA started to propose an expansion of
that cordoned off area by articulating conservation-based arguments that, to Basalo, were really
basic or vague (such as establishing terrestrial wildlife corridors for the macá, who is a bird and
therefore flies) she began to question which species they were seeking to preserve and whether
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that was justified. Later, after seeing first-hand their territorial expansion and receiving a lot of
pressure to keep the project moving forward, Basalo believed that, ultimately
“this was really a discussion about the destiny of the region, which they wanted to base,
almost capriciously, in some individual person’s dream, where there no longer were any
real conservation elements. It had to do with his forever dream (…) As a conservationist,
this was about obtaining the cocarde of having created a binational park.”
In this context, then, the national park and its desired expansion become more than conservation
goals in themselves; instead, it is possible to begin regarding them as spatial arrangements that
belong to a particular discursive formation of wilderness that needs a certain array of heterogenous
elements, which form a unit through a particular political and economic logic, to become dominant.
SELLING WILDERNESS
In the previous chapter, I built on the work of Archibald et al (2020), who offer a characterization
of how different Patagonian social imaginaries gave way to specific arrangements of
introduced/native animal species. These authors offer a crucial argument in relation to the last of
these constructions, which is that it characterizes Patagonian spaces as “wild and pristine
landscapes for the world, rather than as only national province or local resource (Archibald et al.,
2020, p. 3319).” Although originally limited to Tierra del Fuego (one of the five provinces of
Patagonia), I argue that this characterization can not only be extended to other places in Patagonia,
including Santa Cruz, but that it is at the center of Patagonia’s third discursive construction, the
one that coincides not just with conservation work but with ecotourism. This discursive
(re)construction of Patagonia as a (now positively) sublime, wild and pristine place casts this space
as a playground for well-to-do individuals, what Fletcher (2014) calls a globe-trotting, upper
middle class, as it simultaneously resurfaces it as a place of interest for the new powerful figure of
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the moment: ecophilanthropists. Perhaps, this is nowhere more clearly stated than in a recent piece
in The Atlantic, which begins by stating:
“Patagonia as many of us imagine it was born in 1968. That year, the vast region of South
America became an exotic destination for outdoor adventure. Of course, residents of Chile
and Argentina did not need their backyard discovered any more than Native Americans
needed Christopher Columbus. But to a group of young men in California, the landscape
held a mystical appeal” (O’Donnell, 2021).
These men visited Patagonia for the first time that year hoping to conquer the peak of the Mount
Fitz Roy which, until then, had never been summited by an American and had only been climbed
twice before. One of them, Yvon Chouinard, would later found outdoor-apparel company
Patagonia, inc. whose logo to date is, in fact, an outline of Mount Fitz Roy. Another was Douglas
Tompkins who, as mentioned above, would almost single-handedly decide the course of thousands
of hectares of the land he professed to love. In so doing, he profoundly set a course that wants to
see Santa Cruz adopt a new modernity model.
Almost echoing Theodore Roosevelt and romantic American notions of “the wild,” for
Tompkins the “wilderness experience” stood against urban living, as a remedy and “antidote to
urban ills” (Franklin, 2021, p. 140). The black and white photograph of Mount Fitz Roy Tompkins
came across in 1968, a mountain that “had long been shrouded in mystery,” as well as the trip he
took to Patagonia, “a land as mythical as it was tempting,” would be influential enough to flip “his
life compass (…) from Northern Hemisphere to Southern Hemisphere” (all quotes from Franklin,
2021, p. 35). For him, Patagonia was an ideal playground where he himself could become “wild”
again. As his biographer notes:
“Tompkins loved the pioneer experience. By day, he kayaked the remote fjords swarming
with black-and-white dolphins. He ice-climbed to remote glaciers with friends when they
could penetrate the weather to visit him from the Northern Hemisphere. When hungry, he
fished from either riverbank or kayak, and he harvested vegetables from his recently
constructed greenhouse” (Franklin, 2021, p. 129).
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Tompkins wanted to go back in time himself and to stop “progress” in any form, from bridges to
new roads, from entering Patagonia because “come road, come destruction” (Tompkins, quoted in
Franklin, 2021, p. 133). Tompkins, Chouinard and others were part of a marginal counterculture
of the 1960s that regarded their adventurous pursuits as attempts at escaping the anxiety, alienation
and dissatisfaction associated with urban labor and its routines, and opportunities to immerse
oneself in what Fletcher calls “a timeless wilderness where one can achieve a sense of peace and
freedom ostensibly unattainable within the confines of (post) industrial civilization” (2014, p. 4).
This quest for the exotic is at the heart of the ecotourism experience, a commercial activity that is
commonly described as “travel in pursuit of a non-extractive encounter with an in situ ‘natural’
landscape” (Fletcher, 2014, p. 7).
The vision that sustains this activity is akin to the one described in the introduction of this
work and mentioned above, namely one that reads “wilderness” as a construction exactly opposite
to “civilization” and that, by its very nature, works as an antidote to the perceived ills of modern
industrial life. In this construction, “the wild” either has no humans residing in it (it needs to be
empty or emptied of people to work rhetorically) or they are presumed to be living romanticized
lives immersed “in nature.” As noted in the introduction, this understanding of nature-culture is
typical of a modern Western worldview that is not necessarily shared by other people elsewhere,
including in the very same Western Hemisphere. For example, after having visited Chile many
times, Doug Tompkins decided to begin purchasing all the lands of “pristine nature” he could to
“preserve” them, which meant “shielding” them from “progress,” almost attempting to freeze or,
even, go back in time. Therefore, rather than modernize the infrastructure of Reñihue, the first
ranch he purchased in Chile, Tompkins subscribed to a magazine that offered XIX century pioneer
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products at XX century prices. But his romantic visions clashed against the progress that local
people wanted:
“The caretakers living at Reñihue thought, ‘Yeah! An American guy is buying the place,
we’re going to get washing machines!’ But Doug wanted to go backwards. And they were
like, ‘No, no, no!’ They didn’t want to spend six hours doing a load of laundry. They wanted
to have a machine, push a button, and have their clean laundry” (Rudolph, quoted on
Franklin, 2021, p. 136).
Indeed, the pioneer village that Tompkins envisaged entailed an economy based on manual labor
and sustainable agriculture, including teaching beekeeping to locals. As O’Donnell (2021) astutely
remarked, the idea that these locals might rather aspire to a more modern existence given their
particular socioeconomic circumstances—ones very different from that of Tompkins—or “that
they simply preferred to choose their fates for themselves did not slow him down.”
The wilderness mentioned by Fletcher above is what fundamentally defines the ecotourism
experience, and what is Patagonia if not the “ideal” wilderness? The “alpine wilderness” described
before was a political project of frontier expansion, but it was also a construction that sought to
position Andean Patagonia in the category of alpine destinations such as the European Alps or the
Canadian Rockies. In this type of environment, plenty of outdoor recreation forms are possible
from mountaineering or climbing (what allured the 1968 crew mentioned above) to kayaking,
trekking, skiing in the winter and cycling. Since the creation of PNP and PP (including the
Gateways at La Ascensión and at Los Toldos), the area that had previously been left for livestock
farming, namely the central plateau, new parts of Patagonia have been brought to the fold of the
“wilderness with touristic appeal” that the national government began to fashion in the 1930s.
Consequently, some of the outdoor recreation activities mentioned are certainly possible in the
central and northwest portion of the Santa Cruz as well, which means that now, the province as a
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whole works well as a landscape linked to adventure travel, extreme sports and the outdoor
recreation industry in general.
The reason why this works (and why FRA has little trouble selling or promoting its PP
brand) is because tourists see in all of Patagonia a possibility of adventure within sublime
wilderness. As was explained in detail in the previous chapter, Patagonia has always been a land
of “mystery” as well as a “savage,” untamed, place. But what began to be ascribed to the region in
earnest as it was increasingly positioned as a destination was the condition of sublime, an adjective
typically used to describe awe inspiring naturally occurring phenomena. As something of
extraordinary metaphysical density, the sublime provokes “the strongest emotion which the mind
is capable of feeling,” including awe, wonder, dread, fear, and terror, because it triggers “the
passions which belong to self-preservation” which are “the strongest of all passions” (Burke,
[1756] 2005, p. 111 and p. 126). These emotions are delightful rather than painful in the context
of the sublime because they are elicited when an individual is not in a dangerous situation, which
is why the main effect of the sublime is to elicit astonishment, admiration, reverence and respect.
It is, in other words, a state of imagined vulnerability and a pleasurable terror. The representation
of Patagonia as sublime works because it produces an “aesthetic that presents the possibility of the
unpresentable through a paradoxical attempt to express that which exceeds discourse” (Stormer,
2004, p. 219). Considering this, both the boldness of Mount Fitz Roy and the vastness of the
Buenos Aires Lake Plateau have that quality of excess, meaning of that which can exceed
representation because of the perceived inadequacy of the senses to cope with the intensity of the
experience that marks its sublimity. Accordingly, tourists who visit Patagonia
“experience the sublime as a sense of wonderment, intense connection, and even rapture
before the majesty of the Andean wilderness, a sentiment that they take back home with
them, where it works to recruit the next wave of travelers” (Mendoza, 2018, p. 15).
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Again, the experience of imagined peril that a towering ice-covered mountain can elicit is the same
that a mesmerizingly vast plateau besieged by relentless winds can, which is why the quote above
can be extended, in this analysis, to the non-Andean portions of Patagonia (see Figure 2.1). The
representations these visitors take back with them as well as those that already circulate are
important because they ultimately create a space of appearance, a rhetorical space where the
subject it invokes gets to recognize and renew himself (himself being a key word since traditional
sublime aesthetics invoke a white male subject). In this sense, the representations of Patagonia as
a sublime, vast, wild place work much like Ansel Adams’ landscape photographs, which by trying
to “coax the public into a rejuvenating, hygienic (or purifying) relationship with nature, (…) his
landscapes created a commonplace of Man seeking rebirth in nature without the necessity of ever
experiencing that rebirth” (Stormer, p. 223). These widely available sublime scenes address a mass
subject and while they do not necessarily precipitate the experience of sublimity, they constitute
those rhetorical spaces where a humanistic rebirth of a mass subject can take place. In this context,
the wilderness discussive formation as reconstituted through “rewilding” creates these (primarily)
international ecotourists as its subjects of interest, those who are given the right to visit and move
about the territory. But, on a deeper level, it creates the space against which an ideal or desired
human subject is reified.
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Figure 2.1: Photograph of Cañadón Río Pinturas, a canyon carved by the Pinturas river located
in the northwest corner of Santa Cruz, roughly 100 miles from the town of Perito Moreno
(Author photo, 2020).
Considering the appeal that wild places such as Patagonia have garnered recently, it is easy
to understand how, since the 1960s and 1970s, ecotourism has blossomed into a substantial global
infrastructure in which many countries participate, even if it is still regarded as a form of tourism
alternative to the mass tourism that consolidated in the 1950s. By the mid-1990s, ecotourism had
gained an entirely new dimension: while at its core this commercial activity was still about having
a somewhat strenuous experience in the wild outdoors, it now incorporated the conservation of
those visited “natural spaces.” Therefore, while experts defined “common” nature-based tourism
by the recreational activities of visitors, ecotourism now stood out as “responsible travel to natural
areas that conserves the environment and improves the well-being of local people” (Honey, 2008,
p. 6). By 2002, the profile of ecotourism had risen so much that the United Nations declared that
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date the ”International Year of Ecotourism” (Butcher, 2006) in part because, given its presumed
sustainability, it was increasingly presented as an ideal form of development for the rural areas of
the less developed countries of the world. Thus, ecotourism became a bonding agent of sorts that
managed to harness synergy between conservation and tourism, considering that the activity’s
revenue was generated from preserving rather than depleting natural resources.
Consequently, one of the things that propelled ecotourism forward has been its widespread
promotion as an important form of support for protected areas concerned with preservation of
biological diversity. These forms of land organization have always been linked to tourism in that
they “have always been connected with processes of capitalist commodification, particularly in the
form of the nature-based tourism (e.g. Safari trips, trophy hunting)” that is promoted inside them
(Büscher et al., 2014, p. 12), particularly big game hunting (Igoe, 2004). However, the ecotourism
associated with conservation is the principal supporter of a protected area management strategy
that, rather than primarily rely on the state for control, focuses on a form of community-based
conservation whose aim is “to deliver alternative income-generating opportunities to members of
park-adjacent communities and thereby encourage the latter to refrain from exploiting resources
within the protected area” (Fletcher, 2014, p. 12). The premise on which this synergy between
ecotourism and conservation works is that, if locals perceive that a profit can be made in a
supposedly “non-extractive” (Barrena Ruiz et al., 2019, p. 745) way from either a natural landscape
or an animal species without compromising their sustainability, then they will be more inclined to
protect those resources rather than exploit them into nonexistence (see also Duffy, 2010). Chapter
5 will problematize this assumption further and put it in the context of Parque Patagonia and
northwest Santa Cruz. But it is fundamental to surface this nexus at this stage firstly because it
foregrounds how this model constitutes an alternate way of extracting value from the natural
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landscape (“nature”), and secondly because it sits at the base of the new modernity project
proposed for Patagonia, a green (re)incorporation of Patagonia into networks of global capital.
THE GREEN MODERNITY PROJECT
In this context and following Hegel’s dialectic method (Schnitker & Emmons, 2013), what I
propose is that if we consider the image of an extensive yet desolate Patagonia inhabited by giants
to be thesis, and an image of Patagonia as a productive panacea to be the antithesis, then the
synthesis is an image of Patagonia that reaches back in time to rescue (whitewash) the wildness it
originally suggested and commodifies it, centering it in ecotourism discourses. In this newly
defined discursive formation, which is lodged deeply in mainstream environmental conservation,
wilderness is not something to be feared, subdued or corseted but rather something to be embraced
as a positive force for revitalization and renewal; something to be “experienced.”
The photograph below (Figure 2.2) shows a sign that welcomes travelers who fly into
Comodo Rivadavia, the city in the northern neighboring province of Chubut whose airport
constitutes the closest location to the park one can fly to, roughly 438 kilometers (272.2 miles)
northeast to the town of Los Antiguos. The sign depicts the Pinturas Canyon (Cañadón Pinturas)
which not only is one of the most scenic points in the northwest region of the Santa Cruz province
but the formation next to Cueva de las Manos, the archeological site open to touristic visitation—
all of which is now on land that belongs to FRA. The sign reads “Let the wild discover you,” which
was the primary slogan the Foundation was using at the time of my visit, thus inviting the visitor
not just to make the trek to visit a touristic location nearby, but rather to have a potentially
lifechanging experience in the wild.
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Figure 2.2: Photograph of a sign located in the airport of the city of Comodoro Rivadavia, the
closest location to the PNP/PP complex one can access via air, immediately visible upon
entering the main hall of the building. The sign invites the viewer to “Let the wild discover you”
(Author photo, 2020).
When PNP was officially created in 2014, the discourse around this protected area revolved
mostly around the conservation of the macá tobiano, an endangered native species that only nested
in the lagoons atop the Buenos Aires Lake Plateau. As was explained in the introduction, FRA
continued to expand its presence in the territory by purchasing other plots of lands, which it aimed
to eventually incorporate to the established PNP (until that occurs, these spaces are part of FRA’s
brand, Parque Patagonia, and not part of the recognized national park Parque Nacional
Patagonia). These plots were either still actively dedicated to agricultural production, such as the
case of La Ascensión—one of the largest and most productive estancias in the area—or were
abandoned given the financial and climatic circumstances for sheep rearing already described. But
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what both types of ranches shared was their location: rather than being part of the already famous,
spectacular and nationally protected Andean Patagonia, more typical of the southwest portion of
Santa Cruz, these plots were positioned in a part of the province that had historically been used for
agricultural activities by those pioneers of yesteryear, some of whose descendants still live there.
Consequently, some of the local people who had participated or otherwise lent their support in the
creation of PNP felt “betrayed” when it became clear that FRA’s involvement was not limited to
providing the necessary funds to enable PNP but that they had a model of their own, and that it
directly clashed with their livelihood.
The conservation model FRA follows whenever they deploy some place is called
“Economy of Nature,” which they define as “an approach to development that enables the recovery
of ecological integrity in areas where the biodiversity has been affected by human activities”
(Rewilding Argentina, n.d.). Their model does indeed start by creating protected areas—that,
ideally will become national parks—which are equally presented as conservation spaces and
engines for local development, and is followed by managing the wildlife that not only completes
the ecosystems that want to be preserved but are also observable. The third element is a
“regenerative economy,” which they believe encompasses a territorial brand and “world-class
tourist experiences,” and the fourth is communities, which refers to entrepreneurship and “public
empowerment” (all quotes from Rewilding Argentina, n.d.). At the center of this positively
reinforcing loop is what FRA calls, unironically, “production of nature.” The very contradictions
that sit inside the rhetorical construction of “production of nature” will be explored at length, as
mentioned, in Chapter 5. However, the point of foregrounding it at this stage is to demonstrate
how the model FRA is effectively trying to impose in the region constitutes none other than another
form of development that promises to move Patagonia forward into a better future, one marked
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not just by the financial wellbeing of the locals brought about by the opportunities that ecotourism
can represent for them, but by the planetary wellbeing of global humans (and native nonhumans)
alike as ecosystems are preserved.
Much like it occurred before in Patagonia, the values and practices this project entails are
mediated by power imbalances. Although this form of development is not new to Patagonia
itself—in fact, it has been for some time now one of the forms in which it has successfully entered
networks of global capital who invest in it as a destination—it is entirely novel to the region where
FRA is working on, the region at the heart of one of the staunchest ganadero or campo culture.
Consequently, the local population feels as if the rug is being pulled underneath them because
what FRA is affecting with their “conservation” model is not just their way of making a living, it
is their very identity as individuals, as generational beings and as citizens. This is greatly
exemplified in the testimony of a local inhabitant of the disputed northwest corner of Santa Cruz
who, explaining how it had taken her father eighteen years to build an infrastructure that would
bring water from the Correntoso River to their ranch, stated in a recent documentary
“Now, it turns out, all of that was wrong. Because these people [FRA] says we must ‘rewild.’
That we are misguided (…) So my sister and I, all of us who think differently, who approach
this from a different place because we have the campo in our blood, are now the enemies.
We came to destroy. The irrigation work my father did, which in any place where labor and
progress are valued would be deemed as something to applaud, is now subject to criticism
because it modified the ecosystem” (Cvjetanovic, S. quoted in Dickinson, 2021).
What this testimony is getting at is that whereas before the locus of progress was placed on the
receding frontier, that is the conquering of “wild space” by civilization through labor and human
ingenuity, the locus of progress is now placed on an advancing frontier, on the (re)conquering of
civilization by “nature,” on the re-wilding of the space. Therefore, if one hundred years ago a
pastoral model was the key to incorporate lands to the burgeoning (postcolonial) state as well as
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insert the country into (liberal) international commercial routes, a wilderness with touristic appeal
is the (neocolonial) model presented now not only as a path forward for those who inhabit this
momentarily “in-transition” or receding space but offered as a global (neoliberal) good, something
that is beneficial to a global subject, to mankind, in the context of the perils brought about by
industrialization and climate change.
The imaginary that sustains the conservation/ecotourism model FRA proposes works only
if the space is perceived to be truly wild; that is, following the common Western conception of
“the wild,” the landscape needs to appear untouched, almost as if it had just materialized on the
Earth and had subsequently frozen in time, where the only active forces are those of “nature” and
not “man.” This is because this imaginary of the unworked natural landscape is sustained by a
social group who
“have never themselves had to work the land to make a living—urban folk for whom food
comes from a supermarket (…) Only people whose relation to the land was already
alienated could hold up wilderness as a model for human life in nature, for the romantic
ideology of wilderness leaves precisely nowhere for human beings actually to make their
living from the land” (Cronon, 1996, p. 11).
In this construction no men belong other than the tourist who visit and “experience” the restoring
wilderness of Patagonia, and no nonhumans belong other than those native species that further
cement the authentic wild image of Patagonia. In this context, donating lands to fashion a park
does not merely constitute a park donation; rather, it is a specific form of territory development
that outlines contributors and expels detractors. This rationale explains why the Foundation works
territorially by undoing past arrangements and instating others, reconverting the plots from
productive areas to protected areas. It also explains why FRA is hellbent on removing the material
infrastructures and technologies associated to past development models, which is why they
promptly remove the fences that delimit the estancias they buy, as well as cut the (“exotic”) trees
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that locals planted to cope with the constant wind. But it also sheds light on why FRA is equally
centered on the idea of rewilding as a conservation practice given that, while it strives to restore
the health of the ecosystem and preserve nonhuman species, it also works to populate the landscape
with observable native (and charismatic) wildlife.
These material practices sustain the discursive formation of Patagonia as a wilderness with
touristic appeal, a construction anchored in an imaginary I have outlined drawing directly from
what Mendoza et al., (2017) refer to as “the Patagonian territorial imaginary,” which they argue
bundles three regimes of representational value related to tourism, the outdoor industry and
environmentalism. In regard to the first regime, Mendoza et al. argue that the Southern Andean
Patagonia (which, again, includes the southwest portion of Santa Cruz) has been formulated by
transnational tourism as an exotic landscape of consumer value for bourgeois leisure who seek the
thrill of adventure sports. As explained, this framework can easily be extended to the region of
Santa Cruz FRA is currently trying to position as touristic, where “letting the wild discover you”
comes in the form of “active trekking,” biking and other services offered by “local entrepreneurs”
such as horseback riding (incidentally, this “service” relies on a species that is not native to the
area but that many people associate with Patagonia given its modern history).
The second regime of representational value the authors describe for Andean Patagonia
focuses on the role that the Euro-American outdoor industry plays in generating the Patagonian
imaginary as they sell clothing and technical gear to middle- and upper-class consumers, precisely
by “using imagery from globally renowned wilderness areas like Patagonia while also presenting
these zones as the ideal places to wear their products” (Mendoza et al., 2017, p. 101). Indeed, the
outdoor and tourism industries are mutually reinforcing because, by financially supporting the
protected areas in which the latter can thrive, the former can continue to profit by selling
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commoditized symbols of adventure. Sure enough, the uniform FRA staff dons is manufactured
by none other than Patagonia, Inc, but the connection is even more fundamental in the context of
PNP and PP considering that neither these nor any other of the protected areas and conservation
ventures under the umbrella of Tompkins Conservation would be possible were it not for the
profitable outdoor apparel and gear industry: Douglas Tompkins, the mastermind behind these
projects in Patagonia was the founder of outdoor equipment manufacturer The North Face and
clothing company Esprit, and his wife, Kris McDivitt Tompkins, the CEO of Patagonia, Inc, a
brand whose founder was, as noted earlier on, one of the men Tompkins would climb Mount Fitz
Roy with.
Finally, the third regime of representational value that Mendoza et al. signal as a
contributor to Patagonian imaginary is global environmentalism, given that a wide host of local
and international NGOs have invested the region with ecological value and constituted the
vulnerability of the region’s icecaps, rivers, lakes, steppe, flora and fauna. This environmental
movement, which includes state actors as well as other civil society actors, has “foregrounded
images of the sublime landscape as a way to represent the region as ecologically at risk to domestic
and global publics” and, in doing so, encompassed tourism flows and the outdoor industry within
this framework (2017, p. 102).
The interactions among foreign CEOs-cum-ecophilanthropists, international and local
NGOs, state and provincial actors, and civil society actors in northwest Santa Cruz is so complex
that an entire chapter is dedicated to teasing it out (see Chapter 3). However, following Mendoza
et al.’s line of argumentation, the figure of those big-pockets individuals needs to be prefaced here
because, much like the European colonists of the XVI century or the Europhile local intelligentsia,
it is now their mediation what is setting, once again, the course for a region in Patagonia. In this
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particular case, the fact that the park donations were effected by a foundation that emerged from
the intimate circle (and capital) of Douglas Tompkins adds another layer to the
conservation/ecotourism nexus as he was a professed follower of a deep-ecology philosophy,
which means that he believed that “nature comes first, that we are bound ethically to share the
planet with other creatures” (Tompkins, quoted in Franklin, 2021, p. 113). And in Patagonia, a
land he saw as truly wild, untouched and pristine, he believed he could do so. However, this
exquisite and undisturbed land of volcanos, condors, virgin forests, free-flowing rivers had one
flaw Tompkins simply could not forgive. “One of the things that drove Doug crazy,” said an
environmental activist who flew with Tompkins over Patagonian canyons, were the cows that had
gone feral after their owners had left the ranches. Thus, the same individual who rhetorically
professed eco-centrism and placed all species on equal footing,
“would go up in his airplane (…) [and] chase them, because they hated the noise. He moved
them repeatedly to the front where they could be captured. He loved getting rid of every
one of those cows” (Kimbrell quoted in Franklin, 2021, p. 135).
After corralling them, Tompkins would reportedly pack them on a barge and ship them back where
they belonged, the mainland, to be sold. This demonstrates that, just as fences alter the envisioned
uninterrupted, wide-open wild terrain, so do domesticated animals because animality is, as
Belcourt (2015) argues, a politics of space. The multispecies arrangement Crosby (1989) had
identified as instrumental to the successful expansion of European imperialism and that others
(Bandieri, 2014; Coronato, 2010; Harambour, 2019) have since tightly woven to the identity of
Santa Cruz as a national territory first and province later (see Chapter 1), is no longer part of the
Patagonian imaginary that one of the actors in the most powerful position favors. In this imaginary,
substantial human/non-human entanglements are missing, as there is only “untouched nature”
inhabited by those nonhumans who formerly roamed free in the olden wild Patagonia, like pumas
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and guanacos. Against this, this imaginary positions a transient subject who is invited to discover,
experience and momentarily become part of a realm that is, by definition, foreign and whose
politics of conviviality are exclusively limited to a seemingly innocuous and restorative visitation.
Time and again, certain animal practices are used as “tools of cultural imperialism designed
to delegitimize the subjectivity and citizenship of those labeled Other in the nation state” (Elder et
al., 1998, p. 73). It is precisely the power differential of those who hold the capacity to single-
handedly change the reality and future of a region “by giving money away” that mediates
imaginaries that favor and other certain subjects (Tompkins Conservation, 2020). As explained
earlier in this dissertation, the colonial empire legitimized its violent settling actions on the figure
of the giant created through chroniclers coming out of the Middle Ages, and the postcolonial
nation-state supported its territorial expansion by producing a racialized reading of the barbarian
or backward native. These characterizations were intimately linked to the animal practices these
peoples followed; namely, the giants were beyond the scope of humanity because they reportedly
ate live rats, while the tehuelches represented a by-gone era of nomadic life based on hunting and
gathering. Highlighting these historical representations is important not just because history and
context shape the ways in which political dynamics and land transformation unfold, but because
we have established that power operates discursively (Foucault, 1972).
Thus, I contend here that Patagonia is, yet again, the backdrop against which a green
neocolonial political struggle is unfolding. In this case, FRA discursively justifies their territorial
expansion, enabled by Euro-American ecophilanthropists who are bent on preserving huge swaths
of “pristine” land, by systematically characterizing the modes of lives of those who clash against
their “dream” as passé. For example, in a conversation I had with Rocio Navarro, a communication
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specialist of FRA that mostly works on community engagement, mentioned that, in this region of
Santa Cruz,
“they are para atrás [a literal translation of those words would be backwards, though she
used them to express that conditions were dire]. It’s becoming impossible to sustain. In
the south maybe it’s a bit better because there are pastures of better quality, but here it’s
harder… look around!”
Later in the conversation, she further stated that
“There are people who have been pursuing this [agricultural] activity for over 100 years,
and they are not questioning that ‘hey, if I’ve had the same amount of sheep for 100 years,
maybe I should think about a different strategy.’ Those are things they have to think about
themselves, and maybe today they aren’t doing that. And they have a good excuse, they
blame the protected area.”
In her study on race, animals and nation in Zimbabwe, Suzuki (2017) explains that while lions
used to be thought of as vermin that preyed on cattle, the change brought forth by wildlife tourism
in the 1970s meant that they began to be seen as untapped potential for profit. In this context, those
ranchers that converted their properties to wildlife ranching were perceived as modern and
progressive, while those who retained their land for cattle purposes, conservative. This specific
change in perception is what FRA wants to make happen in Santa Cruz with the pumas (see
Chapter 5) and it is why the attitudes performed towards this animal, as was the case with lions in
Zimbabwe, is regarded as a key marker of participation in the modern world.
This is similar to what Brockington reports in the case of the Mkomazi game reserve in
Tanzania, namely that “backward irrational herders” are expected to become “modern progressive
stockmen” in order to get on board with the times, even if it is to the detriment of their livelihoods
(2002, p. 4). Patagonia has always been flush with discourses that legitimate the appropriation of
land, but the discursive framing of local communities as environmentally destructive, backward
and disordered need now to conform to modernist visions of “sustainable development” (Adams,
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2004). Thus, we see that the local ranchers who oppose the project are referred to as selfish
individuals who blatantly disregard “the public” or “the public benefit” in order to protect their
private interests. Sofia Heinonen, FRA’s executive director and personal friend to the Tompkins,
stated in a radio interview that
“those who oppose [us] do so because they don’t interpret or they don’t understand the
proposal. For me, they see this from a very narrow perspective focused on their private
interests, and on whether this will increase the amount of pumas and guanacos in the
region. Instead of seeing it from a perspective of the public, as something that can develop
a touristic destination comprised of more than 200 thousand hectares (…) so that people
can spend a vacation and get to know the geography, the historical and cultural values…”
(Sofia Heinonen, presidenta de FFyF - Circuito Binacional, 2018).
Because FRA enacts conservation from a neoliberal standpoint, their solution to the biodiversity
and environmental degradation problems in Patagonia is promoted as a “win-win-win-win-win-
win-win” (Grandia, 2007) one, and thus there should not be any excuses for people to be losers in
this scheme. But, considering that green grabbing is a neoliberal practice marked by privatizing
land that used to be public or otherwise common—for example, the purchase of fiscal lands—or
concentrating wealth—by having one individual person or entity buy multiple ranches from private
owners in difficult socioeconomic circumstances—it is somewhat ironic that FRA’s CEO centers
her critiques on notions of the public. That is why, highlighting how neoliberal market-based
approaches to conservation are not only dominant but increasingly connected to ambitious plans
for setting aside half or more of this planet’s surface for the exclusive goals of nature conservation
in this instantiation, Kashwan et al. (2021) outline a neocolonial form of global conservation
designed to serve the goals of powerful global interests.
Furthermore, in Santa Cruz, the backward-progressive characterization intersects with age:
in most cases, those who are refusing to sell their estancias and thus frustrating the
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ecophilanthropists’ dream of a park expansion are, in fact, older ranchers whose children have, in
some cases, moved to the city. And this is something FRA knows too well:
“today, 18 year old kids don’t want to be peones (…) It’s not an activity…. Today, a kid
doesn’t want to do that work and earn little money and have poor health insurance. It’s
not a job that today’s youth wants to have” (Navarro, interview, Los Toldos, 2020)
FRA’s strategy to impose a desired, modern future in the region does not solely depend on rhetoric
or fragments of discourses. Interpreting discourse as a heterogeneous ensemble permits us to
include national parks as technological infrastructures through which FRA also circulates
discourse and, therefore, competes for power: by creating a national park in a direct neighboring
situation, the maintenance of the remaining productive plots becomes much harder given that rural
displacement and land use conversion of productive ranches immediately next to national parks
enable predators to proliferate and attack the remaining flocks of sheep. Therefore, the legacy
current ranchers are looking at leaving their children is strangled patches of productive land in
between ever-growing protected areas.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
This chapter has argued that PNP/PP/Rewilding project constitutes a different form of neocolonial
domination equally predicated on land ownership though orchestrated by a neoliberal political and
economic logic, couched in conservation discourses. Certainly, the socioeconomic profile of the
pursued land is different but the large tracts of it owned by pioneer ranchers who, in the late XIX
and XX centuries, utilized it to raise sheep and export primary goods are the same tracts of land
owned or pursued by FRA who, since 2014, seeks to utilize it as wilderness areas to fulfill certain
conservation purposes and brand a destination to be consumed by primarily foreign tourist who
will get to experience the sublime wildness Pigafetta and Darwin described.
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In this context, Patagonia is experiencing another instantiation of the same phenomenon
whereby different discursive formations sustained by particular capital configurations erect
infrastructures, organize nonhuman life and enact certain practices to fulfill a normative modernity
project. Before, it was primarily English capitals who sustained the formation of estancias with
fences, irrigation works and barns to perform a form of pastoralism or agricultural development
centered on cattle. Now, the main actor is philanthropic money of Euro-American origin that seeks
to establish national parks and vista points to enable an ecotourist activity that draws value from
native wildlife. Like before, this new modernity project is equally predicated on the idea of a
Patagonia that is still inhabited by othered individuals and that, because it is still found wanting,
needs to be controlled. This is the shadow that has stuck to the region through time given that
Patagonia as a territory has been inhabited for over 10,000 years and appropriated by the
Argentinian state over 100, and yet it is still casted as uninhabited and available (see Navarro
Floria, 2011).
What has also remained constant in these hundreds of years is that the land in Patagonia—
which is now made to fit a different modernity project through less violent though equally powerful
material and rhetorical moves—remains at the center of the political economic equation for capital
formation in the XXI century. In this new modernity project, global capital (primarily Euro-
American) has added conservation to the profitable formula that already coupled extraction with
progress. The region’s productive past is discursively and materially erased to arrive at a moment
when “in 100 years, no one would be able to imagine the land as anything other than national
parks” (O’Donnell, 2021). This is because the Patagonia wilderness at the center of this project
needs to be discursively produced in order to be seen as legitimate and “real.” While past
modernity projects sought to erase “undesirable” people to insert Patagonia into “civilization,” so
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does this project write people out of landscapes so that protected areas can discursively take on the
semblance of unimpeded wilderness. What is key here is that, as Igoe has noted, “this process of
erasure had to erase itself” to perpetuate the idea of “natural,” “wild” spaces (2004, p. 85). Thus,
highlighting how neoliberal conservation constitutes “natural” spaces and conceals their
constructed nature demonstrates the discursive nature of “Rewilding Patagonia,” as discourse
precisely refers to “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak (…) they
constitute them and in doing so, they conceal their own invention.” (Foucault, 1972, p. 169).
While eco-tourism is presented as an opportunity for local entrepreneurs to offer services
rather than export raw goods, what draws the sought-after tourists is not the fried pastries they
might eat at the tea shop in La Ascensión or the little plush toy of the macá they might be able to
buy. The alluring bet is placed in the very raw, wild, pristine, virgin, majestic, sublime, awe-
inspiring landscape and charismatic wildlife. This is why, as the chapter comes to an end, it is not
my goal to leave the reader with a sense that FRA and the “Rewilding Patagonia” project is
inherently bad nor that supporting the local ranchers and their ways of life is inherently good.
Rather, by revisiting the socioeconomic history of Patagonia and contrasting it to what unfolds
there today, the main takeaway this work proposes is that, in a sense, this conservation project
attempted in Santa Cruz and the economic practices that clash against it are the same in that they
share similar origin stories and respond to similar, though differently oriented, models or ideas of
progress. In one case, it was about imposing the decision to dedicate land as pastures or as
productive space for a development project predicated on a pastoral model of European origin,
while in the other it is about imposing the decision to set aside the same land for a development
project predicated on a wilderness construction of American origin. Because both discursive
formations of wilderness, with all their rhetoric and material practices, are about ordering society
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and nature, determining how landscapes and resources should be used and by whom, I follow
Brockington in arguing that “at a deeper level, both conservation and pastoral development are
part of a broader desire to induce or impose productive change on society and nature in the name
of development” (2002, p. 4).
But, because this is about ordering the future as well, it begs to wonder: what now?
Centuries ago, the ways of life of the natives to America were obliterated by European imperialists
to establish a colonial regime that asserted socioeconomic domination, much like the identity and
history of the Tehuelches and other peoples were violently erased by local postcolonialists
operating on foreign capital in order to further extend those commercial and political ties
established before. Today, the reverberation of that past—the northwest region of Santa Cruz’s
present—is being phased out by a neoliberal and neocolonial conservation model that, centered on
“rewilding” the area is, effectively, imposing the same fate to the local ganaderos that their
ancestors imposed on native populations. Whether one is inclined to interpret that as divine justice
or simply as history repeating itself is beside the point. What matters is whether Patagonia is
destined to continue to be conceptualized from an exogenous center, from where it appears
permanently incomplete, its plasticity ready to be coopted in ways that always de-center or other
those who have and continue to call that place home.

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CHAPTER 3. RENATURING THE SUBLIME WILD

In the last five minutes of a documentary released in November of 2020, two sisters who own an
estancia in Santa Cruz and whose future livelihood is directly affected by the PNP/PP/Rewilding
project make two strong statements. The first sister, talking to an interviewer who is also a ranch
owner, states:
“I can’t really say what’s behind this; what strikes me is how, suddenly, this country is
dazzled by and acquiesces to the dreams of others. Because Mr. Wyss, Mr. Tompkins, at a
certain point they dreamed for this to become a national park, one that removed us from
the productive sector. And for reasons that are beyond my comprehension, the authorities
thought this was viable… Why don’t you and I go to Mr. Wyss’ country or Mr. Tompkins’
country, and deploy there with this wonderful, illuminated idea; let’s go and say that we
are going to move all the people that have been there for so long, and that we are going
back to nature. Let’s go see how we do…” (Cvjetanovic, S., quoted in Dickinson, 2021)
Just a couple of minutes later, the other sister says, talking directly to the camera
“Our Parks law explicitly states that there can be no farming inside a park, so we are
subjected to an expropriation for the public good. Then, everything you’ve done over years
and years has no value. Because of the dream of Wyss and Tompkins, who are allowed to
have a right to dream” (Cvjetanovic, E., quoted in Dickinson, 2021).
In these statements, these local women are decrying what they perceive as an abuse of power from
what I described in the previous chapter as a networked transnational elite of ecophilanthropists
with a penchant for saving the planet through the creation of protected areas in (re)constructed
“wild” places such as Patagonia. Ironically hypothesizing what would happen if those depicted in
the scene attempted a similar move some place in the United States (or Switzerland) effectively
works to demonstrate the perceived stark power differential as well as the project’s arbitrary
nature. But their claim also extends to the national authorities who are seemingly at fault for
aligning with foreigners instead of their own constituents, protecting and upholding others’ right
to dream against their own right to private property. In this narrative, then, the local ranchers
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directly affected by the project are positioned as powerless subjects, as those on whom the
discursive formation of “rewilding Patagonia” is being imposed and whose discipline is sought.
Although this is certainly a viable reading, the documentary from where these statements were
extracted demonstrates that the speakers also emerge as powerful subjects; that is, those same local
ranchers affected are actively contesting the political and economic arrangements set in motion by
FRA just as they are directly offering a competing discourse.
In this context, the PNP/PP/Rewilding project became a starting point for an opposing
discursive strategy, and that is what this chapter is concerned with. By focusing on a series of texts,
practices, political maneuvers and representations, it provides a grounded account of the different
forms through which the local agricultural producers have sought to resist, challenge or otherwise
compete with FRA’s discourse. On the one hand, this exercise of power by a defined social group
through language and practice demonstrates that “protest against the experience of displacement
and marginalization by protected areas has become one of the defining features of politics of
protected areas in the last two decades” (Brockington & Igoe, 2006, p. 425). And that it is
especially loud in places where people are highly dependent on natural resources for their
livelihoods and risk facing impoverishment because of the regulations that protected areas entail.
On the other, it demonstrates that the ranchers also want to go back in time to a nature that,
rather than admired for its pristine wilderness, is regarded as a space to be productively acted on,
a terrain of cultural subsistence and economic development. In other words, they want to continue
to circulate the discourses and practices that belong to the second Patagonian discursive formation
explored, which not only constituted them and their animals as powerful subjects in whose hands
(and bodies) lay the future of the nation but which has thus far enjoyed a remarkable stability given
its high degree of institutionalization in northwest Santa Cruz. Now, that is being challenged by a
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new discursive formation I have identified as “Rewilding Patagonia.” Effectively, the case of the
PNP/PP/Rewilding endeavor in this region offers an excellent opportunity to explore how
competition among discourses, motivated by power relationships among different human groups,
occur. Moreover, it is an opportunity to study how discursive formations compete to achieve a
stable unit and to institutionalize their particular contingent order.

(COMPETING) DISCOURSE AS PRACTICES AND LANGUAGE
As noted in the introduction, Foucault referred to an economy of discourses because power is
“never localized here or there, never in anybody’s hands, never appropriated as
commodity or a piece of wealth. Power is exercised through a net-like organization. And
not only do individuals circulate between its threads: they are always in the position of
simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power. They are not only its inert or
consenting target; they are always also the elements of its articulation” (1980, p. 98).
Power, then, circulates. But, as it does so, it also constructs a scaffolding of knowledge, an artificial
ensemble of rules, network of elements or “a system of ordered procedures for the production,
regulation, distribution and operation of statements” (Foucault, 1980, p. 132), that only makes
sense withing a given discursive formation.
As we saw in the first chapter, one of the ways in which power operated, both in the XVI
and XIX centuries, was by appropriating land. In the second chapter, I explored how foreign actors
and capital were effectively imposing a new modernity model on Patagonia equally predicated on
grabbing land (greenly) but centered on exporting touristic experiences and
conservation/environmental “services” to a global citizenship rather than exporting raw goods
derived from cattle. During the XIX and XX centuries, the idea of wilderness that dominated was
anchored in an imaginary that constituted the pioneer agricultural producer as a central subject and
constructed Patagonia as a land to be farmed. Around this imaginary as support object-idea, a
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whole set of nonlinguistic practices emerged, from the spatial organization of hectares in ranches
and the enforcement of laws supporting and incentivizing sheep rearing, to the development of
specific infrastructure and technological use, to even the production of schoolbooks that retold the
story of the Conquest of the Desert (see Chapter 1). This modernity model became so embedded
that the social configurations created through discourse became a new “truth regime,” a discourse
governing what counted as true and false, and what constituted the obvious. The dominance of this
discursive formation is what the ganaderos in northwest Santa Cruz are competing for, which is
done through linguistic and non-linguistic means. In what follows, this chapter first provides a
detailed account of the different practices and political moves rehearsed as ranchers navigated the
imposition of a different heterogeneous ensemble of practices, techniques and technologies,
metaphors, language, practices, and discourses. In this competition for discursive hegemony,
representation works as a crucial site for political action, which is why this grounded account of
micropolitical struggles is followed by an analysis of a cinematic, long-form documentary released
in 2020 that seeks to embed particular constructions of the ganaderos and Patagonia in ordinary
language.
MICROPOLITICAL STRUGGLES
Power is continuously constructed in ordinary interactions via the production and circulation of
discourse, which is why Edwards (1996) talks about the “micropolitics” of power. These
interactions can appear in the construction of regimes of truth and in the exercise of force, and they
ultimately delineate the relations of power that, more in “the form of a war rather than that of a
language,” construct “the history which bears and determines us” (Foucault, 1980, p. 114).
Foucault metaphorically referred to discourse as an “economy” precisely to highlight that there is
always production, exchange and, ultimately, competition among a variety of discourses in a
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society—a multiplicity of “economies” that overlap and vie with each other for dominance.
Consequently, when FRA attempted to establish its discourse as dominant, it necessarily had to
compete with the local social institutions that, as productive systems with their own elements and
logics, contribute to that economy of discourses Foucault refers to.
Because power relations cannot be settled or implemented without the production and
circulation of a functioning discourse, those whose modes of life were most directly affected by
the PNP/PP/Rewilding project attempted not only to influence policy, like FRA, but to regain
control of the circulating narrative about productive futures. As I will discuss below, this was done
through a series of interactions with the provincial and national executive offices and legislatures
which, as independent institutions, interacted differently with FRA and pursued differing
objectives, some of which did not align with the regime of truth the ganaderos were seeking to
(re)impose.
THE GENERAL CONTEXT
The importance that the combination of protected area growth, ecotourism and reputable NGOs’
has for local governments, particularly those in provinces in the Global South that experience
constant fiscal deficit in their budgets, explains why some environmentalisms centered on
conservation can become powerful forces. It is important to characterize this early on because this
structurally “weak” position constitutes a significant condition of existence for the discursive
formation of “Rewilding Patagonia” (it is not the only one, see chapter 5).
Perhaps no other statement conveys this as clearly as what Mariano Bertinat, Secretary of
State for the Environment in Santa Cruz province, said to me when we met in relation to how he
found the province when his job started and how he operated during the first months, “we learned
to administer poverty” (Interview, Rio Gallegos, 2020). The dire financial situation of the province
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also made it vulnerable to the influence of the nation-state: during 2016-7, FRA had an excellent
access to President Macri’s office, particularly with the chief of staff—Marcos Peña—meaning
that the most important heads of the Executive branch of the country wanted the bill that expanded
the park to 500,000 to pass, and they were not shy about it. Bertinat explained that, at the time, the
province was “in a really bad state, we couldn’t pay the bonuses,
31
we were in a critical situation.
We needed the help of Nación [the federal government].” In this context, he added, “the province
was extorted, it was ‘either make this a national park or we won’t help you financially.” This same
story was reproduced by Basalo who explained that, after Macri took office, the Foundation started
exerting a “disrespectful pressure through many government contacts.” She said
“and it came, the pressure, the pressure, the pressure, the pressure, the pressure that this
had to pass sí o sí [no matter what], that it needed to pass.” (Basalo, interview, Los
Antiguos, 2020)
Again, she established the fact that the province was “deficitaria” meaning that it is always
needing to spend more money than what it perceives and that Nación was “apretando a la
provincia,” a colloquial expression for stating that the federal government was extorting the
provincial government to effectively cede the jurisdiction over the land, in exchange for providing
the money the province needed to pay the bonuses [aguinaldo].
As Igoe and Brockington (2007, p. 440) have noted, “outsiders bring money on which
officials from impoverished states are highly dependent, as well as new skills and technologies
that are essential to increasingly sophisticated forms of territorialization” (see Chapter 4). This
structural reality is coupled with the fact that, for those external private actors who are attempting
to intervene in a place in order to enact a specific conservation vision or project, legitimacy

31
The word in Spanish for this is aguinaldo, a figure established in 1945 under Peron’s government and
protected by labor laws. Typically, this is the equivalent of a month’s wage and it is paid in two
installments, one in June and one in December.
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becomes a valued commodity and thus cultivating a close relationship with state officials is crucial.
Ultimately, this explains why these individual officials or politicians are torn between the agendas
of transnational institutions and the interests of their constituents. One the one hand, as we saw,
the national government was directly aligned with FRA who had direct access to the president and
chief of staff. On the other, it is important to remember that, initially, the governor of Santa Cruz,
Alicia Kirchner, had supported FRA’s intention to increase the total surface of the national park
to 500,000 hectares, thus adding verbal provincial approval to the spoken approval the project
already had from the national Executive Office. The governor is interested in projects that will
generate revenue and economic interest for the province, which is why the prospect of having
various touristic attractions along Scenic Route 41, including better infrastructure for Cueva de las
Manos and real estate development in Lago Posadas (another nearby town), appeared as
productive selling points for FRA. Eventually, when the local sheep owners and agricultural
producers organized a staunch opposition, she changed her stance and ended up signing the law
that forbade the creation of new natural reserves for two years.
Even though the economic activity of sheep rearing is no longer the primary or more
profitable economic activity in the Santa Cruz, the sector commonly known as el campo, which
refers to landowners and those involved with agricultural production, still holds an inordinately
amount of power in the province because their historically prominent position was solidified into
institutional power. As the reader might remember from the previous chapters, Santa Cruz is a
relatively young province (it was born around 1960) with a somewhat patchy and incongruent
administrative design. Today, the environmental portfolio or department, especially what refers to
the administration of natural resources, is divided into different Ministries as opposed to being
concentrated in one, which is a more typical organization. The first organism created by the
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provincial constitution to organize the land was the Concejo Agrario Provincial (CAP) because,
during the time Santa Cruz was a “national territory,” it was agricultural producers who primarily
occupied it. When Santa Cruz began growing, the CAP expanded its oversight power to include
hydric resources and wildlife management because these were elements that directly affected the
agricultural production. In 1998, then Governor Nestor Kirchner created the Undersecretary of
Environment, very much in-tandem with the paradigm shift that had taken place after the 1992
Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which had prompted many countries in Latin America
to create their own environmental organisms. But, while the Undersecretary grew to become a very
specialized entity, it mostly concentrated in overseeing the oil industry, the most important
economic activity by then, thus continuing to leave to the CAP, an institution whose priority has
always been to care for the province’s agricultural production, the faculty to administer “the green
agenda,” including forests, wildlife, water, soil and protected areas.
Coincidentally, this institution turned out to play a key role in the story of PNP expansion.
As explained above, the bill that FRA was looking to pass in Santa Cruz’s legislature “came
straight” from Buenos Aires, as the locals expressed to me. At the time, Mauricio Macri was
president and the majority political party in the country was Cambiemos, a coalition that included
The Radical Civic Union (UCR, Unión Cívica Radical), the oldest political party in Argentina. It
was precisely through this political union that Mauricio Macri managed to extend the territorial
reach of his own political party, the Republican Proposal (PRO), which had governed the capital
city since 2007 and had little national presence. In Santa Cruz in particular, Cambiemos had no
institutional representation of its own, meaning that everything was enacted via UCR, a party that
had traditionally represented the interests of the ganaderos against the other major political force
in the province, Frente Para la Victoria (FPV, Frente para la Victoria), founded by Nestor Kirchner.
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When the draft of the bill “landed” in the provincial House of Representatives, it was introduced
by members of the Cambiemos/UCR front which upset the farmers because the party was
“prioritizing this foreign investor over the locals who had always been there,” as Martin Roa, an
agricultural producer, put it. As he also explained, it was only when this bill reached the
Agricultural Commission of the House that the ganaderos even became aware of what was
happening, and that connection was established because in that Commission a vocal of the Concejo
Agrario Provincial sits. Demonstrating lack of understanding of the local culture where they
“deploy,” FRA believed that support from the national government was all they needed to move
the project forward, failing to comprehend the ineffectiveness that top-down schemes have in
Santa Cruz nor just how the campo culture is engrained in the province, even if it is no longer the
primary economic activity.
THE GANADEROS
By November 2017, the conflict over PNP expansion had exploded and, in the following
December, the provincial House of Representatives rejected the bill. The agricultural sector,
primarily represented by FIAS and CRA, organized and mobilized to make their plight known and
thus effectively halted FRA’s project. Competing to reposition themselves as powerful actors, it is
not surprising that one of the first movement was to produce a text, a statement decrying the events
unfolding in the province, which they presented more as a real estate development than a
conservation project (Mesquida, 2018). After this publication, the ranchers were invited by the
Office of the Chief of Staff to a meetin in Casa Rosada, the Argentinian equivalent for the White
House, to see if or how the situation could be amended. The ganaderos got to make an official
presentation to relay the costs and losses the park expansion would represent in the next fifteen
years but even though, according to Miguel O’Byrne (the president of FIAS, one of the
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aforementioned organizations), two of the government representatives present timidly expressed a
conciliatory attitude, the Chief of Staff officer cut across and made it clear that there was nothing
there to be negotiated.
FRA continued to purchase land in various locations during 2018 and 2019, offering
ranchers excessively lucrative sums. Indeed, to obtain the estancias that FRA wanted or, rather,
needed in order to fulfill Tompkins’ dream, they appraised patches of land, some of which were
abandoned, semi-abandoned or degraded, at millions of American dollars—sums that those owners
were hard pressed to have ever received for their properties. According to O’Byrne, the owner of
the plot in Paso Roballos, an international mountain pass through the Andes that joins Argentina
and Chile, was offered $5 million for his estancia, Sol de Mayo, which, after he declined, became
$14 million for his property, an offer they reminded the owner of when they systematically called
him every fifteen days. For La Ascension, locals mention that the Foundation could have paid
somewhere between $8 and $12 million, and they venture $3.5 million for Los Toldos, though the
prices remain unknown to them. What makes the Foundation’s offers even more alluring is that
they also take care of all the costs that that transaction might accrue, from the surveyor fees to
those associated with normalizing the title for the land. As explained in the previous chapter, as
the nation-state was burgeoning, Patagonia needed to be occupied. Thus, a lot of these settlers
found themselves working in formally fiscal lands that, over time, became their own, even if they
did not possess the accompanying formal title. In these cases, as Martin Roa explained relaying
the situation of a good friend of his family, the Foundation makes the present owners sign a binding
agreement where they promise not to back down on the sale while the legal documents are being
obtained.
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Martin is someone I met at the INTA’s (the National Agricultural Technology Institute)
regional office in a sleepy part of Los Antiguos. He is an interesting character because not only
does he have formal training and expertise in agribusiness, but he also owns land and sheep in the
region (like his family did before him) with no intention to sell or otherwise put an end to this
activity, and he is young. I later learned that his work at INTA had to do with determining and
stabilizing productive performance and financial indicators of the region’s different agricultural
enterprises, but at the time of meeting him, I was struck by how invested he was in devising cattle
management strategies that would lead to more sustainable practices. To be sure, these did not
pertain to the environment in general but to what could be implemented to guarantee the long-term
health of the soil and other conditions that sustained the economic activity of the ranchers.
Nonetheless, he seemed to possess a series of characteristics that, I thought, could have made him,
at best, a good partner for FRA or, at least, someone to court: as a rancher, he had first-hand
knowledge of the needs and interests of that group of stakeholders; as president of the Agricultural
Association of the Northwest of Santa Cruz Province, he also personally knew most of the ranchers
or productores; and as a key researcher at INTA’s regional office, he had a disposition that made
him amenable to science-based approaches to land management.
Certainly, these characteristics also made him the perfect detractor of FRA and its
rewilding project, which is, as the reader might have guessed, what ended up happening. Although
his being a staunch opponent had a significant situational-material basis, FRA’s actions and
rhetoric certainly lent a hand. When I first spoke to him, Roa explained in detail how aggressively
the Foundation was pursuing ranchers to buy their lands, but he singled out one quote from Sofia
Heinonen who, according to him, stated in a radial interview that they were not worried about
eventually getting to possess all the land of interest because they could wait, as they “ha[d] time
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and capital.” I have not been able to retrieve that audio file to listen to the verbatim quote, but what
is important here is that, for Roa, that was the spirit of the statement, what he remembered and
what he felt directly attacked by, a statement that belittled the lives and livelihoods of the ranchers
he knew as well as his own. He is certainly not the only one who remembers and resorts to that
episode to make a point or otherwise describe the moral tenor of FRA. When I mentioned this
story of the radio show to Basalo, she quickly confirmed that Heinonen “says that all the time”
and that “she said it to my face; she said: ‘we always come to break with what is established, with
the status quo and we can wait them out.’” Furthermore, she relayed that, during a meeting in
January of 2016 that brought together representatives from the national government, FRA,
rancher’s associations and other local figures, a rancher (who had also served as a representative
in the provincial legislature) said: “One day, these ladies come and say to me that they want to buy
my land, and I tell them no. And then they reply: ‘it doesn’t matter, we’ll buy if from your children
in a couple of years.’” Other times, as Martin mentioned, FRA would approach ganaderos to sell
and say that they would purchase the plot and leave the owner what is known as the casco, the
principal living quarters, so they could spend there “the remainder of their days.”
Prompted by these mistreatments and angered by the article that La Nación published
which not only revealed the identity of the Swiss donor that had remained anonymous until then
but also told the origin story relayed in the previous chapter, FIAS put together another statement,
decrying the harassment locals were receiving from FRA after manifesting that they were not
interested in selling their property. They further described FRA as possessing an “aura of arrogance
and high-handedness,” as a Foundation whose language did not include the concepts of respect or
coexistence. Protesting the interference of different value systems into their local economy, their
point was clear:
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“More important than money is the dignity of those who do not want to sell their house
and will not resign themselves to being devastated by being surrounded by a park” (Parque
Patagonia, 2018).
And resign themselves, they did not. In fact, what multiple local actors in Santa Cruz agreed on
was that the debacle of FRA “deploying” in Patagonia, aggressively buying land and attempting
to convert its uses worked to strengthen the associations of ganaderos. As Arturo Puricelli, the
first democratically elected governor of the province of Santa Cruz (1983-1987), explained, “the
ganadero [agricultural producer] is, by nature, individualistic. What an hombre de campo [rural
man] values is himself and his family, and it is very hard for him to associate with others.” This
was echoed by Martin, who explained that whatever problems or issues arise, they are typically
delt with on an individual basis. And yet, at this juncture, it was the organized opposition of the
ganaderos sector what halted FRA’s plans. What is more, the ganaderos were able to do what
FRA could not; that is, they managed to build bridges with other actors in the province that had
never previously aligned with them or their interests. As Basalo explained: “I don’t really know
why I talk so much with the ganaderos, I don’t have anything in common with them. But this is
about the defense of the place.” While FRA’s maneuvers in the region were very poor, it was the
strategic relations and resistances organized through discourse and practice by the agricultural
producers what managed “to unite that which otherwise never would have united” (Basalo,
interview, Los Antiguos, 2020).
The cited quote from FIAS statement gets at some of the specific reasons why the local
producers do not want PNP to expand. If PNP grows from where it currently is, namely an area
that registers no economic production, then the park becomes a neighbor for plots of land that are
currently used for pasture. As Roa explained to me, when fashioning a national park, those who
suffer the most are the neighboring ranchers whose production activities become much harder to
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sustain over time. Eventually, these estancias are squeezed out and then the same occurs for those
located in the next neighboring zone because:
“Grazing campos form a sort of attenuation barrier or cushioning, and losses are shared
among them. If you had three ranches with sheep and a puma attacks, then the losses are
distributed among those three ranches. But if only one remains, then that one bears the
brunt of the land conversion” (Roa, interview, Los Antiguos, 2020).
Eventually, all the grazing lands next to the park—in addition to those already transformed into a
park—are either sold or abandoned. This is compounded by the fact that, once certain land
becomes a protected area, neighboring ranchers can no longer access it the way they used to before
to practice different control strategies.
The actions of the local ganaderos demonstrates that, beyond material loss of livelihoods
and dwellings, they are fighting for their symbolic obliteration, their removal from Patagonia’s
history, memory and representation (Schama, 1996). As was mentioned in the previous chapter,
one of the ways through which the Tompkins modified the arrangement of the landscape to make
it serve their conservation purposes was the removal of the purchased estancias’ fencing that
blocked the movement of guanacos. For animals to be truly wild, they had to “go back” to their
“natural migration patterns,” and the Tompkins believed that ranchers’ fences were getting in the
way of that.
32
Though this, for them, was a basic building block of the project, it translated as a
direct affront for the local producers who, according to the president of FIAS, have “lived all their
lives fighting to get a fence in place, spending 20 years to cover 10,000 meters.” Local producers
were also particularly hurt when FRA bought La Ascension because this estancia, unlike others,

32
Because this meant hundreds of miles, the Tompkins’ sponsored Foundations, both in Chile and
Argentina, launched a volunteer program to get these fences removed. At the time of my visit, there were
no volunteers working on this, which was regarded by the staff I talked to as a disappointment. However,
Franklin (2021) has reported that Kris Tompkins, former CEO of Patagonia, Inc, coordinated with Yvon
Chouinard, creator of Patagonia, Inc, so that employees of the company were given time off to volunteer.
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was still actively producing at the time: it had 8 thousand sheep, 250 cows and produced alfalfa,
grasses and cherries. Even someone from Aves commented on this purchase as a negative event,
highlighting that he believed the animals themselves had been removed too quickly. Seeing the
Foundation purchase one of the most lucrative estancias also worked to generate a sensation
among other ranchers that “everything was going to become a park, and so you’d better get out
now that your campo is worth something because afterwards who’s going to want to buy it?”. This
was amplified by the rhetoric employed in general by FRA who, as mentioned in the previous
chapter, systematically places their way of life as belonging to a by-gone era that not even their
own grandchildren were interested in.

Figure 3.1: Photograph of carts and other tools formerly utilized by workers in La Ascension at
the time this was a productive estancia. These now sit at the entrance of the ranch, in the space
between the main entrance and where the road meets the Route 40. (Author photo, 2020).

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Knowing this, I was surprised to observe the “decorations” of La Ascension: at the entrance
of the main building in the estancia, there were carts and other tools formerly employed by the
ranchers and the workers, while the barn where the shearing of the sheep would occur and the
small building where the gauchos would gather to drink mate had been maintained (see Figure
3.1). To be sure, these were displayed much like tools from ancient civilizations in a museum, as
relics of what used to be there but is long gone by now. Nonetheless, I was surprised to see that
they had kept it because it ultimately works as a reminder that there were other people there before
and that the land had, in fact, had a productive use, giving way to all sorts of questions. When I
brought this up to someone who had deep knowledge about the Foundation—had even worked for
them at the very beginning of their “deployment” in Patagonia—as well as some familiarity with
Doug Tompkins, he agreed that “Tompkins wouldn’t have liked any of this and would have asked
that it all be thrown out.” It was Basalo who provided the final answers: FRA wanted to donate all
the material but were not able to because the local Office of Tourism intervened as La Ascensión
was one of the most emblematic estancias of the region and thus was of high sociocultural interest.
It could be argued that that was a small symbolical victory for the ganaderos. However,
this group, acting as a collective, were able to accrue other more substantially material victories.
In November of 2019, the provincial legislature passed a bill (provincial law N. 3,692) that
declared a state of emergency in the matter of rural land possession and tenure (see Emergencia
En Materia de Posesión y Tenencia de Tierras Rurales, 2019) which forbade the creation of any
new protected areas, public or private, for a period of 12 months, renewable for another full year.
Verbally, people referred to this as “the law that prohibits natural reserves,” though those who
supported it were sure to point out that it was more about land-use planning than banning natural
reserves. The letter of the law does state that everything is halted until an index of all
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establishments, including agricultural or otherwise as well as public and private estates, has been
made and a strategic development plan for the provincial agricultural sector has been drafted.
Basalo, as someone who personally felt used by the Foundation and has a strong civil vocation,
believed this law was fair because it prioritized the people by letting their democratically chosen
representatives decide the direction in which the province as a whole wanted to go. For the Aves
member I spoke to on a three-hour drive along route 40, this was a clear power move:
“the law is unconstitutional (…) but it is a clear power demonstration, saying ‘Look, not
only do I not let you create the park but I also create a law that forbids you from creating
new reserves for two years.’ And it is very strong because, after that, what are you going
to go negotiate, ‘Hey, let’s make a park?’ No!” (Interview, on R.N. 40, 2020).
Sure enough, the second article of the law has an additional paragraph that very clearly extends
the prohibition to those areas created by any national, provincial or municipal mechanism that
entail provincial territory and lack the corresponding and legally approved cession of jurisdiction.
Furthermore, this bill was unanimously passed because it had the support of the governor who,
earlier in August of that year, had promised the agricultural leaders she met with that, whether she
won or lost the following elections, she would get the representatives to present this project by the
end of the year.
Now, as Foucault stated, while discourse transmits, produces and reinforces power, it also
“undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart” (1998, p. 101).
Therefore, because the process through which a discourse can be an instrument (and an effect) of
power is unstable, the reality that all the micropolitical interventions conform is equally unstable.
Thus, as baffling as it might seem, the reader should know that, in the same legislative session that
passed Bill 3,692—the one that prohibited the formation of new natural reserves—another bill was
passed, number 3,688, which effectively created two provincial parks and one provincial natural
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reserve (see Creación Del Parque Provincial Cerro San Lorenzo y La Reserva Provincial
Huemules, 2019). One of these new protected areas, called Parque Provincial del Viento
[Provincial Park of the Wind] had the exact same footprint as the desired expansion of PNP. In the
figure below (see Figure 3.2), the image on the left is a map of the proposed Park of the Wind
while the image on the right is a map of the proposed expansion of PNP. According to the members
of the House who proposed Bill 3,688 (which were the exact same two that sponsored Bill 3,692),
these provincial parks and reserve were created because the demarcated zones were ecologically
relevant, and consequently they believed it should not be left to foundations to drive initiatives
pertaining to them nor to get to administer them together with the national government. Thus,
building from the previous approval some legislators had granted the idea of having such a park
in the region, the sponsors of the bill presented Parque del Viento as an alternative, an expression
of provincial autonomy opposed to “foreign expressions.”
Figure 3.2: On the left, a map depicting Parque del Viento, a provincial protected area created
by law in November of 2019 (Villegas, 2019). On the right, a map depicting the area over which
the national government was requesting jurisdiction from the province in order to extend PNP
(privately obtained, 2020).

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This means that, at the same time that the ganaderos managed to see the law they had been
demanding through organizations such as FIAS and CRA pass, the province itself decided to
fashion a provincial park over the same extension that FRA was claiming for their own PP. As can
be inferred from the description above, this can also be interpreted as a power demonstration
though, in this case, a lot of the locals I spoke to could not make sense of it, even people who had
served public office for over four years, all equally unable to wrap their heads around the fact that
those two bills were passed in the same session by the same representatives. But, irrespective of
how it came about, these arrangements work to demonstrate how FRA’s involvement in the region
caused yet another fracture for the rural producers. As explained, the ganaderos managed to get
their representatives to vote against the bill that would have given the national government
jurisdiction over thousands of hectares that are presently occupied by around 40 families, a couple
thousand sheep and a couple hundred cows. By doing so, they halted FRA’s ambition to eventually
claim those hectares as part of their brand, first PP and later an expansion of PNP. However, after
the province became involved in the conflict and, crucially, once its own precarious situation had
been stabilized, they added one more nail to the coffin by declaring FRA’s area of interest as a
provincial park; that is, making use of its power over the land (jurisdiction), they unilaterally
changed the legal status of those plots, some of which, as stated, were under private ownership
(dominion). In practical terms, though, the consequences are the same for the ganaderos because
one way or the other, their productive lands ended up conscribed by a conservation mechanism
that transformed them into parks.
Against this, the ganaderos once again organized a linguist and non-linguistic response. A
key figure here was Arturo Puricelli, the former governor of Santa Cruz province, who, upon
meeting me, introduced himself as the son of one of the first settlers of the Buenos Aires Lake
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plateau. Immediately after that, he produced a copy of his father’s official certificate of ownership
of cattle, which had been granted in 1918 and he had inherited, a clear source of pride. He was
profoundly distraught by the creation of Parque del Viento because:
“All of these establishments, mine included, are exposed now to becoming parks.
Consequently, if the provincial government decides to go ahead with this law, they must
remove your sheep, expropriate your land. If you are an owner, such as me, you might get
some pesos in compensation. But those who had lands without formal ownership in the
zone of the [route] 41, they don’t have any possibilities because that is now already a
provincial park” (Puricelli, interview, Perito Moreno, 2020).
Consequently, he wrote a letter in his capacity as vice-president of the Asociación Agrícola
Ganadera de la Zona Noroeste [Agricultural Association of the Northwest Zone] of the Province
of Santa Cruz to express his (and the producers gathered under the association) disagreement with
the law that created the Wind Park. The first page of the note ratifies their support for the law that
declared a state of emergency in the matter of rural land possession and tenure, which they deemed
an indispensable tool against the avalanche of land purchases done by NGOs to establish protected
areas without having conducted any environmental studies nor with any participation from the
affected actors (nor any “polite gestures” towards the locals), simply through “the power of
money.” Before moving on to the Wind Park, Puricelli stakes the position of
“agricultural producers with more than a century of history in the territory, who
consolidated Argentinian presence and contributed to its development through their labor
and effort…” and therefore “must opine about the destiny of what constitutes the basic
input of our economic activity, the land, the territory” (Puricelli & Roa, 2019, p. 1).
Having established this, the association manifested its opposition to the Wind Park because it
directly affected the interests of those producers but, rather than ascribe responsibility to the
province, the document states that the park is a response to the interests of FRA who seek to fulfill
the posthumous wishes of the American citizen named Doug Tompkins. Towards the end, the
letter reads:
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“As Santa Cruz producers, we do not want the Parque Provincial del Viento, we want the
wind to continue tanning the face of our producers, like it did their fathers’ and
grandfathers’, and for the species of flora and fauna to continue being admired by all
instead of becoming the excuse of those who want to keep the land of the santacruceños.”
(Puricelli & Roa, 2019, p. 2).
The document is titled “What did you do?” because, as the final lines explain, remaining quiet
against this organization of the land would not just be a sad homage to pay to those who came over
one hundred years ago but an embarrassing situation to have to explain to the producer’s
grandchildren when they inquire, in the future, about what their grandparents did at the time.
In the end, the governor listened to their protests and vetoed the first article of Bill 3,688,
the one that created the Park of the Wind, and signed into law the remaining articles, effectively
creating one provincial park (Cerro San Lorenzo) and one provincial wild natural reserve
(Huemules). But, ultimately, the conflict is still ongoing and it is unlikely to be resolved any time
soon. When I left Santa Cruz, two things were occurring simultaneously: on the one hand, a
meeting was scheduled among the governor, Hansjörg Wyss, the CAP and the Secretaries of
Environment and Tourism; on the other, an assembly was scheduled in Los Antiguos for producers
to meet, explain how they were doing and collectively think about the necessary next steps.
PROYECTO PARQUE PATAGONIA, THE DOCUMENTARY
According to Hall, one of Foucault’s “most radical propositions” was that subjects may produce
particular texts, but subjects are also produced within discourse and can become the bearers of the
kind of knowledge which discourse produces (1997, p. 55). As I have discussed thus far, the
agricultural producers affected by FRA are variously positioned as powerful or powerless by
competing social and institutional discourses. On the one hand, and as we can gather from what
was discussed above, the micropolitical struggles the ranchers as a defined social group have
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engaged in—from preventing a law to pass to having an article in another one vetoed—have sought
to reposition a particular discursive formation of the Patagonian wilderness as the context against
which statements are held to be true. In other words, they want the Argentinian society at large
(and, arguably, other societies in the world as well) to continue to regard Patagonia as a productive
land and to believe their role as agricultural producers to be fundamental to both the character of
the nation and the province, and to its future subsistence.
On the other, those localized political practices are insufficient to effectively re-stabilize
and guarantee a significant permanence in time of the order they seek. In this context,
representations that reach wider audiences become crucial. As Edwards has argued,
“political interactions—the maintenance and the shifting of power among groups and
individuals—occur in the representations of situations as well as in the situations
themselves. In fact, representations are generally inseparable from the situations they
describe, largely because representation is itself a form of action” (1996, p. 152).
As we saw above, the agricultural producers as a social group competed to establish their discourse
as dominant through specific texts that constituted representations of the situation they were
experiencing, such as the letters published in different media outlets or circulated in the
community. Although some of those did get them national traction as their plight made it to some
of the most popular newspapers with nation-wide circulation, it is probably “Proyecto Parque
Patagonia”/“Patagonia Park Project” what thus far stands as the most instrumental representation
of their political plight.
Released in November of 2020, the documentary was shot in the same locations I visited
during my field work: Los Antiguos, Perito Moreno, Cañadón Pinturas, PNP and the Buenos Aires
Lake plateau. This film, which runs for 80 minutes, was made available through a video streaming
platform called CINE.AR PLAY which offers free on-demand audiovisual content, from short
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films and documentaries to TV series and films, made with the support of the National Institute of
Cinema and Audiovisual Arts (INCAA), the Argentina national film authority. At the moment of
this writing, the film is no longer hosted there but it is available in its entirety on YouTube with
English subtitles. Its director is Juan Dickinson, who had directed several documentaries before
this, including one about feral dogs in Tierra del Fuego (“Fireland Dogs”/“Perros del fin del
mundo”) in 2018. As he explained in a radio interview when promoting the film, it was precisely
after recording that documentary in Patagonia that
“people from Patagonia approached me and asked me whether I could look over a
situation they had been going through, particularly in the province of Santa Cruz, where
large foundations financed by foreign philanthropists of great economic power are
creating enormous privately protected areas to donate as national parks. What the
santacruzeños, or the friends that talked to me, were upset about were certain attitudes
of these foundations… because they have come to reject the results of the colonization of
Patagonia, stating that the effect of this populating, the expansion of the sheep frontier or
the establishment of estancias in the last one and a half centuries has negatively impacted
the ecosystem. So, what these foundations want to do is to take large swaths of land in
Patagonia and administer them differently. But what these friends told me was that much
of what the Foundation was arguing was wrong and asked me whether I could go take a
look at the situation. And this is what the documentary is about” (Dickinson in Jager, 2020,
emphases added).
As I will explore below, although Dickinson presents his film as an unbiased documentary, that is
very much not the case. The quote above might explain why, as the director reveals that he
stumbled onto this project because some friends from Santa Cruz asked him to take a look at this
situation which they believed was not only based on false grounds but directly harming them. But
while he states that the documentary reflects his taking a look at the situation and that he and his
team “tried not to state an opinion, but to document, take a picture and show a situation through
interviews, landscapes and a narrative,” Dickinson later admitted in the another radial show that
“the people of Patagonia are our first clients, we are very interested in their reaction because this
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is their plight and issue, and it is why we made the film; to elucidate these complex environmental
problems” (Dickinson in Marina, 2020).
BEGINNING – “THE PROJECT”
The documentary starts with some wide-angle shots of vast snowy and arid lands, “deserted”
swaths of land in front of a dense chain of mountains and an image of the Buenos Aires Lake. The
first easily identifiable place is El Sauco, the estancia originally purchased by FRA that enabled
the formation of PNP. The first person who gets to speak in the documentary is a park ranger who
briefly tells the audience when PNP was formed and stresses both the biodiversity of the land and
the importance of its donation by the Foundation. Right after, we are introduced to Sofia Heinonen,
FRA’s CEO, who communicates what the Foundation’s mission is and, almost immediately after,
we are presented with a text paragraph against a black background that informs us of Douglas and
Kris Tompkins role, the establishment of PNP Chile (deemed the largest donation of private land
in history) and that large expanses of land are currently being bought on the Argentina side of the
border to constitute a homonymous, binational park. “Everything starts with Doug’s dream to
create a binational park that protected the Atlantic and Pacific ecoregions,” tells us Heinonen. She
relays the story mentioned in the previous chapter, namely the “adventure” and the “experience”
that found Doug Tompkins and Hansjörg Wyss stuck in the snow and having to walk long miles,
which ultimately prompted the former to have his legacy be the Argentinian PNP and thus
materialize “a dream on a grand scale.”
After that introduction, this first part of the documentary explores the motivating factors
and evolution of PNP, already discussed in this work (see Introduction as well), primarily from
FRA’s perspective. Thus, it features another park ranger showing the natural wild reserve La
Ascension—one of the gateways of PP better prepared to receive tourists—and describing what
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visitors can obtain there, such as local souvenirs and foodstuffs made by entrepreneurs, and a
network of hikes and camping sites. Heinonen appears multiple times to explain the economic
potential that this project has for neighbors, business owners and entrepreneurs; the rationale for
preserving large territories, needed in only to truly let “nature” flourish; and the need to secure
water sources, which ultimately support the varied wildlife.
Even as this first part grants significant presence to FRA and their discourse, it is already
put in contraposition with the testimony of local actors. For example, already in minute six of the
film we are introduced to Marcos Williams who sits in the directory of CAP and outright presents
FRA’s conservation project as a strategy to remove “500,000 hectares of the most productive land
of the province” from production. Later, we see Representative Flores who explains why the
project of including Cueva de las Manos as a national park was interpreted as a direct attack by
the province of Santa Cruz and the town of Perito Moreno since it would force them relinquish
their administration rights over the site, an important revenue source.

MIDDLE – “THE PARK”
Around minute twenty of the film, we see two individuals meet on the side of a road. As indicated
by the titles on the screen, one is a rancher and the other is Miguel O’Byrne (president of FIAS)
and, after commenting on the large number of guanacos they encountered on the journey (almost
in passing, much like one comments on the weather in the first moments of meeting someone)
together they set out to “circle the plateau.” This is a scene Dickinson probably planted to introduce
the dynamic progression to come: after this encounter, the two individuals go their separate ways
and begin interviewing ranchers as well as entrepreneurs and/or business owners to inquire about
their thoughts on what has occurred in the area in general and in their life in particular since the
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formation of PNP. This is the narrative structure that the documentary will follow until the end,
interspersed with testimony from FRA staff.
Whereas those individuals who either represent or are in favor of FRA’s project are always
presented standing up and outdoors, the portrayal of the agricultural producers and those who
question the validity of FRA’s project is much more intimate and colorful. With the exception of
the veterinary and the conservation coordinator who are depicted actually doing something in the
field, the rest of the pro-PNP testimonies are statements by individuals facing forward and
indirectly looking at the camera, answering questions the audience never gets to hear. On the
contrary, the opposing testimonies show people in their homes or going about some work in their
estancias, all in a conversational setting that now includes two “hosts” who ask questions and with
whom all these interviewees share mate. To be sure, Dickinson is not forcing a representation
because the people depicted do demonstrate the same demeanors and practices when the camera
is not rolling, but he is making a clear choice in his treatment of the different characters on screen.
During my time there, I visited ranchers in their homes or places of work and was invariably invited
to share some mate. But I had the same experience when talking to people from FRA: either in the
lobby of La Posta or inside the Toyota Hilux of the rewilding team, I was always invited to share
this warm drink.
While this treatment reveals how Dickinson begins to stake a position, the interviews
shown in this second part of the documentary make this even clearer as they favorably reproduce
all the statements that sustained the discursive formation of Patagonia as a land of promise for
pioneers. The first rancher-interviewee in the film, who comes across as a rough individual with a
gentle, almost painfully humble demeanor, expresses the powerlessness felt by the ganaderos like
him as he says: “But now… what can you do? The orders came from above and that was that. It
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would have been good if, back then, the authorities had talked to us, the few remaining farmers,
about the pros and cons of the national park.” Shortly after, the film discusses the topic of soil
degradation (explained by a park ranger and a neighbor of Los Antiguos, not FRA) and presents a
key figure in this documentary, someone Dickinson kept referring to in various radial interviews
as an independent local expert, Fernando Manavella. In the scene, Manavella introduces himself
as an agronomist and director of INTA Los Antiguos, and explains that while the historically
largest provincial sheep flock was 8.5 million, there are now a total of 2.5 million sheep. Right
after, he makes a crucial statement: “At first there was overgrazing, but today we can affirm that
the amount of sheep is in balance with the available grass, we have been working for a long time
to achieve precisely that.” Even though he is referred to as an “independent expert” by Dickinson,
Manavella is far from espousing neutral opinions. When I talked to him at INTA’s office in Los
Antiguos, he was a staunch opponent of FRA, challenging the arguments the Foundation was
peddling in favor of ecotourism and even suggesting that they were secretly seeking to gain control
over water reservoirs. To be sure, I am not contesting the veracity of his statements in the film;
rather, I am contesting Dickinson’s presentation of him as a neutral expert. Furthermore, either
Dickinson is unaware of INTA’s history—as we saw in Chapter 1, the institute was created in
1956 to improve rural life and agricultural production through technological innovation—or
misconstrues the expert’s institutional association. Indeed, INTA is the local authority that has
been closely studying Patagonian soil for over half a century and questioning the integrity or
veracity of their work is absolutely not the intent of these sentences, but it bears remembering that
the entity itself was created in the service of agricultural production.
Once the health of the soil has been established, the film moves on to a deeper discussion
on the role of humans vis a vis a “wild” nature. To do so, the film dedicates four minutes to explain
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rewilding, which is presented by FRA members as a tool in their conservation work, and
immediately follows this with the interview of the sisters quoted at the beginning of this chapter.
In this conversation, the audience learns that these women (and, therefore, probably others like
them in the region) are direct descendants of those pioneers that came in carts, sometimes pregnant
and with children, behind a couple of sheep trying to find a ranch to settle in because that is what
“progress” was. It is in this context that the hard labor of their ancestors is described, strenuous
efforts to bend nature to their will that required moving heavy rocks or hoeing at night (in the
scene, we see the sisters and their own children also moving rocks and removing leaves to ensure
the free flow of water from a nearby man-made stream), as well as all the vicissitudes that the
present-day ranchers have endured, such as theft, severe snowstorms and draughts, volcano
explosions, etc. Similarly, another rancher-interviewee who appears a few minutes later also
reminds the interviewer (and, therefore, the audience) that the Santa Cruz province itself was
practically founded through agricultural production and compares the negative effect of FRA’s
presence in the region to that of the eruption of the Hudson volcano.
33
Establishing the long lineage
of these ranchers in the region and foregrounding the difficult conditions in which different
generations of this human group have operated works to legitimate their presence and their
positionality against FRA’s project. Therefore, when, in the next scene, one of the sisters states
that they simply cannot compete against the astronomical sums of money FRA manages and the
other refers to the ranchers who do not want to sell their estancias as hostages of the Foundation’s

33
This rancher-interviewee states on camera that FRA has introduced puma cubs, followed by a close-up
shot of the rancher-interviewer nodding and smiling affirmatively. Based on my research, this statement is
entirely false. FRA is very cautious in stating that the pumas that roam around the lands the Foundation
owns are not their pumas but simply wildlife that are there. Effectively, this works to put distance between
the negative effects the animals might represent to agricultural production and the figure of FRA itself. But,
at least at the time of my visiting, they had not introduced individuals of any species, especially pumas, as
they found the existing populations to be quite robust. FRA has helped bred jaguar cubs in the province of
Corrientes, where it has been working for over a decade.
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project, the discursive constitution of these subjects as powerless elicits feelings of unfairness in
the audience. These key arguments about the history of the region, the fundamental role that the
present settlers play and the political affront that the ecophilanthropists and their foundations
represent are repeated again toward the end of this middle section through the testimony of
Puricelli, who is portrayed in the estancia he inherited and describing its productive development
as what allowed him to go to university, become a lawyer and, eventually, provincial governor.
Proving that rewilding is a discursive formation that reconstitutes the Patagonian
wilderness as a place to be preserved and a place to be visited, Dickinson’s documentary discusses
wildlife ecotourism following the presentation of rewilding. Interestingly, his choices are very
telling of the presence of said discursive formation: because the director first establishes that the
prevalence of pumas in the region is good via APN’s testimony (much like he did with the soil
through Manavella’s interview), it becomes clear that FRA’s project is not just about alleviating
the biodiversity crisis but rather about a new spatial and socioeconomic development model that
rests on a particular construction of “the wild” (see Chapter 5). But because the documentary takes
a clear critical position against FRA, it immediately contests these arguments by interviewing
Basalo, the tourism authority who negates that PNP has worked as motivator for touristic
visitation, and homing in on the case of Monte León, a nearby national park established through
the donations of land purchased by Kris Tompkins which failed to fulfill the promises made by
FRA’s model, one based on trickle-down economics derived from conservation of land.
34

34
Monte León is truly the ganaderos’ rhetorical trojan horse. In effect, Tompkins Conservation donated
the purchased estancias, the land became a national park under the administration of APN and, shortly
thereafter, it was closed to the public. In practice, APN had neither the resources nor the capacity to develop
the infrastructure needed, a lesson learned by FRA as, in their newer ventures, they first develop the
infrastructure and then hand it over to APN. Furthermore, they have since done more work trying to promote
their vision and raise awareness in the local communities themselves to try to get locals to embrace an
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END – “PATAGONIA”
The last twenty minutes of the documentary, titled “Patagonia,” begin with the display of old
photographs of the pioneers travelling in carts pulled by horses and bulls, as well as in large groups
or familial settings and is followed by a collection of concluding statements from a series of key
characters, primarily ranchers and the two rancher-interviewers. Through these, all the major
discursive elements of the formation the ranchers are holding on to are rehearsed—such as, this
region’s rich history and ways of life FRA is intent on erasing; that the PNP expansion is not about
protecting the macá tobiano but about removing farming; that the ecotourism promised by FRA
cannot occur without the necessary infrastructure, as Monte León has shown; that the last 130
years of occupation of the Buenos Aires Lake plateau with a few shepherds represented less of an
anthropogenic impact compared to the number of humans that now walk on it. Additionally,
suspicion about the ulterior motives of FRA is planted—by rehashing geopolitical concerns about
land donation and suggesting that FRA, posing as philanthropists, are buying up land with
significant water reservoirs. Heinonen does make one final appearance to explain that, because
“people” dream of going to cities and consequently leave “marginal areas” such as this one, FRA
wants locals to “take root in [se arraigue] and be proud of their place.” Given all that the
documentary has shown the audience thus far, Heinonen’s statements fall on deaf ears: if there is
something all the interviewees and interviewers (and the film) have demonstrated is that they are
extremely proud of their land, which they come across as connected to (“in their blood”), and thus
are very much set against selling it to FRA and leaving.

economy of services instead of an extractive one, and to get the provincial authority to accompany their
project through public infrastructure development, such as roads.
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Figure 3.3: Screenshot of the second to last scene of the documentary Proyecto Parque
Patagonia”/“Patagonia Park Project.” In this shot, we see the two ranchers who played the role
of interviewers in the film, resting against a car at the entrance of PNP (that is, to the actual
national park and not the other portals that give access to PP) (Dickinson, 2021).
The documentary ends with the testimony of Williams, the first detractor of FRA portrayed
in the films and a member of FIAS and CAP, which discursively reclaims the power of ganaderos
as subjects, the agency that FRA is threatening to remove: “We don’t want history to be written
without us; we want to be part of history and tell ourselves what we have done, what we do and
what we want to do.” Visually, the film concludes with three shots of the two rancher-interviewers
leaning against a truck, drinking mate, at the entrance of PNP: the first one approaches them from
the front, which allows us to observe that they are in silence, just waiting, next to the PNP sign;
the second one shows them from behind, which works not to so much to showcase that they are
doing nothing but waiting, but to highlight the vast expanse in front of them which remains
unvisited, no matter how much they wait (see Figure 3.3); and the third one, which takes them
from the side and thus allows the audience to observe the passing of time thanks to the long
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shadows the car and the two humans project, and the darkness from the sky coming in the frame
from the right.
What those last scenes convey should be a moot point because, by the time it ends, the
documentary has exposed in depth the reasons why ecotourism is a troubled development
proposition for this area as well as remarked that only five people visited PNP in all of 2019.
However, it is a powerful visual composition that very simply and effectively undermines one of
the statements and associated practices at the center of FRA’s discursive formation that
reconstitutes wilderness as an experiential rewilding. It is, after all, what the director wanted to
demonstrate all along, that:
“one of the most important resources in Patagonia is the people that are there, who really
love their land and are trying the best they can to protect it (…) It’s not right to come here
and discredit these people, discredit what the colonization of Patagonia has generated, the
pioneers’ feat and all that. The people there feel a lot of pride for what they have done and
accomplished in a very complicated area, a region that is really arid, with little water and
where the estancias are poor… these are working people. So it makes little sense to come
and say ‘No, everything you’ve done is wrong and here we come to generate something
completely new.’ Because the ‘new’ that the Foundation generates is still in question…”
(Dickinson in Marina, 2020).
In so doing, the political nature of this media representation of the ganaderos reveals itself as
incontrovertible.
RENATURING THE WILD
The “Proyecto Parque Patagonia”/“Patagonia Park Project” documentary is none other than a site
where power competes for dominance through semiotic means, just like the micropolitical
interactions described at the beginning of this chapter were. This representation is a political act
and a way through which discourse is self-elaborated. As Edwards (1996) has noted, the political
significance of a particular representation increases when it becomes embedded in ordinary
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language. This film is seeking to reaffirm the discursive tropes and subjects most Argentinians
were already familiar with, those that other institutions, practices and rhetoric have constituted as
a truth regime. Indeed, the image of the pioneers, not just as brave individuals who dared settle in
such a hostile land but as fundamentals of Argentinianness together with their fluffy white sheep
and dark horses constitute a true Patagonia. Certainly, as I have discussed, there is nothing
“natural” in that depiction; rather, this is a particular discursive formation that emerged in the XIX
and XX centuries which created and centered on certain subjects and legitimized a particular
modernity model.
This is what the XXI century ganaderos are trying to go back to: they are attempting to re-
nature the wild because they are holding on to a wilderness construction that marked nature as a
place archetypically opposed to “culture” that needed to be remediated through pastoral practices.
In so doing, they are resisting a different discursive formation—another contingent unit of
elements brought together by a different logic that engenders a new development model—that
equally marks nature as a space other than culture but which needs to be embraced in its now
positively sublime wildness. That this alternative is, in fact, a formation that is made possible by
and through a neoliberal logic that seeks to reintegrate the region to global networks of capital in
a qualitatively different way (see Chapter 5), becomes apparent in the documentary analyzed
above. This is not so much based on what the ranchers or business owners interviewed say, even
if their interventions are prompted by it, but rather in the fact that FRA’s CEO is shown talking
about rewilding as conservation just as much as she discusses it as a development strategy. Indeed,
in her testimony—which evidences their protected areas as instances of green commodification—
Heinonen clearly explains that removing an economy based on extraction and replacing it with an
economy based on services (“which is what the new generations want”), will transform the area
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into “an ecotourism destination,” effectively allowing for plenty of exchanges with other parts of
the world to which this place will be now connected.
An element at the root of this competition of interests is that the environmentalism that
sustains the paradigm of conservation as the expansion or creation of protected lands comes from
the global North, which encompasses wealthy countries and their populations. This clashes directly
against the environmentalism of the rural population of the global South who, rather than needing
to “connect” to wild places or have transcendental experiences, value their natural environment
for its contributions to their livelihoods (see Guha, 1989). In Santa Cruz in particular, the neighbors
of Los Antiguos and Perito Moreno felt that their livelihood was being threatened by the expansion
of the PNP, devaluing their land and entirely affecting their production practices. Thus, while no
violent evictions occurred, these people were the target of a type of conservation displacement
centered on exclusion of dwellers from the areas instrumental to their pursuit of a livelihood.
Furthermore, the political shifts that FRA caused in the local legislature meant that inhabitants
experienced a profound sense of uncertainty as to what the future of their property was. As Puricelli
expressed, “You wake up in the morning just like every other day only to find that someone from
the provincial government decided it was game over.” This uncertainty also manifested in the loss
of confidence in their elected officials who, faced with threats and political pressure from the
national government, altered historical alliances which resulted in local producers having to resort
to representatives they had not and would have never voted for.
Although the effects of protected areas are too diverse to merely categorize those areas as
ultimately “good” or “bad” (Brockington & Igoe, 2006; West et al.,7 2006), this empirical case
demonstrates that wilderness as a discursive formation, especially as reconstituted through
“rewilding,” generates inequality by continuing to concentrate the costs of conservation on the
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populations of less developed countries while the benefits are enjoyed by global elites of more
developed countries: while the former lose not just their way of life but their identity, the latter
either get recognition and funding for their foundations or get to go on a “wild experience” and
bring back photographs. As I will explore in the last chapter, the inequity in the flows of benefits
and losses also manifests in the fact that the global North gets to continue developing lucrative,
industrial and agricultural industries, such as those that gave origin to the fortunes that the
ecophilanthropists sponsoring FRA are now greenwashing, while the global South is cornered into
a position that dresses any alternative to conservation as morally irresponsible against the backdrop
of a dire biodiversity crisis.
Given this, it is no surprise that the agricultural producers of northwest Santa Cruz labored
to reestablish discursive hegemony and to extend in time the order that produces them as powerful
subjects. However, what the ganaderos need to compete with is not just FRA’s discourse and
practices; rather, they need to contend with the change in the conditions of existence that allowed
for the emergence of the discursive formation they so want to maintain. Surely, some things have
remained the same: Patagonia is still very much sparsely populated, some of the common fruit
available for purchase at the towns arrives almost completely ripe, a great number of individuals
only rely on AM radio for communicating with other fellow humans and receiving news, and the
wind continues to relentlessly howl, feeling on the ground “like a buzz that is never silenced”
(Brunswig de Bamberg, 2009). But back in the XIX century, the State was in a very strong position
and could offer subsidies and land to promote a form of economic development, whereas now the
province of Santa Cruz is in a perpetually dire fiscal situation (augmented by its complicated and
fluctuating relation with the federal government) and is thus much more amenable to development
projects that promise capital. Before, this part of Patagonia had clear seasons throughout the year,
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marked by significant amounts of snowfall and accumulation, which regularized the migration and
general displacement of animals, whereas now the milder temperatures and water emergency status
means they do not move that far up or down the plateau, resulting in a mid-level congregation that
increases the competition between wildlife and cattle for resources, existentially threatening the
viability of agricultural production itself. Thus, the endeavor to continue to uphold a discursive
formation of wilderness that regards nature as an othered place where man can simply set up shop
and that casts native wildlife as pests necessarily has an expiration date. Some ranchers see this
coming, which is why they are attempting more sustainable practices in their management of soil
(supported by INTA); others, if their pride allows, are considering reconverting their estancias to
accommodate an additional touristic venture. Although FRA’s actions in this region of Santa Cruz
are an inexcusable exercise of neocolonial power, this Foundation and the ganaderos share a
similar trait: predicated on maintaining ontological separations that do not exist, they are ultimately
covering the sun with one finger.

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CHAPTER 4. REWILDING AS A MEDIA PRACTICE

– She was there at two, three, four in the afternoon.
– Waiting…
– Yeah, two, three, four… so strange, that she’s there and at that time. And then, there’s
two other good ones [refers to data clusters], they are up there, close, just past that
small canyon.
– That’s where the camera is, no?
– No, that’s farther…
– Because yesterday I looked for a camera and…
– It’s more where the cub was killed, because you can see the lagoon, remember? In the
video Nico shot, you could see the lagoon. Then, wasn’t it close? I don’t have it written
down.
– No, it has to be more towards that side, these [points to element on phone map] are
the bushes right up there.
– So, then it has to be back there, where the clusters are. For sure. Are we going to go
check them out? They’re kinda far
– Oh, I think we passed it!

The excerpt above is a verbatim transcription of an exchange between the two men in
charge of overseeing the rewilding project on site. The three of us were inside one of the
Foundation’s white Toyota Hillux, stopped in the middle of the empty road, trying to decipher
what the geospatial data on their phones was telling them as they attempted to (re)map it onto the
field stretching before us. As I sat on the back seat, I could see them leaning over their cellphones,
heads close together, trying to understand where a female puma fitted with a satellite collar could
have been the day before and whether those spots the data was pointing to were accessible to visit.
Even considering this context, the excerpt is still hard to fully comprehend due to its indexicality.
However, I have chosen to reproduce it here because this vignette is representative of what
ecological research and practice looks like today, when direct human observation is no longer
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believed to provide thorough and standard data that will allow the falsification of hypotheses for
all animals and research questions. But more importantly, this scene offers an entry point into what
this chapter discusses, namely the mediation that technologies such as cameras and cellphones
together with the videos and data clusters they produce effect in conservation. While dense and
seemingly cryptic, the dialogue still demonstrates how the conversations and practices pertaining
to conservation are deeply intertwined with media: even though the participants were oriented
towards finding traces of a real, flesh-and-blood animal “out there,” the puma they are talking
about, who appears as a mere “she” in the text, is one they know through the technologies of vision
they rely on. By their capacity to reveal her existence, the puma in the excerpt becomes
knowable—and, arguably, alive—through the technological mediators put in place to record and
track her movements.
Just the night before, I attended a presentation regularly offered by communications
representatives of FRA to anybody who spends the night in their mountain lodge, La Posta de los
Toldos, where they outlined and explained their rewilding project. The Foundation’s discursive
and material strategy around this initiative was best synthesized in the second video we were
shown that day, which borrowed from tried-and-tested tropes of wildlife documentaries:
spectacular panoramas and intimate depictions of charismatic fauna (see Bousé 1998; Chris 2006;
Mitman 2012). The clip started with a series of aerial shots that depicted an expansive and
spectacular Patagonia—coincidentally, it showed the parts of Patagonia that pertained to the brand
the Foundation is promoting, Parque Patagonia—and was followed by a series of close-up shots
of individuals of the animal species this project targeted. After establishing where and who, the
video then shows us by whom: much like the Patagonian explorers of yesteryear equipped with
maps, we see weather-braving individuals holding camera traps and antennas, donning backpacks
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and jackets from patagonia, the brand. The last third of the video shows the interactions between
the animals and the humans as mediated through technologies, from a hand setting a foot trap for
the puma to the rifle and dart used to sedate a guanaco (who is latter fitted with a tracking collar),
to the release and further observation of a collared vizcacha.
This last part is very important, not just for what it does rhetorically but because it
introduces a fundamental player in the “Rewilding Patagonia” discursive formation. Indeed, the
display of modern technological devices employed for wildlife conservation works to grant the
Foundation a sober aura of legitimacy, casting it as a serious entity whose work relies on a science
and technology that have long been deemed to be the most promising means of effecting ecology
research and, consequently, of mitigating the dire circumstances in which humans have placed
wild animals. This narrative is important and so the first part of the chapter describes the camera
traps and satellite collars employed by the Foundation as well as the work they do. It is precisely
because of their capacity to define what can be known that these technologies constitute a crucial
element in the heterogenous ensemble that wilderness as a discourse is, which is why this work
dedicates an entire chapter to them.
Though part of the discourse of wilderness, the technologies of vision and surveillance
discussed here work as more than mere elements in an ensemble. Certainly, the technologies are
discursive elements in themselves as FRA utilizes them to construct specific narratives about
Patagonia and wild animals, and to present their work as legitimate conservation. But they are also
objects through which other discourses find their way into this discursive formation thus
structurally shaping it: because camera traps and satellite collars are inherently linked to particular
discourses of wildlife photography and movement ecology, their presence allows for the
articulation of fragments of those discourses into the discursive formation of wilderness.
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Their dual role as discursive elements and enabling conditions becomes even more
palpable when considering how fundamental their mediation is to the reconstitution of wilderness
as a discursive formation through rewilding. As I have explored thus far (and will continue to do,
see Chapter 5), the PNP/PP/Rewilding initiative is predicated on restoring and preserving the
Patagonian ecosystem as well as on offering this site as an international destination for ecotourism.
At the center of it all lies wildlife: securing an abundant presence of diverse nonhuman species
(and of apex predators in particular) is key to guaranteeing the health of naturally occurring
processes, such as trophic cascades, but it is also crucial to the branding of the region as a site
where those who come to conduct “eco-safaris” will have their expectations met. In this context,
by rendering wild animals discoverable to global social media audiences, international and national
tourists and, equally, to FRA’s rewilding team, these technologies become conditions of existence
for the discursive formation itself.
Considering this, the main contribution this chapter seeks to make, pertains to the
ontological consequences of the mediation of these technologies. As mentioned in the introduction,
rewilding has become a popular conservation practice in the last decade as a cost-effective solution
to the preservation of biodiversity. Yet, despite its seemingly “hands-off” approach in letting
nature “go wild” (“again”), this practice can entail an intensely active management of species that
typically relies on the use of wildlife tracking technologies. While the use of media such as camera
traps and satellite collars in conservation is not a new phenomenon, their histories and uses predate
this application. Indeed, as technologies of vision at the center of hunting, wildlife films and enemy
surveillance, these devices are embedded with politics, far from constituting “neutral” devices,
that create particular types of power/knowledge (see Cosgrove, 1994, 2003). On the one hand, this
suggest that the mediation that they organize or otherwise effect is not without friction as the
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animals that emerge in their outputs are not the same as those who inhabit the land. On the other,
it points to the fact that their mediation in conservation practices can reproduce some of the power
structures or orderings inscribed in the devices.
This is why the chapter concludes by arguing that framing rewilding as a media practice
can open up space to critically assess this form of conservation from a perspective informed by
media, and science and technology studies. To be sure, reading these technologies as part of a
discursive formation centered on the idea of wilderness—that is, foregrounding how they work to
support a particular order or contingent unit that, in turn, constitutes, circulates and reaffirms the
power of certain social groups—already interrupts the analytical trajectory that only reads them as
instruments for ecology research. However, muting the context in which rewilding and its
supportive technologies constitute a conservation practice and repositioning them in an analytical
camp that treats these technologies as media, and rewilding as a media practice, allows researchers
from other disciplines, particularly the aforementioned ones, to weigh in on conservation debates
that have thus far been dominated either by the natural sciences or political ecology.
HUNTING WITH THE CAMERA, REMOTELY.
One of the most commonly employed devices in ecology research is something called “camera
traps,” small photographic devices designed to be inconspicuous that automatically begin
recording when they sense movement (or sometimes heat) nearby and thus provide
“unprecedented, unobtrusive access into wildlife habitats” (Kucera & Barrett, 2011, p. 9). Thus,
these cameras are used to detect rare species, delineate species distribution, estimate population
size, monitor animal behavior and document predation. Originally, though, the cameras were
activated by the animals themselves as they tripped on a wire placed by the photographer on its
path, one which also tended to have some form of bait attached to it. Previously known as
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“flashlight trap photography,” it was developed by George Shiras (1906) at the end of the XIX
century and made popular during the first quarter of the XX thanks in part to Shiras’ articles in
The National Geographic Magazine from 1906 to 1921, as well as the first detailed guide to
outdoor photography aptly titled How to hunt with the camera (Nesbit, 1926). Originally too, the
cameras were far from unobtrusive: as a leading ornithologist who used camera traps similar to
those of Shiras in the tropical rain forest of Central America during the 1920s described, the sound
of the flash charge exploding after an animal activated the camera via the trip wire was akin to that
of a small cannon, which altogether “must have been a terrifying experience for the animal to
endure a sudden explosion of blinding light along with a thunderous boom only three meters or so
away” (Sanderson & Trolle, 2005, p. 151).
After constant improvement throughout the XX century, the automatic camera trap entered
the market at the end of the 1980s, a model that involved a film camera connected to an infrared
transmitter that was able to shoot a picture when the beam was interrupted by an animal as well as
to automatically reload the film after the capture (see Savidge & Seibert, 1988). A great promoter
of the technical improvement of these contraptions came in the form of “weekend hunters” who
realized that camera traps could help in their search for trophy deer and other game, and thus
proceeded to eagerly adopt the tool, consequently helping to create a mass market with an ample
offer of varying costs (Sanderson & Trolle, 2005). In the realm of wildlife research, the use of
these remote devices grew exponentially during the 1990s not only due to its increasing ease of
use and new commercial accessibility, but because an awareness of the precarious conservation
status of small and mid-sized carnivores developed during those years. Low density species such
as the lynx or the tiger do not reveal their presence easily to humans and tend to roam vastly, which
made gauging their occurrence a tricky matter. Thus, unobtrusive cameras that could be placed
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and left on their own in remote or difficult to access habitats became crucially instrumental in
determining population density and behavior of these hard-to-spot animals.
Nowadays, the rate of biodiversity loss means that a large proportion of conservation
projects entails the monitoring of threatened species’ populations over time and space. In this
context, camera traps are mostly used to establish presence in given areas and to aid in estimating
population density, although more studies are using them to study plant-animal interaction and
other specific behaviors like infant care or social interaction (see Trolliet et al., 2014).
Additionally, the range of species studied has expanded beyond large mammals to includes birds
and reptiles, and the cameras themselves have been deployed in multiple types of habitats
(O’Connell et al., 2011). Altogether, these photographic traps seem to continue to be appreciated
by researchers because they have the capability of recording accurate data without having to
capture animals and because, unlike data produced by live-trapping or direct observation, these
records “can be reviewed by other researchers” (Swann et al., 2011, p. 29).
Effectively, FRA’s rewilding initiative employs “photo-trapping.” During my stay at Posta
de Los Toldos, the mountain refuge located in the Cañadón Pinturas Portal/Gateway, I got to
attend yet another rewilding presentation that took place during one fine weekday morning in the
month of February. We gathered around the same large coffee table in the “living room” of the
refuge, looking straight at a big projector screen that was hard to see at times due to the glare that
entered through the window, emanating from that day’s cloudless sky. Yet this time, the audience
and the speaker were different. The first comprised of press members from provincial and national
news media representing print, radio and online-only outlets, as well as other parties of interest,
such as the general manager of a 4-star hotel located in the city of the neighboring province of
Chubut that happens to be the closest airplane-accessible location to PNP/PP (one still needs to
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hop on a bus for 6 hours to get to Perito Moreno, and then put in another hour by car to get to the
refuge). People such as journalists, bloggers or influential businessmen, are regularly invited to
“experience” the PP so that they can later promote it in their respective ways. The presenter this
time was none other than the coordinator of the rewilding project himself, Emanuel Galetto, a lean
and unassuming young man who, despite the morning chill, was wearing a blue plaid shirt and a
simple black vest. Even though he is not the scientific coordinator of the project, he is the one that
supervises any task or activity related to rewilding on-site, something he has ample experience in
as he was responsible for coordinating other species-reintroduction projects with the Foundation,
only in a different part of the country. At the time of my visit, the team in charge of actually
executing the day to day “chores” related to the rewilding initiative were himself and another
young man who had just recently started working for the Foundation, and they lived together in a
small biological field station known as El Unco (one of the many former estancias purchased by
FRA, see Introduction), some 33 miles from the refuge.
That morning, Galetto started the presentation—an unstructured talk interspersed with
videos—explaining that, when the Foundation “deployed in Patagonia,” they did not really know
what the situation was like in the region in terms of how many native and “exotic” species were
present (population diversity) nor how many of those individuals there were (population density).
I came to understand later that although they did not have any accurate estimations (possibly, none
at all), they assumed that the situation was going to be similar to what they had encountered in that
other part of the country where Galetto had worked before. In Esteros del Iberá—a protected area
in the northeast of Argentina that is a mix of swamps, bogs, stagnant lakes and lagoons—the
Foundation worked for over 10 years to reintroduce native species that “had been extirpated locally
in historic times” consequently developing a “model for proactive conservation,” which was also
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“one of the first program of this kind in the Americas” (all quotes from Zamboni et al., 2017, p.
248).
To get a sense of what roamed this part of Patagonia, Galetto explained that they placed 30
camera traps in their newly acquired lands (see Figure 4.1). These cameras are small rectangular
devices (4.5 by 3.25 inches) manufactured by Browning Trail Cameras, who self-describe their
products as “designed and manufactured by an avid group of hunters and outdoor enthusiasts who
continually strive to bring the most technologically advanced, high-performance trail cameras to
market with unmatched industry quality” (About Browning Trail Cameras, n.d.). Browning Trail
Cameras is owned by Browning Arms Company, an American marketer of firearms originally
founded to commercialize the sporting or civilian designs of John Moses Browning, arguably the
most successful American firearms designer (Suciu, 2020). The fact that the same company that
sells the cameras the Foundation relies on also markets high-end hunting rifles and shotguns is not
surprising, considering that hunting has historically served as a motivator for wildlife preservation.
Granted, hunters wanted to preserve a “stock” of wild animals to ensure the continuation of their
favored “sport,” and did not consider their preys as anything more than resources that needed to
be maintained and renewed. Nonetheless, they were “the first organized group to press for wildlife
preservation and until well into the twentieth century provided the money for wildlife work”
(Dunlap, 1991, p. 9). These camera-taps have a trigger speed of less than half a second, taking
another half a second for them to recover between pictures, and have a long detection range.
Powered by six double-A batteries, they can shoot during day and night and these images, which
also relay time, date, temperature and moon phase, are stored in a memory card that can be
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accessed on its side (Figure 4.2). Both this and the batteries need to be replaced often in order to
access the images and keep the camera working.
Figure 4.1 (left): A camera trap in the Strike Force range (from Browning Trail Cameras),
strapped to a wooden pole by the rewilding team, which automatically shoots depending on a
combination of detected heat and movement (Author photo, 2020). Figure 4.2 (right): A member
of the rewilding team removing the memory card from the slot on the side of another camera
strapped to a rock in order to download and access the stored picture (Author photo, 2020).
Along with the animal species one intends to capture, the other main conditioning factor
of camera trap use is the environment in which these will be deployed. Logically, different actions
must be taken depending on whether the camera will be exposed to heavy rain or humidity, fog,
snow, wind, extreme heat or cold, dense vegetation, as well as the likelihood of other humans
encountering it. In the vast and hard to traverse land in Patagonia, the Foundation currently owns
180,000 hectares (or about 444,789 acres), which is equivalent to more than half of Yellowstone
National Park’s extension and a territory almost as big as Kings Canyon National Park. In
Patagonia, it is not just the hard-to-grasp distances that complicate camera trap use, it is the hostile
terrain itself. One afternoon, I accompanied the two-man rewilding team as they set out to replace
the batteries of one of these cameras and, although that took no time at all, finding the camera
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proved incredible difficult as the plateau can be a little mesmerizing and disorienting—not to
mention immense—thus making it really hard to find a small, 7x5 inch rectangle. So, our 20-
minute drive on very rough road was followed by another 10-minute walk on equally rough soil
in which we followed Galetto—or rather, I followed both of them as I advanced painfully slow in
comparison, trying to avoid being stabbed on the foot by the prickly hairs of coirón, a native plant,
getting through the mesh of my shoes yet seemingly leaving theirs unscathed—who was going off
of a memory of where he had placed the camera months ago. Another morning, I followed them
again but this time I was trailing behind as we all walked up a rocky terrain that led to a ravine.
Again too, we were advancing based off memories of past placement, but this camera took less
time to find (see Figure 4.2). Except that Galetto remembered having placed another one nearby,
so we walked a bit further up until we were unnervingly close to the drop only to discover that
there no longer was a camera: the famed Patagonian wind had blown it away.
As can be appreciated, keeping up with these cameras is costly, not only in terms of the
time and labor dedicated to retrieving the memory card and replacing the batteries, but also in
monetary terms: each of these units can cost between US$120 to US$140. The most onerous thing
for the team however, at least at the time of my visiting, entailed not the camera traps themselves
but rather that which they contain. Depending on the storage capacity of the memory card and the
setting chosen for the quality of the image, the cameras employed by the Foundation can store over
9,000 pictures or around 250 10-second videos (Browning Strike Force Extreme, n.d.). Since they
do not rely on an algorithm to process those (at least, for now), it falls on the two-man rewilding
team to look at the massive number of pictures and videos gathered. As Galetto’s partner, Jose,
confessed, it can be “un bajón” (meaning, “a downer”) to do so considering that thousands of those
images are just of grass moving. Equally, Galetto mentioned that sometimes they spent hours
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looking at chinchillones (Wolffsohn’s vizcachas), which they endearingly call chinchis, merely
looking up or at a gallineta (Austral rail) just passing by.
KNOWING ANIMALS, MANAGING HUMAN PERCEPTIONS
Considering, then, that these cameras are expensive, not easily reachable once deployed and
downright inaccessible after heavy snowfall, that can fall victim of the elements, and that they
produce an amount of data that surpasses the ability of an overtaxed two-man team to review, what
makes them so attractive that FRA is willing to keep using them? As mentioned earlier, the first
purpose these cameras were meant to serve was that of communicating existence; that is, the
pictures these cameras took were to reveal what roamed in this part of Patagonia. Just as he would
later state in the rewilding presentation, Galetto told me when I first met him that the Foundation
“had not done any sort of census” of what inhabited the region before their arrival, and so what
lived there and in which quantities was a total unknown. Thus, in 2019, someone in the team “set
up camera-traps to see what was out there.” As mentioned before, their assumption was that the
land was mostly devoid of wildlife, that it was just a “stage missing its actors,” yet what they found
took them by surprise: the cameras revealed that there was ample wildlife presence in the land. In
Galetto’s words,
“We thought there was nothing here, that there were only some guanacos. Pumas were
unseen or were… very hidden. The locals would tell us that there were more pumas now
than 100 years ago, but what we realize today is… This is mostly our perception of the
terrain. The populations of the local wildlife are stable and rising. Well, I don’t know if they
are rising, but you see them. There’s a high density of pumas… you set up a camera trap
and you see pumas popping up everywhere.” (interview, Los Toldos, 2020).
He reiterated that this was still very recent work, seeing as they had just started this a year ago,
and it was only after they began utilizing other wildlife tracking technology that they were able to
determine that the wildlife was, in fact, present. This is a crucial point, not only because it is a
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direct consequence of the perception of Patagonia as a barren desert as discussed in Chapter 1, but
because it lies at the center of this one as it begins to demonstrate the ontological qualities of the
technologies involved.
Even though camera traps are one of the more affordable technologies for ecology research
and that certain significant information from animal populations can be obtained, Galetto
explained to me in that same initial conversation that it was not in FRA’s plans to conduct a
systematic census of the animal populations of interest. To explain the rationale for this decision
he referred to what the leading scientist of the project, Emiliano Donadio, had in turn explained to
him, namely that it was a very difficult project to conduct systematically. In other words, “one
would need a lot of cameras and the pumas cannot be identified individually, so you’re always
going to have error, and the sampling would be so large and so expensive, only to end up not being
scientifically validated.”
35
Factors such as economics or logistics are commonly used as grounds
for failure to systematically account for detectability or spatial variability, and in contexts where
not only the territory is so vast and inaccessible but where the cost of one of these Browning
camera traps is equivalent to 56%-91%
36
of the national minimum wage, these factors do represent
real limitations. This is why O’Connell et al. claim that, in order to ensure that scientific analyses

35
Along with the improvement of the camera-traps themselves, the analytical techniques employed to make
appropriate inferences from camera trap data have also evolved. However, the analyses derived from these
continue to present some problems. On the one hand, many studies continue to rely on convenience
sampling and thus compile the data as indices. On the other, being able to make significant inferences about
populations depends heavily on the possibility of probabilistic sampling (which entails determining whether
the sampled sited is representative of the larger area of interest) as well as on detectability (assuming that
individuals can be detected and identified) and a strong relationship between the count and parameter of
interest. For further explanation and references to case studies, see O’Connell et al. (2011).
36
Converting US dollars to Argentine pesos is never an easy task. The minimum wage for December 2020
is estimated to be $20,587 pesos (Argentina - Salario Mínimo 2020, n.d.). At the time of writing (October
2021), that can either amount to $11,700 pesos at the official exchange rate or to $18,850 at the black
market (“dólar blue”) rate (“Cotización del dólar hoy,” 2021).
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yield reasonable estimates of relevant parameters, “research and monitoring of animal populations
require an investment in time and effort before field work begins” (2011, p. 2, emphasis added).
Yet all these technical limitations of camera-traps were not discussed in the rewilding
presentation on the lodge’s living room to the group of enthusiastic press members. Instead,
Galetto stated then that they were using the camera traps not only to establish animal presence but
to understand how those species were utilizing the space in order to decide on a course of action
that would help either recuperate their numbers or guarantee that they were satisfactorily playing
their ecological role. At the time, he did not elaborate on how exactly they were doing that based
on the images nor on what “fulfilling their ecological role” technically meant. Granted, Galetto
clarified that he was not the lead scientist on the project and this presentation was not addressed to
a group of conservation professionals. Still, what followed was a seemingly unrelated statement:
“From this, we identified that the puma and guanaco were the two species whose
perception was negative among the local [human] population, who interpreted them as
plagues. So, instead of increasing animal populations, we had to recuperate their ecological
role and get people to change their perception about these species.” (Presentation, Los
Toldos, 2020).
Right there, on the third minute of the rewilding presentation, the one that was supposed to explain
to the public the work the Foundation was doing in species conservation through active
management, it became clear that this project was equally concerned with the management of
people and their perceptions through images. It is at this intersection that we can begin to observe
how the technologies and their outputs fulfill a dual purpose: not only does their mediation convey
existence, as explained, but it also supports the construction of particular narratives of those
knowable animals meant to elicit specific perceptions in the audience that will be engaging with
them (primarily) online.
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Out of the 30 camera-traps they have, Galetto explained to me, some were kept stationary
or fixed in a particular spot and the rest were rotated “depending on what we are trying to obtain.”
So, for example, if they are trying to learn more about predation dynamics in the region, they place
cameras next to the found carcasses of animals to observe which individuals come back to feed
from it. This is in line with modern, standard use of camera traps as the use of these for
observational research in predator-prey ecology has exploded in recent years. According to Smith
et al. (2020, p. 1999) the “non-invasive observational approach” that camera traps represent has
“revolutionized predator-prey ecology, using innovative statistical techniques and large-scale
camera trap datasets to reveal how predator and prey populations dynamically use space and time
relative to one another.” But here again, while these cameras hold the potential to enable diverse
scientifically rigorous avenues for research into predator-prey ecology, the Foundation does not
seem to be interested in exploring those. Instead, although both members of the two-man rewilding
team do occasionally review the images taken, there currently is no researcher dedicated to the
task nor are there systematic research questions being asked. Instead, the images are being used
for communication purposes on social media.
During my first outing with them, we headed south to inspect a location where some pumas
had gathered for an extended period—which, as will be explained later, is an indication that they
might have fed there leaving behind a carcass—and to replace the batteries of a camera trap.
Returning to the truck after having completed the tasks felt blissful, a warm and quiet place where
we were suddenly protected from the howling wind, and where we could hear each other again
without having to shout. As I fidgeted with a small, plastic white box where they kept the batteries,
Galetto explained that they were learning,
“how to dump all this information on social media. But in an attractive way. But also in a
way that is not… we wouldn’t want for this to become super passional; we want to use a
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more common vocabulary, so not super scientific but also not passional. We are trying to
learn how to attract people.” (Interview, somewhere near Los Toldos, 2020).
That the camera traps’ output is meant exclusively for social media or, as they mostly called it,
“communication,” was later confirmed by Emiliano Donadio, the lead scientist for Rewilding
Patagonia, whom I met at his house, 1000 kilometers (around 621 miles) north of the Foundation’s
mountain refuge. As he succinctly put it, “nothing systematic has been developed with the cameras.
The cameras are basically for communication.” He did mention that it was possible to do so with
them, something he had already started to implement in Monte León, a different though nearby
location where he had already been conducting research on pumas before he left his position at
CONICET
37
and joined the Foundation. Donadio explained that to conduct some systematic
research project utilizing the cameras, such as for example determining predator abundance, would
require devising a camera grid or even setting up enclosures. But, as mentioned before, camera
traps are expensive and their upkeep can be onerous, and though the Foundation discursively
mobilized the images these produce to signal their innovative and technologically savvy approach
to wildlife management, a systematic processing seemed to be outside their scope in practice. All
this explains why Donadio concluded that, in order to move forward in this direction, “I would
have to get an individual hired to do it, and we would have to see if that fits the objectives.”
One of the ways in which FRA has used these images in the service of “communication”
is via the creation and posting of a series of segments on Instagram that highlight some of the
animals captured by the camera traps. As Galetto had mentioned, these are moved around
depending on what they want to obtain. At a certain point during the last year, the rewilding team

37
Founded in 1958, CONICET (which stands for National Scientific and Technical Research Council) is
the main Argentine government agency that fosters and co-ordinates science and technology research in the
country.
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discovered that one of the collared Wolffsohn’s vizcachas, the species locally known as
chinchillón and referred to as chinchi by the Foundation’s staff, had recently had offspring. Thus,
they took some of these camera traps and placed them close to her living and roaming area because
“she had a baby and we wanted to see what she was doing all the time to generate
information for social media. So, there’s a fixed camera and every so often we go retrieve
[the memory card] and maybe there’s a cool video and then we write: ‘Johanna had a baby,
look how Johanna plays with…”
This explains, then, the image we see below of a baby chinchillón (Figure 4.3), specifically “one
of “the first images of a baby Wolffsohn’s Vizcacha.” But, at the moment of writing, I have yet to
find images of Johanna on social media; in other words, I have yet to discover a social media post
that identifies an individual chinchi as Johanna, and that further describes her interactions with the
baby chinchis.

Figure 4.3: Still of the second installment of the series of videos dedicated to learning more
about the Wolffsohn’s Vizcacha, referred to as chinchillón in local parlance and as “chinchi” by
the rewilding team. Screenshot of Fundación Rewilding Argentina’s public account on
Instagram.
Instead, the image above tells the story of a baby next to an adult chinchi—one that’s
actually “wearing” a VHF collar of which only a little black antenna is visible—and its
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accompanying caption merely states that they “placed more camera traps to monitor its
development and interaction with its mother and father.” I cannot ascertain whether the
individuation and personification of this individual chinchi was stripped due to concerns of
“passional” audience engagement, but I can attest to the weight this chinchi had as Johanna. The
first time I heard this name, I was in the truck with Galetto and Jose one afternoon, heading south
to see if we could spot some pumas, when we crossed paths with another of the Foundation’s white
trucks. We slowed down to meet them and Galetto rolled down the window to exchange a few
words with the driver, a woman dressed in FRA’s uniform who was coming back from some outing
and headed out to town. From the back of the car I heard her say, “we saw a la Johanna,
38
with a
baby!” to which Galetto replied, “La Johanna? Yeah, where the camera was?” When we had
resumed our drive, Galetto turned his head back and said: “La Johanna is a chinchillona.” The
clarification was not unwarranted because, at first, I thought Johanna was a woman. But she was
a female vizcacha, and although a general audience could “get to know” her through the
photographs and videos recorded by the camera traps and uploaded to social media, for those on
the ground, finding the camera was equivalent to finding her.
Although Johanna did not become a social media persona, Pampa did. The video series
with the most installments on Instagram is called “Pampa’s Secrets,” which is the name given to
one of the female pumas they have trapped and put a collar on, and follows her story from the
moment when she was captured, highlighting how she moves in the territory and what she eats, as
well as how she fulfills her ecological role in so doing. The narrative arch imposed on Pampa’s is
not without heteronormative and anthropomorphic drama: as the image below shows, the camera

38
In some countries in Latin America, some people routinely add the definite articles “el” (masculine) or
“la” (feminine) before names, although its usage tends to demonstrate familiarity or endearment.
179

traps placed to record her and the images they have obtained reveal that she gave birth to three
cubs for whom she is “working hard” (see Figure 4.4). The nocturnal image below is a still of a
short video posted on FRA’s Instagram account (@rewilding_argentina), the seventh

installment
in this animal’s series, which shows the puma donning a geo-tracking collar standing amid her
offspring as they feed on meat. The accompanying description (which is both in Spanish and
English) introduces the animal and its location and explains that, while her cubs have started eating
meat and joining her as she explores the territory searching for food, “Pampa will have to work
harder during the hunts before her cubs are ready to help with the task.”

Figure 4.4: Still of the 8
th
installment of “Pampa’s Secrets,” a collection of videos depicting the
“secret,” intimate life of a female puma as she is captured and collared, finds her mate, has
offspring and cares for them. (Fundación Rewilding Argentina, 2021d).
The sequence or structure the series of “Pampa’s Secrets” videos follow is always the same:
the clip on Instagram begins with a wide-angle shot of the landscape that visually highlights its
majestic vastness, and is followed by an explanation of how the technologies they are employing,
namely the camera traps placed in the park as well as the geo-collars attached to the animals, are
allowing them (and subsequently, those of us watching) to peer into the raw intimacy of wildlife
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and to uncover their secrets. In the third installment of this series, we see the two-man rewilding
team from behind, two black figures in a large, arid expanse, walking towards the carcass of a
guanaco a few meters in front of them. Thanks to the information from the geo-collars, the team
believes this animal was killed by Pampa, and so the next scene shows one of the men securing a
camera-trap to a wooden post (see Figure 4.5), which they leave in place to “spy” on the other
animals that will likely approach the carcass to feed from it.
Just as it occurs with wildlife documentaries on television which construct action
sequences based on a composite of images that may not all belong to the same animal nor have
been taken on the same day for the sake of continuity (Bousé, 2003), although we first see the men
deploying the camera on a flat terrain on a bright sunny day, the image that follows shows a
collared puma, whom we are told is Pampa, feeding on a different guanaco in a sloped terrain
covered with snow. After that, we see a succession of animals from other species (caranchos, term
for crested caracaras, a condor and, two months later, a gray fox) feeding on the same dead
guanaco, followed by one last look at Pampa, howling at something in the night, and a closing
black screen with white letters that conclude: Pumas, the architects of the ecosystem. In exactly
one minute on Instagram, the Foundation has built its case: the media technologies employed and
the images obtained through them “reveal” that there are charismatic pumas roaming this territory
and that they have a very important ecological role to fulfill.
Thus, although not taken up as enablers of the systematic process science would have us
believe it requires, the camera traps still function as that through which a conservation narrative is
constructed. As will be explained later in this chapter, this active process through which the
animals emerge also constructs them as specific subjects to be looked at, and renders the
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technologies involved as inherently constitutive of the rewilding project specifically and of
“Rewilding Patagonia” in general.

Figure 4.5: Still of the 5
th
installment of “Pampa’s secrets” Instagram videos depicting a
possibly staged moment in which we see Jose placing a camera trap on the field to monitor
which species feed from the dead prey left by Pampa, the puma (Fundación Rewilding Argentina,
2020e)
It is through the camera traps that certain conservation practices are also enacted. As the
following section will discuss in detail, the Foundation also relies on a different set of technological
media to perform conservation, namely collars with satellite and/or very high-frequency (VHF)
connectivity. To put these on the animals, they obviously first need to trap them and here is where
these camera-traps come in handy. For example, Galetto mentioned that, at a certain point during
the past year, they had three remaining collars to put on chinchis and so they wondered about
where they would be able to capture these individuals. Therefore, he decided to set up a camera
trap next to some rock formations where many chinchis had been spotted before in order to
determine which cracks on those rock walls were the most trafficked and then place the actual
traps there. Whenever they want to capture pumas to put collars on them, they organize
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“campaigns” to do so and a key preliminary step before anything begins is the placement of camera
traps in places where pumas are known to roam. In this case, Galetto explained that they put the
cameras to determine which canyons are visited more frequently by pumas, and how many of those
are female as opposed to male if they are interested, for example, in trapping females. Thus, once
they have settled on places that seem accessed by pumas and accessible to humans, they place a
set of camera traps and leave them one or two months. Then, they go retrieve the memory cards
and parse through the audiovisual material to get the information they need:
“Just during the last campaign, I placed [cameras] a month prior and then I determined:
‘Okay, there’s at least two females passing by El Unco per month, so let’s place the snares
there because we already have three females in Los Toldos and only one in El Unco, and
I’d like to have one more female.” (Interview, Los Toldos, 2020).
These camera traps are not only useful before an animal is trapped. As Galetto explained, they
also use the ones left next to the snares to note at what time it closed on a puma’s paw and to
observe how the animal reacted to that, whether it fought or not and for how long. Ultimately,
camera traps are instrumental to the enacting of conservation and work in tandem with other media
technologies and interfaces, namely satellite collars and the visualizations they provide.
SURVEILLING WITH THE SATELLITE
The Foundation’s rewilding initiative is a tale of two media technologies: camera traps and satellite
collars. The use of camera traps is certainly widespread in ecology research but one of the most
prominent forms of technology-enabled conservation involves following animal bodies as they
move about the territory. This form of wildlife tracking, namely one that attaches to the animals’
bodies, originated around 1960 at the intersection of wildlife management and military
surveillance as a promising way of studying often-elusive wild animals in their natural habitats
(Benson, 2010). Equally crucial to other modern electronics, the development of the transistor—a
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device designed to amplify or switch electric signals and electrical power—gave birth to
biotelemetry, as it permitted small radio transmitters to be attached to animals without significantly
affecting their normal behavioral patterns. The first transmitter, whose design was first described
in 1959, was “a transistor, crystal-controlled oscillator with the tank coil for the oscillator acting
also as a magnetic dipole transmitting antenna,” and it was used on cotton-tail rabbits (Cochran &
Lord, 1963, p. 9). The advent of very high frequency (VHF) early in the 1960s was followed by
satellite tracking in the early 1970s, which presented the advantages of extending coverage to
remote locations or surveying extremely large areas in short periods of time, freeing researchers
from having to monitor the transmitters at close range. Before the turn of the century, these forms
of biotelemetry would simultaneously become a symbol of modern wildlife conservation and the
privileged mode of knowing wild animals.
Although camera traps have multiple parts to them, they require less infrastructure to
operate. As noted, the readily available camera traps of today are a result of years of technological
innovation and arguably depend on other infrastructure to fully operate: although a researcher can
set them up on the field and leave them alone to “do their thing,” the information they contain is
stored in a tiny yet powerful memory card that, in turn, needs to be inserted in a computer or similar
device for said researcher to access the contents. And, obviously, there needs to be a functional
electric grid to do so and a reliable internet connection if those images are to be uploaded to an
online database. However, the degree to which radio and, particularly, satellite collars depend on
other infrastructural systems is much more pronounced. To track an animal in the field using radio
technology, its body needs to be equipped with a transmitter capable of emitting a signal detectable
to the receiver the human counterpart controls (both the transmitter and receiver use antennas to
aid in that transmission). The use of these signals for wildlife research became popular because
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radio waves could transmit information rapidly and through long distances, which became more
complex when satellite communication began to be explored. For example, the first experiments
with satellite monitoring of animal movement and environmental and physiological data were
conducted using the Interrogation, Recording, and Location System (IRLS) on the Nimbus 3
satellite which, launched in 1969, was the third in a series of meteorological research and
development satellites designed to serve as a platform for testing advanced meteorological sensor
systems and collecting meteorological data (NASA, n.d.). After experimenting with a migrating
elk, Craighead et al. (1971) relied on this system to telemeter environmental and physiological
data from the den of a hibernating black bear, who was instrumented with a ground-tracking
transmitter collar and tracked with a portable directional receiver for 27 days while it prepared for
winter.
Since then, researchers have been relying on the Argos system, a satellite-based system
that collects environmental data from autonomous platforms and disseminates it to users
worldwide. Powered by batteries or solar power, the transmitters on the bodies of the animals
upload short duration messages to Argos instruments on satellites that are on a polar orbit and pass
overhead at an altitude of 850 kilometers. By the time they reach the poles, which they do
approximately 14 times per day, the satellites have seen all the transmitters on earth and received
their messages simultaneously (see How Argos System Works?, n.d.). These are stored on the
onboard recorder and retransmitted to the ground when the satellites pass over one of the three
main receiving stations, two of which are located in the United States and the remaining, in
Norway. They can also be retransmitted to the regional reception stations, of which there are 70,
that enter the satellite’s field of view. These receiving stations retransmit the data to two processing
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centers designed for full redundancy where it is processed and made available to users, thus
completing a distribution network that provides worldwide coverage.
Just like camera traps, satellite collars are described in the technical literature as having
revolutionized the field of animal ecology given the wealth of detailed information they can
provide about how animals move and utilize space across diverse landscapes (Cagnacci et al.,
2010). And, indeed, all of this infrastructure has enabled the acquisition of an unprecedented
amount of detailed data about the movements of individual organisms, giving rise to the field of
“movement ecology” (Benson, 2016). Today, satellite telemetry is understood as “the deployment
of autonomous recording tags on free-living animals so that multiple variables can be monitored
at rates of many times per second, thereby generating millions of data points over periods ranging
from hours to years” (Ropert-Coudert & Wilson, 2005). In this context, movement is always the
salient variable, as it is considered to be “the glue that ties ecological processes together”
(Cagnacci, et. al., 2010) and what “provides essential insights into patterns of biodiversity,
ecological characteristics of individual species and ecosystems function” (Kays et al., 2015). The
promise is that all this data will let us learn about the animals’ biology, how they use their
environment and interact with predators, thus enabling us to establish protected areas based on
their movement patterns and even model how some of them can anticipate natural disasters in the
hopes of utilizing that knowledge to protect humans.
At the time of my visiting, the Foundation had 34 individual animals tagged: 8 pumas, 16
guanacos and 10 chinchis. All of these collars have been manufactured by Lotek which, founded
in 1984, self-describes as “a world leader in the design and manufacture of fish and wildlife
monitoring systems” whose innovative “radio, acoustic, archival and satellite monitoring solutions
allow researchers to track animals, birds and fish of almost any size, in almost any environment”
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(Lotek, 2017). On this last point, the capability of reaching any animal anywhere, Lotek is quite
adamant: “Whether an animal moves through a terrestrial, freshwater, marine or avian habitat,
Lotek has a system to track it” (idem). Indeed, between accessories, beacons, collars, receivers,
software and tags, this company offers more than 80 products that work not just with the Argos
system, but also with the Iridium and Globalstar satellite constellations.
The collars the Foundation puts on pumas and guanacos, which cost around US$2,500
each, belong to the “LiteTrack Iridium” range, a family of products launched in 2016 to provide
powerful data collection capabilities with a reduced overall weight. The collars in this family come
in a variety of sizes and can weigh from below 130 grams up to 420 grams, depending on its
configuration, the belt type and size. The specific model the Foundation uses is the “LiteTrack
Iridium 420” one, which can be adjusted to the neck of guanacos (which looks like a more
elongated collar than the one on Figure 6) or pumas (see Figure 7). According to the manufacturer,
these collars are ideal tools to perform animal home range analysis, translocations, reintroductions
and adaptive management, as well as to better determine wildlife distribution and habitat use,
inter- and intraspecies interactions, and predator-prey dynamics, among others (see Lotek, 2018).
The range of possible applications is wide because these collars have a variety of significant
capabilities, including global positioning satellite (GPS) and/or VHF, remote data download and
upload via Iridium and VHF radio frequency, enhanced mortality indication
39
and sensor data
logging including temperature and 3-axis accelerometer.

39
Because the collar is constantly storing and transmitting information, it can detect when an animal has
potentially died through its sensor data logging. If the collar suspects the animal carrier has died, it will
increase the VHF pulse rate and Iridium (satellite) transmission of events, which works to alert the
researchers or human team of the decease so they can retrieve the collar and/or the animal.
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Figure 4.6 (left): Image of Lotek’s LiteTrack Iridium 420 model, the satellite collar the
Foundation employs on some of the wildlife they’re interested in rewilding (Lotek, n.d.). Figure
4.7 (right): Photograph of the image shown during the rewilding presentation in the mountain
refuge’s living room, which depicts a satellite collar that has been molded to fit the neck of a
puma (Author photo, 2020).
At the end of the morning rewilding talk offered to press members, Galetto showed the
audience a couple of images of the collars the rewilding team employs and corroborated that they
weigh half a kilo, adding: “They are big, but since we want constant satellite connection, there’s
nothing smaller. Comparing to what they used to be, they are much smaller.” What makes them
so prominent are its components: the battery and VHF are housed in the bigger rectangular case
located in the bottom portion of the collar, whereas the satellite is the smaller plastic part at the top
of the collar (see Figure 4.7). Additionally, these collars are fitted with a small drop-off mechanism
through which they self-release from the body of their animal carrier by way of a small explosion
after two or three years (this is visible on the left side of the belt in Figure 4.7). Even though they
are light, the collars are certainly bulky, and people notice. For example, someone in the audience
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asked if, as an alternative, a chip could be implanted directly on the animal, to which Galetto
replied that, although technically feasible, it was not the best tool as connectivity was lost very
easily, its placement required a surgical intervention and it altogether failed to last as long as the
GPS collars. Someone else asked if they rotated the collars among the animals, meaning if they
alternated between individual pumas, to which Galetto gave an indirect affirmative answer by
explaining that they relied on the collars’ inbuilt drop-off mechanism to self-release after three
years, which is also the typical lifespan of the satellite component of the collar.
Just then, another member of the audience asked: Does the collar affect their behavior? As
Benson (2010) has noted, the ethical concerns implicated in fitting animals with tracking devices
have been recognized from the moment these technologies began to be employed, which is why
tracking studies were required to undergo thorough reviews. However, there is not enough
conclusive research on this, although some studies mention increased drag and consequent impacts
on energy expenditure and locomotor performance, behavioral modifications and other
environmental impacts (Nussberger & Ingold, 2006; Reisinger et al., 2010; Tudorache et al., 2014;
van der Hoop et al., 2014). Others also mention mild irritation (Collins et al., 2014), severe tissue
damage (Krausman et al., 2004), and reduced fitness and death (Cid et al., 2013).
40
Galleto’s

40
Yet, while there are some studies that systematically investigate the adverse effects these devices might
have, most of the ones that report on mammals are limited to small and medium animals, who are overall
easier and less expensive to monitor and manage in laboratory settings (Murray & Fuller, 2000).
Additionally, the literature that does address large mammals delves into the effects of capture, sedation,
and handling, as opposed to those of the collars themselves (see for example Brogi et al., 2019; Jung et al.,
2019; Wiebke et al., 2011). Focusing on the case of a collared scimitar-horned oryx (bigger mammal,
though still zoo-captive), one of the most recent publications on this subject (Stabach et al., 2020)
acknowledged that these satellite tracking devices have potential risks and may burden their carriers with
additional stress, causing injury or even death, but failed to find long-term effects of GPS collars.
Specifically, they found an increase in the amount of hourly headshaking and another in fecal glucocorticoid
metabolites (which essentially test for hormonal stress levels), which went back to pre-collared levels 3
days after collaring and withing 5 days of collaring, respectively. Interestingly, although the authors
acknowledge that “for species included in reintroduction programs, where the stresses to each individual
are high, it is paramount to understand the effects of devices aimed to monitor individuals before release,”
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response to the question of a collar’s potential for modifications of a puma’s’ behavior was, simply,
“They look bulky, they’re annoying at the beginning, it must annoy him and he would obviously
prefer not to have it on, pero le tocó” (which roughly translates to “it was his turn”).
41,42
Whenever
a collar becomes available, either because they have come across new devices or a puma already
wearing one died, the rewilding team organizes what they call “capture campaigns” and either
place new snares in key locations or re-activate those already in-place. Essentially, these snares
are a noose made of steel wire that is placed on the ground and camouflaged, and which wraps
around the paw of a puma if the animal steps entirely inside the circle made by the wire.
43
Being
in “campaign” mode also means that the team routinely checks on the traps twice per day, one late
at night and the other early in the morning. They might also decide to go check a snare trap if they
“hear” it: these traps are equipped with a set of transmitters that emit a faster beeping sound if the
snare’s mechanism has been activated, which can be picked up with an antenna at about a 2km
distance.

they also “recognize that most researchers are unable (both financially and logistically) to study the effects
on animals once they are fit with GPS collars” (Stabach et al., 2020, pp. 15–16). Ultimately, they reconcile
this tension by suggesting zoos as an ideal venue to address research questions such as these, as those spaces
can provide insight into the potential impact of tracking devices and allow for experimental control, thus
benefitting wild populations in the end, even if conditions do not match those of wild populations.
41
Please note, substantives in Spanish have genders. Therefore, it is common to refer to animals by
whichever pronoun corresponds to their sex, as opposed to using “it.” In this case, Emanuel Galetto was
referring to a male puma, which is why he refers to it as he/him.
42
FRA has specific goals when it comes to capturing pumas, as we will explore in Chapter 5. This is why
Galetto kept repeating in conversation that they were only interested in trapping female pumas. When I
mentioned this to Donadio, he added some nuance claiming that trapping these animals was not an easy
task which in effect means that whichever individual gets caught in an active snare is likely to be collared.
He also said that he was not going to authorize the collaring of only female pumas, though at the time of
my visit Galetto was clear that they collared females and only marked males (in the ears) who fell in the
traps and were let go.
43
Making it easy for the animal to step directly at the center of the noose is important because that is where
the trigger pan lies, a small metal square covered with black tarp and camouflaged with soil. This steel wire
is, in turn, clamped to a proof coil chain hooked to another steel bar secured in place (for example, by
hammering it inside a rock) to act as an anchor that will restrain the animal. These snares are typically
placed in the flattest spots, as well as in the narrowest of places to “funnel” the puma to a snare as much as
possible, leaving little room for it to successfully avoid the trap.
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RETRIEVING THE DATAFIED WILD ANIMAL
As mentioned, the location of the snare traps is sometimes decided based on information gathered
by camera traps which, through their always-ready lens, help “reveal” the pumas existence as well
as the paths they traverse. Other times, however, there is a much more obvious and direct indicator,
such as the presence of carcasses and drag marks on the soil. Typically, pumas launch themselves
at their prey, knocking the animal down and killing it by suffocation, biting their throat. After this,
they also typically drag the dead prey as they carry it someplace else to store it, which can be just
a few meters or a considerable distance away, or even up into trees (Kaufmann et al., 2018).
44

Therefore, the sight of dragging marks is a telltale sign that at least one puma is nearby and likely
to return to its prey later to feed. This was confirmed by Galetto who, in the retelling of the first
time he and his former rewilding partner set up a snare trap, explained that when they were moving
about the territory as part of that initial “campaign,” they noticed the drag marks left by the carcass
of a choique and some remains a few meters downhill, precisely where those marks ended. Certain
that “iba a caer un puma” (a puma was going to “fall” in the trap), they set up the entire snare-
trap-system, confident that, after failing to capture individuals for a while, they were going to have
one to collar the morning after. Unable to wait, they turned to the antenna that same night,
anxiously awaiting to hear a fast-paced beep. But this never came. When they finally went back to
check on the trap the next morning, there it was indeed: a distinct print of a puma’s paw in the
center of the noose, exactly where the animal’s paw needs to step to activate the trap, and no
choique remains. Alas, they had forgotten to release the snare’s safety lock.

44
Furthermore, pumas are known to cover the prey remains with leaves, frass, sand or whatever is available
and later return to the carcass (Sunquist & Sunquist, 2017).
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At the time of my visiting, the rewilding team had captured 11 pumas, although only 7 of
those had collars—3 males and 4 females. In theory, each of the collars these animals were fitted
with can take one geospatial data-point every 3 hours and send that information to the satellite so
that it can then be accessed by the team with a computer or smartphone daily.
45
In practice, this is
not as straightforward as it seems. There are plenty of times in which some of these collars seem
to be transmitting no information to the satellite, which results in the rewilding team not having
any data to observe or download. In these cases, the answer lies again in the characteristics of the
terrain: the narrow canyons these pumas traverse as well as the rock caves they spend time in
preclude any connection with the satellite, removing them temporarily from the digital radar being
imprinted on them. Typically, what occurs is that after 3 or 4 days of no information coming in,
all of it will arrive together once that puma repositions itself and its attached collar in a location
within satellite range.
This peculiarity of the use of these technologies works to demonstrate just how deeply
connected life and media are in this rewilding project: like the camera traps that revealed the
presence of these animals in the territory by capturing them with their always-ready-to-go lens,
these collars also disclose their liveliness, measured as movement across the land. The frequency
of these communications is flexible, and it took the team some time and experimentation to arrive
at the settings that worked best for their purposes. At the beginning, they tried a setting that
instructed the collars on the pumas to collect one data point every three hours (and one every two
hours for the collars on guanacos) and to relay that information to the team every day at five in the

45
These collars gather more information than just one location data-point per hour. In effect, when I asked
Donadio what else they were using these collars for—that is, other than as markers of movement—he
explained that the accelerometers in the devices can, for example, take one data-point per second for 90
days. He also clarified that the Foundation’s rewilding team was not using these data at all, as there was no
research project they were associated with.
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morning. But, considering that they wanted to be able to trace back the location of the puma in real
time, meaning being able to act on the information relayed by the satellite within a timeframe that
would allow the team to go back to the spot marked by the data-point to observe the animal in the
flesh, they configured the collars to take one data-point every hour.

Figure 4.8: Image of what Lotek’s web service looks like, the digital interface that allows
individuals to access the spatial information the satellite collars record, which are displayed in
the form of one colored dot per data point. The platform not only works as a repository of all the
information gathered, but also as a tool to retrieve the collared animal by providing a detailed
map of its whereabouts. Still from the video posted as the 8
th
installment of “The Secrets of
Pampa” (Fundación Rewilding Argentina, 2021d).
The positional snapshots the collars record, which are received by the Iridium satellite
constellation and then relayed to ground stations, are operationalized as a sequence and displayed
as dots on a map (see Figure 4.8). This information can be accessed and manipulated by the
rewilding team through the “web services” Lotek provides, a site that, in effect, is a centralized
repository of the collared animals’ lifetime tracks, a database containing an unprecedented amount
of detailed data about the movements of individual organisms. Since each collar has a particular
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identifying code and the rewilding team knows which animal is wearing which collar, they can
also easily select a particular individual and revise its personal migratory history, either in its
entirety or in smaller units such as in the last 10 days. The image above is a screenshot of what
that interface looks like: on the left, there is a list of all the animals the Foundation has collared,
which read like AP1, AP2, AP3, and, on the right, a map displaying the data points by way of blue
and yellow dots.
This “productive” recording of the movement of animals-as-trackable entities is a precise
example of how “’big data’ are mobilized to address concerns about biodiversity conservation and
wildlife management” (Benson, 2016, p. 137). When talking about these collars one afternoon at
La Posta de Los Toldos, Galleto explained that this interface lets them easily see the last time each
animal was “online,” meaning the last time that its position was recorded, as well as the amount
of data-points sent. At that time, he accessed the website on his phone in the lobby of the lodge
(which is equipped with Wi-Fi), but he was quick to point out that it was not a quick interface to
load nor an easy one to operate on a smaller screen. Each dot represents one point, and each one
has an assigned number to mark its position in the sequence of data-points for the selected range.
So, on the day that I was observing the interface over Galetto’s shoulder, the dot with the number
1 represented the last data-point the satellite recorded for AP1, which was February 2
nd
at 7am.
As noted above, the information the collars offer is rendered valuable because it is
predicated on movement, which ecologists regard as the glue that ties ecological processes
together. Furthermore, these satellite technologies have been argued to have started a new era in
predation studies, and the estimates of kill rates obtained from the captured movements and
relocation clusters to have proven significantly valid in several obligatory carnivores (Rauset et
al., 2012; see also Anderson & Lindzey, 2003; Knopff et al., 2009). Gaining a deeper
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understanding of predator-prey interactions is, in fact, what the rewilding team is trying to
understand. Recognizing that this research objective is common in those studies that employ
satellite collars or that it constitutes an important research avenue with implications for the
conservation of endangered species does not preclude the acknowledgment that, in this case, the
search for information about predator-prey dynamics is politically motivated: if FRA can prove
that the pumas (at least, those tracked) only eat guanacos or other wild animals, then they can
disqualify the claim that ranchers make against the animal (and the entire Foundation at that),
namely that the pumas feed on their sheep.
Thus, because they want to know what pumas are eating, what the rewilding team is
interested in is clusters. These groups of proximate data points represent the moments when
different pumas lingered on a particular place; thus, if there is a cluster with eight data points, then
a collared animal spent eight hours in that location. Although they are still learning to identify
what those clusters represent, Galetto explained that, commonly, if a cluster emerges in relation to
a location visited for an extended period during the day, it might be that a puma was merely
sleeping (they do not tend to hunt and feed during the day) but if a cluster represents a location
visited during the night, it might signal predation. The other important element in cluster
interpretation was actually the terrain itself, as he also mentioned that if he saw that the clusters
corresponded to a canyon or a bushed area, it is all the more likely that the puma spent that time
sleeping.
These interpretations are crucial to organize the rewilding team’s practices because, on the
one hand, pumas move about their territory extensively during the day; in fact, the home range for
a male puma can be 100-500km
2
and 30-100km
2
for females (Laundré & Loxterman, 2007). On
the other, they had 7 collared pumas, which meant that, altogether, there were 7 individual entities
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“generating clusters all the time.” In the presentation to the general audience, Galetto’s openly
disclosed that the decision to visit one cluster instead of another was purely random, that they
chose one individual per week to visit, and that the hope was that a research team was going to
arrive “soon” to “make it, like, more scientific, so that they go and check all the clusters to see
what they are eating.”
46
In conversation with me, he further qualified the “randomness” that guides
their visit to the locations where they believe predation or feeding occurred (which, in itself,
already qualified a set of clusters over others). The first conditional circumstance is ease of access
or proximity; in other words,
“My partner and I, we go check up on the most accessible ones… Or if I detect that there’s
something going on, like this female who crossed over to the neighbor’s field to see what
she’s hunting. So, we select points at random. We have nothing to do today? Let’s go check
that cluster.” (Galetto, interview, Los Toldos, 2020).
The quote above not only explains that, in practice, they favor the closest locations where the
clusters have formed, but also mentions another big conditional clause on the “randomness” that
guides their visits to the field: time. As mentioned before, the two-man rewilding team is over-
taxed and, at the time of my visit, Galetto’s partner, Jose, had just recently joined the Foundation.
So, when I asked if they went out every day to check the clusters, they replied that they handled
each day as it came considering the multiple demands on their time. For example, they might have
to go to the nearest town for two days to get provisions and get a routine check on the truck done,
only to return to a refuge full of journalists that need attending to. But other times, as mentioned
above, they might have a lot of time to fill, and so they go do some rounds.

46
On a recent Instagram post, FRA disclosed that they hired one person (who started in April of 2020) to
revise the clusters generated by pumas. In the video posted, he states that he has visited more than 1000
clusters and has walked more than 2000 kilometers. Furthermore, we can observe him crouching next to a
carcass utilizing a smart phone as he explains how he routinely gathers data and enters it into a database so
that then the researchers who access it “can generate conservation tools.” Accessible here:
https://www.instagram.com/p/COL3luulio5/
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There is one more element the rewilding team considers when deciding which clusters to
visit, something that Galetto was particularly interested in:
“Because we want to generate information and communicate what Puna and her cub are
doing, we go visit… I, personally, go visit some of these clusters.”

“Today, we are focusing on these… more like, if they hunted the images are going to be
good”
These statements indicate once more how the goal of outward “communication” significantly
guides the rewilding team’s practices. If they had reason to believe that a cluster represents a spot
where hunting happened and where it is likely that a puma will return later to feed, they would
visit it not just to check on what the prey was (namely, if it was a wild animal or a sheep) but also
to place camera traps that would later yield Instagramable images.
At this juncture, it is possible to appreciate how the satellite collars work in-tandem with
the camera traps to capture the real animal and transpose it to a digital realm, accessible to those
on the ground as well as to an international audience in the form of social media users. For the first
audience, the real animals become permanently surveilled trackable entities that emerge as data
points in a manipulable interface. For the second, the animals that emerge are the same subjects
that the camera-traps presented, one whose lives in the distant, wild realm they occupy is told
through the tropes of wildlife photography and film.
197

198

Figure 4.9: Composite of three stills of a video posted on Instagram that depicts Puna’s
movements and activities. At the top, Puna, one of the collared female pumas, is presented to us,
almost like the title page of a composition to come. In the middle, there is a graphic rendition of
what a cluster looks like and represents the means by which the lives of the animals are
“revealed.” The image at the bottom depicts a dramatic scene of Puna and her cubs feeding
from the carcass of a guanaco, next to a camera trap positioned on a wooden pole. Fundación
Rewilding Argentina. (Fundación Rewilding Argentina, 2020d)
Like Pampa, Puna is another collared female puma with 3 cubs who Galetto referred to as
being “very hidden, most of the time, among these slopes.” And, as with the case of Pampa, the
media technology on her body and in her direct surroundings “reveal”
47
her story. In the image
above (Figure 4.9), we see three stills of a video posted on Instagram that seeks to demonstrate
how the collar-satellite-interface system generates information that is “key to understanding how
this spectacular carnivore behaves, and to making decisions that contribute to its conservation as
well as to a better coexistence with man and his activities, based on science” (author’s translation
from the captions on the Instagram post). The sequence of the video is quite straightforward: it
starts with the image of a non-descript collared puma who we are told is Puna and, as an invitation
to follow her footprints, the video proceeds with a graphic animation of her movements in the
physical space which ultimately lead to the formation of a cluster (see images Figure 9); then, after
displaying the definition of what a cluster is against a background of a quite graphic still image of
a dead guanaco, we see a man getting up from the ground and walking away in a shot coming
straight from the camera trap we later come to understand he has placed on-site, and passing the

47
Interestingly, reveal here works on two levels. On the one hand, FRA’s videos and language follows
typical wildlife documentary tropes that presume that the technologies of vision deployed can effectively
“reveal” the life stories of the animals depicted. The premise is that these media grant us access to intimate
scenes that were hidden to us before their intervention, which is why this particular verb is chosen. On the
other, this particular word FRA employs also connects to one of the main arguments in this chapter, namely
that technologies can, in fact, reveal life by creating or otherwise fashioning discoverable and knowable
animal subjects.
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carcass of a guanaco on his way; finally, we see the image of a collared puma and two cubs, feeding
on the carcass of a guanaco.
In another post where movement is reconstructed to tell a story, the “encounter” of Pampa
and Pepito, a male puma, is narrated by way of showing how they moved about the territory (see
Figure 4.10 below). In this reconstructed timeline, the red dots represent Pampa’s movements
(which start in the upper, central part of the image) while the yellow ones stand for the data points
of Pepito’s satellite collar (which start in the lower, left corner of the image). The story we are told
on the Instagram video is that, around the dates in which the camera traps set by the rewilding
ream recorded, Pampa remained in the same spot (signaled with that red circle) “where she allured
Pepito,” who later effectively joined her. The remaining colored dots, those that show an overlap
between yellow and red, are the datapoints that put both animals together in space and time for
“many days.” The caption of this video ends with the promising suggestion that Pampa will give
birth to new puma cubs soon, which is what the audience subsequently sees in the following
installment of “The Secrets of Pampa:” stating that “Pampa was about to reveal one of her biggest
secrets,” we are shown two clips obtained with camera traps that depict a collared puma carrying
a newborn cub in her mouth. Ultimately, all of these examples are composite of images put together
to fit the boundaries of a narrative predicated on the drama of wildlife living and on extolling the
technology employed by the team as an enabler of objectively good conservation work, as as
grantors of legitimacy because of their position at the forefront of ecological research and their
output of objective images (Daston & Galison, 1992).
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Figure 4.10: still from the 5
th
installment of “The Secrets of Pampa,” which explains that Pampa
remained on the same spot for some time, during which Pepito “visited.” (Fundación Rewilding
Argentina, 2020e)
For those who enact this rewilding project, the sequenced data that the collars provide is
also interpreted as a narrational structure. That is, they sometimes put together the various data
they have not so much based on scientific protocols or practices but rather following common
media literacy, basic knowledge from popular media culture on how to read a story. Thus, when
looking at the dots on the interface, Galetto would say to me, “Here, she must have rested… How
many points do we have here? 6? For this female, 6 points are equivalent to 7 hours, tops. She was
over there first, finished eating and then came to rest here, and then they continued on.” Other
times, the narrative is even more personalized, “If we see that it is Puna and that she’s traversing
a super wide-open area, and that it happened overnight and all these points were marked, she surely
hunted. Or, if she’s in the plateau or in a narrower canyon… if I see a cluster there, I say: ‘OK,
she’s probably just sleeping now.’” Like the vignette at the beginning of this chapter, what these
lines suggest is that they too come to know an animal through these technologies and their various
outputs.
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Arguably, then, the pumas and other animals the practitioners discuss are not those that
effectively roam in Patagonia; rather, the animals they come to know are those gathered,
constructed and disclosed by the technologies of vision the team relies on. In this context, the
revealing that these devices do acquires a multiplicity of meanings. Rhetorically, FRA claims that
the pictures, videos and blips on a screen they look at and share on social media are true
representations of the real animals “out there.” Yet, as was exposed above and will be further
discussed below, these outputs do not just represent wild animals but also construct specific animal
subjects. This is because the technologies involved in rewilding as enacted by FRA also partake
in an ontological revealing, one that effectively communicates the very existence of those animals
as living entities. This quality is precisely what the remainder of this chapter engages with.

IN MEDIAS RES
As mentioned in the introduction of this dissertation, interpreting wilderness as a discursive
formation instead of mere discourse works to open up space to analyze not only the various
heterogeneous elements that constitute this system of dispersion, but also what conditions of
existence (alternatively called rules of formation) help bring those otherwise disparate objects,
ideas, practices, technologies and language together. Considering this, the technologies discussed
above—camera traps and satellite collars—fulfill a complex role in “Rewilding Patagonia,” the
contemporary reconstitution of wilderness this entire work is concerned with. Certainly, as noted,
these technologies can easily be construed as an element in the ensemble that wilderness as a
discourse is. However, it is also possible to articulate them as more than that; indeed, their
mediation is so fundamental in rendering the animals that roam this “Patagonia as a wilderness
with touristic appeal” observable, knowable and actionable and, consequently, in organizing inter-
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human and human-animal relations, that they become conditions of existence of the discursive
formation itself.
To be sure, mediation is one of the most complex concepts in communication and media
theory, not only because various schools of thought approach this idea differently, but also given
that the word has been assigned different meanings throughout history in the context of everyday
life. For the purposes of this work, the analysis draws primarily from the work of John Durham
Peters, who provides a more fundamental understanding of mediation rooted in the capability of
technologies to disclose being; that is, to act as conditions for existence. Certainly, as what has
been described above suggests, mediation is not without politics: neither camera traps nor satellite
collars are neutral technologies. Thus, this chapter also engages with the work of Richard Grusin
and Bruno Latour, who are instrumental to further draw out the friction that permeates that
mediation, which responds to the politics embedded in the technologies, thus shedding light this
as an active process that creates subjects with defined boundaries. Finally, recent work by Simone
Schleper offers a model to explore how these technologies also work to organize practices and
relations.
THE MEDIATION OF CONSERVATION
The line of analysis pursued in this chapter assumes that mediation is a more fundamental process
than what communication studies typically let on. This is why it primarily follows John Durham
Peters who understands media as “containers of possibility that anchor our existence and make
what we are doing possible” (2015, p. 2). For him, the association of the terms medium and media
to the realm of communication is relatively recent in intellectual history; instead, he digs further
back in time for what existed before that connection—effectively developed in the XIX century—
and theorizes what he calls an elemental legacy of media, one that used this word to refer to the
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natural elements like water or air. What sets Peters’ work apart—and, incidentally, what makes it
such an important theoretical linchpin in the arguments this chapter develops—is that it makes that
legacy relevant again by articulating media as ensembles of natural element and human craft, as
both the means though which meaning is communicated as well as something else that sits atop
layers of more fundamental media. In this context, media simultaneously are infrastructures of
data, civilizational ordering devices, means through which nature is expressed and altered, things
in the middle.
Straying, then, from mainstream media studies, Peters takes media as modes of being and
communication as disclosure of being,
“Once communication is understood not only as sending messages—certainly an essential
function—but also as providing conditions for existence, media cease to be only studios
and stations, messages and channels, and become infrastructures and forms of life (…)
Media are our infrastructures of being, the habitats and materials through which we act
and are.” (2015, p. 14-15)
By being in the middle, media in Peters’ framework are positioned to craft existence. Here, he is
drawing directly from Heidegger (1977) who understood technology as an essentially ontogenetic
mode of revealing, as something belonging to bringing-forth and therefore to poiēsis. In other
words, technological media are world-building and through the bringing-forth they do, “the
growing things of nature as well as whatever is completed through the crafts and the arts come at
any given time to their appearance” (Heidegger, 1997, p. 11). Indeed, Heidegger not only made
the case that t e c hnē belonged to poi ē s i s, but that it was also inherently connected with physis,
meaning nature, which itself also constitutes a bringing-forth (it is, in fact, “ poi ē s i s in the highest
sense, ” p. 10).
The work of Peters (and Heidegger) presents technology as something capable of
reordering nature. Therefore, it can be argued that whenever humans implicate non-human others
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through technologies that render them sense-able to us in various forms, those media are, in fact,
revealing their presence. Consequently, mediation becomes a communicative process of disclosure
of being (see Altrudi et al., 2021). Armed with this theoretical framework, we can now return our
attention to the technologies described at the beginning of this chapter and safely ask what, if not
this, are those media deployed in the described rewilding project doing?
As noted above, camera traps are widely used to establish the presence of certain species
in given areas. Indeed, because they are inconspicuous and automatic, they can be left alone in
remote regions over longer periods of time during which they capture the nonhumans that pass
nearby. Later, when the researchers retrieve the memory cards, those pictures become the sole
evidence of the existence of a myriad of entities who had thus far eluded the sight of the humans.
Furthermore, these cameras are particularly suited to reveal the presence of the more elusive
species because they “allow the identification of diurnal, nocturnal, and shy species that would not
be seen using other methods such as direct observation” (Trolliet et al., 2014, p. 447). In this
context, the mediation process these cameras articulate becomes an ontogenetic process of
bringing forth as the devices, by disclosing the very existence of those animals, are, in fact, crafting
it. In so doing, they are effectively acting as “ontological operators” that enable things—or, in this
case, entities—to be at all (Peters, 2015) .
In the specific case of “Rewilding Patagonia,” the camera traps lend themselves well to
capturing pumas, a species known for roaming vast territories, remaining hidden in canyons and
altogether avoiding humans. But perhaps more fundamentally, these cameras brought forth the
entire region FRA wanted to work in. Before arriving, FRA believed the land to be barren of
wildlife, a stage without actors like the one they had observed in Esteros del Iberá (Corrientes
province), yet the cameras revealed that there was ample wildlife presence, profoundly
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contradicting the assumption the organization was operating on based on past experiences and
consequently altering their conservation practices. Similarly, by revealing their daily movements
through space, the satellite collars attached to the animals’ bodies communicate that they are there,
alive. During those three or four days when there is no information on a collar coming from the
satellite, the puma who wears it becomes Schrodinger’s cat: life and death are suspended until a
new set of data points are sent to a computer, resolving the matter by disclosing that the puma is,
in fact, alive. On the contrary, if the FRA staff cease to receive data from the satellite for a long
period of time, then they assume that a puma ceased to move in and out of satellite reception zones
and is, indeed, dead.
These camera traps, then, altogether constitute a mode of revealing that, in effect, reorders
nature by disclosing what exists. This is so essential to wilderness as a discursive formation that,
through their mediation, these technologies become none other than conditions for the existence
of its reconstitution as rewilding. Granted, this analysis might seem somewhat reminiscent of the
philosophical thought experiment that asks whether a falling tree in a forest makes a sound if there
is no one around to perceive it: if the camera did not reveal the presence of Pampa or Puna, does
that mean they did not exist before? This is an opportunity to clarify the argument presented thus
far: it is beyond the intentions of this chapter to claim that an ever-smaller technological device
derived from human ingenuity and developed though market forces is what gives worth to the
animals it captures. Rather, in claiming that these devices disclose their existence, it argues that
they become legible or sense-able (or, simply, alive) to us. In effect, FRA’s conception of the space
changed, and the living wildlife came forth because of the mediation enacted by the camera traps.
Certainly, the wildlife was already there before the team “deployed” but it was that which the
photographs revealed what fundamentally altered their perception and directly informed the
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practices to follow. Therefore, I follow Peters (2015, p. 4) once again in claiming that these media
represent a means through which nature is expressed and altered for human beings.
Here, both the camera traps and the collars are technologies of disclosure of being—or
ontological operators—that, by way of their mediating activity between the human perceiver and
the animal entity, alter what nature is to said perceiver. Yet these equally revealing modes of
bringing forth have one fundamental difference: the satellite devices are on the bodies of the
animals, while the cameras merely occupy the space they roam. Despite this fundamental
difference, both technologies tend to be equally regarded (and lauded) in the scientific literature
as well as by practitioners, as seamless points of entry into the animals’ (intimate, othered) worlds.
Striving for the ever-purer disembodied gaze, these technologies, as articulated by those who wield
them, are meant to be disregarded in their materiality once deployed. Coextensive with the “god-
trick” (D. J. Haraway, 1991), “[w]ildlife surveillance technologies minimize themselves
continuously, approaching an impossible, ghost-like condition of spectrality” (Reinert, 2013, p. 9).
Except that, in the case of wildlife tracking technologies, media are not just inconspicuous
things in the middle, they can be things on the middle. Even if at this stage it is not possible to
reliably assert what the effects of the tagging are beyond what has been reported in a handful of
cases, the process of capturing, tagging or collaring and releasing the animals is a necessarily
physical (and arguably violent) act. Thus, while the camera traps might recede into the background
(at least, during the day when their flashlights are not beaming), the tags that attach to bodies as
backpacks, collars, rings or appendices, arguably never recede into the background for the animals.
As mentioned, there is not enough research on their effect, but some studies—like those cited
above—have noted increased drag, impacts on energy expenditure and locomotor performance,
behavioral modifications, skin lesions and infections, and, in extreme cases, death.,
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EMPOWERED HUMAN SUBJECTS
On the one hand, it is clear that the “revealing” that Peters and Heidegger refer to is, by belonging
to poi ē s i s, ontogenetic; that is to say that when technologies mediate, they are not merely
“revealing” but essentially bring-forth nature. On the other, though, what is not explicitly dealt
with in their work is the type of “nature” or nonhumans media bring about. Put differently, while
there is a recognition that “being in the middle” is not a simple or unproblematic “being in the
middle,” there is not further elaboration on the characteristics that those subjects in between can
accrue as a result of that ontogenetic mediation. This would be, in Grusin’s (2015) words, close to
a representationalist account that reads mediation as what comes between or in the middle of
already preformed preexistent subjects, objects, entities or actants. Instead, he presents mediation
as something more substantially radical—which, aptly, he calls radical mediation—that should be
understood
“not as standing between preformed subjects, objects, actants or entities but as the
process, action, or event that generates or provides the conditions for the emergence of
subjects and objects, for the individuation of entities within the world” (Grusin, 2015, p.
129; see also p. 137).
Here, he is drawing directly from Latour’s notion of mediators, for whom these have a distinct
specificity and, as a result, “transform, translate, distort and modify the meaning of the elements
they are supposed to carry” (2005, p. 39). Given this, Grusin (2015, p. 130) insists that mediation
does not neutrally reproduce meaning or information but that it operates by “actively transforming
human and nonhuman actants, as well as their conceptual and affective states.” In this context, he
seeks to open up the traditional link between mediation and communication so that the former can
be seen as a more fundamental process and, for this, suggests that our conceptions of mediation
“must also embrace technoscientific forms of mediation in order to be able to account for a wide
range of organic and inorganic entities and forms of existence” (Grusin, 2015, p. 147).
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Thus, Grusin’s work becomes crucial to take the analysis developed thus far one step
further by arguing that the mediation that takes place through these wildlife tracking technologies
does not communicate being by signaling presence in a frictionless way. Rather, because what
“stands in the middle” are Latourian mediators, the process that occurs through or in response to
the mediation of these technologies is an active one that does not merely represent subjects but
rather newly defines or fashions them. This becomes easier to grasp when we remember that
different technological forms carry with it certain assumptions, logic and cosmology (Berger &
Luckmann, 1967)—or, in other words, politics (Winner, 1986)—and that when they build order
into our world they situate actors differently, with unequal degrees of power.
As noted earlier, camera traps have an intimate connection with wildlife sport hunting,
even if the animals these captured are “trapped” by sensing devices and a photographic lens rather
than “hunted” via human intervention. In themselves, cameras are a type of technological device
fundamentally riddled with questions of power as they organize relations between the observed—
the party that is always being captured by the lens—and the observer—the other party that is
always taking the shot. Perhaps no one captured this better than Sontag (1979), who noted that a
camera is a sublimation of the gun, and that taking photographs consists of “loading,” “aiming,”
and “shooting.”
48
In relation to wildlife photography, she wrote something worth quoting in full:
“One situation where people are switching from bullets to film is the photographic safari
that is replacing the gun safari in East Africa. The hunters have Hasselblads instead of
Winchesters; instead of looking through a telescopic sight to aim a rifle, they look through
a viewfinder to frame a picture. In the end-of-the-century London, Samuel Butler
complained that ‘there is a photographer in every bush, going about like a roaring lion
seeking whom he may devour.’ The photographer is now charging real beasts, beleaguered
and too rare to kill. Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the

48
See also Metz (1990) for an analysis on the shared language between photography and guns, and Coe and
Gates (1977) for a discussion on the connection between snapshots and hunting.
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ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been—what people
needed protection from. Now nature—tamed, endangered, mortal—needs to be
protected from people. When we are afraid, we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take
pictures” (Sontag, 1979, p. 15).
The photographic cameras used in conservation raise all these questions anew because, although
designed to work without the presence of a human photographer/hunter, they still constitute a trap
designed to capture (an image of) a living animal. Furthermore, thanks to the “technical
clairvoyance” (Berger, 1991, p. 14) these photographic media bring, the resulting images are not
marked by the moment of contact between photographer and wildlife and thus do not portray
“startled, frightened, and angry animals” (Brower, 2011, p. 38). Rather, they appear unsuspecting
or, sometimes, even “cute” as their nozzles approach the cameras, all on display for the ever-
present gaze whose access to these entities is presented to be at their fingertips (see Figure 4.11).

Figure 4.11: Composite made of two captures of the same promotional video posted on
Instagram to celebrate the International Day of Biological Biodiversity. The first one shows a
puma close to the camera trap, probably sniffing it, and the second one displays the view that
four different camera traps provide, almost in a panopticon style, to whomever has access to the
feed. (Fundación Rewilding Argentina, 2021c)
At face value, considering how closely connected camera traps and their commercial
evolution are to wildlife sport hunting, there is something profound in employing the same
technology that hunters use to learn where prey roam to now gain potentially actionable knowledge
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that will ensure the continuation and survival of animal species. However, the politics embedded
in the camera traps do not change. Consider, for example, a gun: irrespective of whether a rifle is
used by a hero or by a villain—the first constituting a “good use” and the second “a bad use”—the
fact remains that the rifle was designed to shoot and maim or kill. Hunting rifles, in particular,
have been designed to chase and shoot animals with ever-more precision and efficacy. Indeed, as
Latour has argued, guns do not transform good citizens into criminals nor are they so neutral an
object that they have no part in the act of killing. The mediation that takes place whenever a gun
is in between two humans creates “a link that did not exist before and that to some degree modifies
two elements or agents,” consequently transforming a relationship of power (1994, p. 32). Here,
the technological devices that stand between a human and an animal also constitute them as hunter
and prey, and only for one of them do the devices mediate, in factual terms, between life or death.
Early practitioners of “camera hunting”, namely white British men at the turn of the XX
century Africa and white American men in the late XIX century American West, looked much like
ordinary hunters. As Ryan (2005, p. 216) has noted, cameras and guns were shot simultaneously,
and “[p]hotographs of camera hunters posing with cameras beside dead animals or holding both
gun and camera highlight the ambiguous place of these individuals.” In line with Reinert’s (2013)
“aesthetic of stalking,” which he defines as a patient and asymmetrical art, Ryan argues that part
of the appeal of “hunting with the camera” laid in the close spatial proximity between animal and
photographer, and on the framing of “camera stalking” as an equally adventurous and predatory
pursuit as shooting. In fact, some even construed it as more exciting and skillful than shooting
considering that, at the time, photographers had to handle a cumbersome device and remain in
close range of a wild animal, making “shooting in most cases appear as a boy’s sport” (Dugmore,
1910, p. xvi cited in Ryan, 2005).
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Figure 4.12: Composite made of two captures of two promotional videos (titled “Monitoreo de
Chinchillón Anaranjado en el Parque Patagonia, Santa Cruz” and “Rewilding Cañadón
Pinturas – Parque Patagonia Argentina,” respectively) made by Fundación Rewilding
Argentina, which are publicly available on their YouTube channel (Fundación Rewilding
Argentina, 2020b, 2020)
Yet, the effect of the mediation of cameras which have been designed to operate without
needing the constant presence of a human is that those individuals pictured next to the cameras
emerge not as ambiguous hunters but as pioneering conservation scientists. Borrowing from Latour
(1994, p. 33) again, if a citizen becomes another subject because he holds a gun (a citizen-gun),
then these individuals become another subject because they hold the cameras. As can be
appreciated from Figures 4.2, 4.5 and 4.12 (above), the human subject constituted by the mediation
of these camera traps (in relation to the visually captured wild animal) and further cemented in
FRA’s representations on social media refers to yet another male individual, alone in vast, “wild,”
and seemingly uninhabited spaces. Instead of wielding rifles, they carry sport backpacks and rather
than staying put, they are shown approaching or leaving the advanced scientific instrument that
actually takes the shots. They are, in other words, legitimate trespassers who enter “the wild” in
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which they do not belong to “take only photographs” and leave only footprints (see Brower, 2005),
and who do so as modern professionals of conservation equipped with state-of-the-art technologies
to better preserve biodiversity.
Satellite telemetry also brings forth a particular human subject. Because these collars have
been designed to be constantly worn by the animals they are set to track, those bodies, by necessity,
have to be physically captured first. Much like with wildlife hunting and with “hunting with the
camera,” these devices put humans and animals in close spatial proximity once again, after having
the latter stalked with the help of camera traps (or literally trapped via snares) by the former. In
effect, it seems that much of what was at play in early wildlife photography in what pertained to
the physical proximity between animals and humans and the “arousal” of the hunting has been
displaced to wildlife satellite telemetry. As noted, FRA organizes “campaigns” whenever they
have available collars to fit, which are tightly orchestrated events that entail revisiting the locations
with active snares at least twice per day as well as having a specialized crew available nearby,
ready to spring into action when an animal “falls” in the trap. For example, the image below
(Figure 4.13), which was obtained from a video posted by FRA on Instagram, shows Galetto
kneeling on the grass in the left bottom corner holding a rifle aimed at a huemul, a native deer
species, whose body is partially visible on the top right corner. Unless the audience watching the
video is familiar with what a rifle that shoots tranquilizing darts looks like as opposed to what one
that shoots bullets does, this image is virtually indistinguishable from a hunting depiction. What
remains outside of the frame is not a hunting party with local guides or porters, but a team of
humans assembled to assist with the sedation, monitoring, fitting and release process. Unlike
hunting, the goal is not to march with a rifle in order to claim victory over the carcass of an animal,
but rather to capture a live animal and fit it with a technology that will constantly surveil it. Like
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sport hunting, the medium through which it is done still grants a conquering satisfaction over the
traversing and accessing of a space and a subject that was just outside of human reach before.

Figure 4.13: Still of video posted by FRA to its publicly accessible Instagram account to relay
the story about the five collared huemules who are now “sending valuable information about
their way of life”(Fundación Rewilding Argentina, 2021e).

Figure 4.14: Screenshot of Instagram post on FRA’s public account that depicts how the data
sent by Sable’s collar, particularly the VHF emitter, allows the team to get, once again, close to
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the puma. From this vantage point, the team is able take photographs of Sable’s 5-month cubs
(Fundación Rewilding Argentina, 2021f).

Furthermore, the practices that satellite collars enable offer yet another opportunity to
rehearse those power relations sublimated in camera hunting, which takes place when FRA’s team
sets out to retrieve the wild animal from the wealth of data the satellite collars accumulate and
Lotek’s interface displays. But, while former hunting and photographic parties followed animal
tracks or scents over days, the humans in this rewilding initiative follow the digital footprints that
the collars gather, satellites send, and software superimposes on a map, as well as the sounds
produced by the VHF and captured by an antenna. Once the animal is found, the photographic
hunter-cum-conservation practitioner reverts to the modes of viewing most strongly associated
with wildlife photography. Figure 4.14, for example, represents what occurs when FRA’s team,
aware of a specific puma’s most recent whereabouts—in this case, Sable again—goes back to the
field to find her: as the description next to the image explains, after narrowing down the location
of the animal, the team settles on a spot that, with the help of substantial telephoto lens, allows
them to lay eyes and capture on film, for the first time, Sable’s cubs as they set out to find food.
Again, their elusive behavior “in the wild” is presented as a challenge to be overcome with all of
these technologies of vision (see Mills, 2010).
OBJECTIFIED ANIMAL SUBJECTS
As it occurred with Latour’s “citizen-gun,” the animals captured by the camera traps are
themselves modified by these technologies, thus becoming different subjects as well (animal-
cameras). In other words, by being in the middle, these technologies give way to an active
mediation process that renders a qualitatively different animal subject compared to the one which
presently exists in physical space. In the canyons of Patagonia, the pumas that roam are extremely
hard to encounter not just because they actively hide from human sight but because it is inherently
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difficult to spot them at a distance given how their fur camouflages with the landscape (which
further inhibits the possibility of individual identification). There, crucially, humans are on display
under the gaze of the pumas who can choose to remain unseen and surveil from their vantage point
as tourists or FRA staff walk along the trails.
However, the mediation of camera traps affects the quality of animals as autonomous
subjects given that these photographic devices bring forth the same objectified animal already
revealed by early wildlife photography and its discursive regime which render wild animals as
visual objects. According to that Euro-American regime,
“real animals, wild ones, occupy a realm of deep nature that must be pristine and
untouched to be authentic. By positioning real animals as occupying a realm of deep
nature, wildlife photography transforms animals into spectacle, severing the human-
animal connection; real animals, therefore, only exist when humans are absent. Wildlife
photography provides evidence of a gap between human and animal, separating us from
animals as it brings us closer to their daily lives.” (Brower, 2011, p. xviii).
This rhetoric constitutes a fragment of a particular discourse that is certainly at play in wilderness
as a discursive formation, articulated in this reconstitution via the mediation of new photographic
devices. As suggested by the title of FRA’s initiative, this project effectively situates the wildlife
of Patagonia as elusive subjects in a pristine place, one whose wildness has been momentarily
upset by recent human presence and which needs to be reverted and recomposed. The “cleanliness”
that camera traps provide by erasing the presence of even FRA’s staff is a direct continuation (if
not the epitome) of the photographic blind, which started when camera hunters would hide behind
screens and shoot the animals from behind, effectively separating humans and animals as well as
enabling the framework of deep nature images characteristic of the genre (Brower, 2011).
Additionally, camera traps also further the discursive regime of wildlife photography by
promising and, supposedly, delivering an authentic and transparent access to nature. As Chris has
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noted, commercial audiovisual productions depicting wildlife claim that they produce more
intimate views of the daily lives of species, allowing audiences to enjoy “the visual illusion of
approaching the animal a little more closely” (2006, p. 46). This is something on which specialized
conservation literature, another discourse included in the wilderness discursive formation, agrees,
as Kucera and Barett have stated that “these remote camera techniques have allowed previously
unimaginable access unto the lives of many wildlife species” (2011, p. 21), while Nichols et al.
mentioned that “biologists commonly perceive camera traps as a new tool that enables them to
enter the hitherto secret world of wild animals” (2011, p. 45). These authors also discussed the
web-based digital photographic system that these cameras enable when they are connected to the
Internet and transmitting live: sustained by solar power and triggered by motion and heat, they can
capture images in real time without needing an operator to change the memory cards or batteries,
thus giving the observers real, “unmediated” access to wildlife.
This trope of enhanced intimacy via technological mediation is centrally placed in the
rhetoric FRA has built around the media they employ to effectively conduct rewilding, ultimately
reflecting their nature as existential conditions for the discursive formation: these cameras and
satellite collars allow us, the audience, and them, the conservation specialists, to peer into the raw
intimacy of wildlife. It is consequently unsurprising that one of the series with the most video
installments on Instagram is called “The Secrets of Pampa,” which was described above, and
another, “The Intimacy of Nature” which, as the title suggests, depicts intimate scenes of the daily
lives of animals who are either oblivious to the cameras or get extremely close to them to sniff
them. Also unsurprisingly, what gets edited and posted online represents the most “dramatic”
aspects of animals’ lives (see Mitman, 2012), such as scenes of different species feeding, as well
as those that can easily be pieced together into one typical, heteronormative narrative of
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reproduction and motherly care. As stated, the intimacy trope and the penchant for drama are
anything but new phenomena in wildlife media constructions. In fact, it has been duly noted that,
as a result, these depictions create “an expectation of nature among lay audiences that [is] rarely,
if ever, realized in the field” (Mitman, 2012, p. 72), as these animals are “surely better than animals
in the wild: they are not only captive and visible at our whim, not their own, but they are at their
very best” (Chris, 2006, p. 13). As we will see in the following Chapter, it is these wild animals
constructed as readily available what brings tourists in from different parts of the world and what
they expect to see in Patagonia (see Chapter 5).
If the technology of wildlife film and photography already made the animal subjects visible
at our whim, the technology of wildlife satellite telemetry extends that logic by materially enabling
the panopticon gaze. If “in camera hunting photographers symbolically kill the animal and produce
its image as a trophy following a predatory logic” (Brower, 2011, p. 79), then in camera trapping
conservation practitioners symbolically capture the animal and produce its image as a data point
following a surveillance-cum-scientific logic. In this context, it is technologies of surveillance
what structurally shape rewilding as a media practice (and the digital renderings it produces).
This constitutes another difference in the way in which the Latourian mediators employed
here bring forth or communicate being: both the camera traps and the satellite collars generate
digital renditions of the animals they capture, yet only the former provide an isomorphic
representation of that which they capture. In other words, the chinchis we see in Figure 4.3 are
presented as a realistic and “objective” depiction of the individual chinchis photographed, just like
the pumas in Figure 4.4 are, arguably, exactly like their real counterpart (see Daston & Gallison,
1992). The collars, on the other hand, further transform the digital animal subject by representing
it as colored dots on the screen, as data obtained from collars and displayed in a digital interface.
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In this instance, the physical animal—the one whose body sustains the technology—disappears
and an abstract rendition—a frequency on a receiver, a digital signal on map, a data point in a
database—appears in its place (see Figures 4.9, 4.10 and, especially, Figure 4.8). Thus, the animal
whose life had already been reduced to a mere track is left “with no space but the interface”
(Berland, 2019, p. 130).
If the photographs and videos captured by the cameras and presented on social media work
to distil the natural world “into a series of dramatic moments” (Mitman 2012, p. 72), the mediation
that these tracking or surveilling technologies effect continue to reduce the animals’ experienced
reality by stripping their physicality, something already noted by Bergman in relation to radio
transmitters, who argued that
“[while] the radio-transmitter allows the animal to be followed and known in new ways
and in new detail, the coded patterns of the beeps on the transmitter constitute signs of
the creature’s disappearance. Under surveillance, the endangered animal is disembodied
as a creature and signals its own loss” (2005, p. 257).
This was later extended to satellite trackers by Reinert, who, analyzing the case of tagged
endangered Norwegian Lesser geese, noted one of the most important effects of this mediation;
namely that, amid these digital signals captured in the visual field of two-dimensional cartography
and real time GPS rendering, “[t]he observer remains embodied, acting on the observed at a
distance, and the data ghosts that scatter as disembodied blips across the screen are still moored to
physical bodies—bodies that remain frail, vulnerable, all too mortal” (Reinert, 2013, p. 10).
Reinert’s quote also helps to demonstrate how the mediation of technologies works to
transform relationships of power by upending who gets to observe who. In one of my visits to
Cueva de Las Manos, the tourists I was with and I did a short hike through the Pinturas canyon.
This trek was, in fact, a very recent addition to the touristic packs offered and, as such, had very
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little human traffic. Probably because of that, as we were walking toward the viewing platforms
built around the paintings in the cave, we spotted the print of a puma’s paw on the ground which
we realized had to be recent as it was almost intact (consider that the dryness of the soil and the
Patagonian wind create conditions that prevent any imprint on the ground to stay for long). In that
moment, my group realized that, right at that moment, we were sharing the space with pumas who
could most certainly see us but whom we could not at all observe. But, when FRA or the rewilding
team enters this space, they bring with them these vision and tracking or locating technologies that
simultaneously reaffirm and extend the power asymmetry that emerged when researchers or
amateur observers of wildlife relied on their sight or binoculars to watch wildlife, hidden. As
Reinert notes, those human bodies concealed themselves, withdrawing from the possibility of a
reciprocal gaze in the patient and asymmetrical art he calls the aesthetic of stalking. With the
intervention of these media, human bodies altogether cease to share the space of those they set out
to regard, at the same time that the gaze remains—even if delayed—ever present, surveilling.
This is not a new phenomenon either: ecologists have relied on a host of technologies of
observation and monitoring, from airplanes to radio trackers to computer simulations since the
1950s. Yet the application of technologies to track wildlife occurred, as Benson (2010) already
noted, at the intersection of wildlife management and military surveillance. During this time, the
geophysical sciences arose to prominence in the interest of defense because, against the backdrop
of the Cold War, the surveillance of nuclear activity in the territory of the enemy demanded the
ability to explore and patrol outer space. This means that the gaze that the technology that tracks
wildlife across space affords was first used to put the entire planet under surveillance at a time
when gathering information about the earth was intimately linked to gathering information on
enemies. This “view from above” is but a continuation of the aerial photographs that preceded it
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(see Cosgrove 1994, 2003; Grevsmühl, 2014) and both instances demonstrate the close
relationship between gazing upon the world and striving to master it, one that places “seeing as
the foundation of knowledge and power, and [..] the gaze–distanced, objective, and penetrating–
as symbolically mastering, masculine and modern” (Cosgrove, 1994, p. 272). This is why
Turchetti and Roberts (2014, p. 11) have warned that “the power of surveillance to know nature,
and thus to facilitate its control must not be underestimated, or the technology regarded as
unproblematic simply because the cause of environmental monitoring is regarded as enlightened.”
Ultimately, unearthing the politics embedded in these technologies helps to better
understand the mediation that the satellite collars effect, highlighting how those enable certain
modes of viewing and being, laden as these mediators are with power in ways that have ontological
consequences. Thus, even if there is no concrete human intervention or active human engagement
with the technological device—or if that stage has passed, as it occurs with collars—these media
are still affecting and delimiting the space for those digital human-animal encounters. Even while
agreeing with Reinert that these surveillance technologies minimize themselves continuously, the
success of that apparent “erasure” of mediation also responds to the fact that “[o]ur culture wants
both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation: it wants to erase its media in the
very act of multiplying technologies of mediation” (Bolter & Grusin, 1996, p. 313).
ORGANIZING HUMAN RELATIONS
At this point, I have explored how the technologies employed in this rewilding project act as
ontological operators: from disclosing the existence of wildlife to effectively bringing forth a
particular wild animal, they organize the relations between these animals and their human
counterparts, even if this is unbeknownst to the animals themselves who nonetheless feel the
material effects of such mediation. But, as Schleper’s (2021) work highlights, technological
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mediation also organizes inter-human relations by relegating and promoting certain individuals
and, consequently, enabling or foreclosing different sets of relations. Placing the technological
mediation of spaces for humans and wildlife in the Serengeti at the center of her analysis, she
contends that observational technologies directly impact the ways in which things like animal
migration and human land-use are experienced.
49
Therefore, while direct tracing of migratory
ungulates from small aircrafts in the 1960s supported mixed forms of land-use and close
cooperation between individual researchers and local park employees of European descent,
photographic mapping and recorded data points in the 1970s encouraged spatially removed
viewers to focus on the competition for land and shifted the locus of expertise to international
experts.
For example, the data that the technologies employed in this rewilding project gather, both
the photographs and digital renderings of spatial coordinates, need to be synthesized at a later
stage. In the 1970s Serengeti, a similar way of data collection and a similar need for posterior
synthesis “resulted in a shift of expert knowledge to visiting international experts rather than
locally based wardens” (Schleper, 2021, p. 11). This is like what occurs in Patagonia with this
rewilding project: the staff who visit the clusters in real time, that is those who successfully walk
among coirón against the wind, hold antennas and manipulate the animals bodies are local, yet
those who will later analyze the data and transform it into a publishable report will likely be

49
The concept of technological mediation that Schleper uses is rooted in postphenomenology, which has
been described as “the practical study of the relations between humans and technologies, from which human
subjectivities emerge, as well as meaningful worlds” (Rosenberger & Verbeek, 2015, p. 12). Because its
primary focus is how subjects and objects are constituted in their mediated relation (see Verbeek, 2005)
and what roles technologies play in establishing those relations, this approach to mediation is actually not
too dissimilar from Grusin’s radical mediation as both consider neither subject nor object to be pre-given
entities.

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primarily international master and doctoral students. As the scientific director of the project
explained to me, in his previous research project (focused on pumas in Monte León, the other
contentious national park on the east coast of the province created through land donation by the
Tompkins) he was working with one master and one doctoral students from the University of
Wisconsin, a doctoral student from the University of Wyoming, another from University of
California, Berkeley, and was exploring a joint project with a professor at University of California.
There was only one postdoc from CONICET in the team.
Furthermore, in directly mediating conservation practices, these technologies organize the
relations between FRA and local ranchers. It is a well-established fact in the region that native
guanacos follow a specific migration pattern as the seasons change: during the winter, they descend
from the plateau in search for greener pastures and milder temperatures and, during the summers,
they go back up. Because the goal of FRA is to “recuperate those ancestral migrations,” they have
attached sixteen collars to guanacos of different familial groups (and plan to fit fifteen more
individuals) to be able to track their movement and observe whether that pattern is still occurring.
Ultimately, they hope that this, like aerial photographs promised for practitioners in Serengeti, will
“not only provide information about the movement of ungulates, but would also allow to derive
conclusions on environmental causes and ‘stimuli’ behind the movement of animals” (Schleper,
2021, p. 9). Thus, they hope that they will be able to determine when and where an intervention is
needed, either in the form of translocation of individuals of the species or actively addressing
human activities found detrimental, such as sheep rearing or rancher’s fences. This is another
example of how technologies that operate by enabling the human participants to be removed from
the research space, much as they can facilitate “unobtrusive” access, can encourage those spatially
and temporarily removed viewers to focus exclusively on the competition for space between cattle
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and wild animals, ultimately pitting production against conservation and constraining researchers
and ranchers to antagonistic dynamics.

REWILDING AS A MEDIA PRACTICE
The argument that this chapter advances is that mediation is an active process through which we
construct the reality we apprehend in interrelation with other human and non-human animal
subjects whose very being is revealed by way of technological mediators that, themselves, carry
particular idiosyncrasies. Considering the works cited thus far and others from the STS field
(Gabrys, 2016; Helmreich, 2007, 2009; F. A. Jørgensen, 2013; Lehman, 2018; Vallee, 2018), and
that, more than a decade ago, Livingston (2009, p. 2) stated that “in a heavily mediated world, one
cannot analyze the relation between politics and the environment, or society and the family,
without also recognizing the importance of the media,” the previous sentence works as an iteration
of a prevalent yet already well-defined phenomenon. However, the implications that this
“mediated world” has for conservation have yet to be fully explored.
To be sure, Benson noted that, because they bridged the distance to the animals observed,
monitoring technologies such as the ones discussed here supported ecologists’ “authority to speak
on their behalf” (2010, p. 190). Yet, as also noted here, the mediation of these devices is much
more fundamental, a point eloquently made by Schleper: “Technological tools, however, do more
than buttress professional authority. By shaping the way in which we experience, understand, and
communicate the world arounds us, their use has ontological consequences, too” (2021, p. 3).
Therefore, much like a ship is equally existential to humans as the sea—considering that no human
can be in, on or at the sea without it—but not so for marine animal species (see Peters, 2015, p.
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103), the cameras and satellite collars are existentially the same as the lives of the animals they
capture, even if that is not the case for the animals themselves.
For FRA, to rewild is “to protect and restore natural environments, with all their species
and amazing processes, in order to turn them into an engine for local development through turismo
de naturaleza activities” (Fundación Rewilding Argentina, 2020a). In this definition, animals are
crucial participants because they are inherently constitutive of the wilderness or wildness this
conservation project is after. As this chapter surfaces, the technologies employed by the
Foundation are crucial in establishing their presence as well as communicating it to a wider public
and, in so doing, they too become inherently constitutive of rewilding as a discursive formation.
Put differently, in this instantiation of conservation, the animals’ being is brought forth by
technological media and Patagonia is constructed through a narrative stitched together from their
outputs, just like “in the ship, ontology is created by craft and nature is made by art” (Peters, 2015,
p. 108-109). In this context, then, rewilding becomes something other than a path towards
ecological restoration that utilizes media to operate; rather, rewilding can be argued to be a media
practice in itself, brough forth by the mediation of these technologies.
Framing rewilding as a media practice reveals “the ontological indiscernibility of medium
and world” (Peters, 2015, p. 102). But it also opens space to observe the extent to which the
phenomena that the technologies that ontologically and effectively sustain rewilding have
displayed elsewhere have taken root in conservation practices. As explained above, these media
forms are embedded with histories and uses that organize the physical and discursive relations
between animals and humans in unequal ways, forged through the practices of hunting, wildlife
photography and film, and scientific observation. Therefore, an uncritical understading of
rewilding leaves this practice exposed to a faithful reproduction of those orderings. It is precisely
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this what is at stake in framing rewilding as a media practice: approached as such, it becomes
amenable to an analysis that, grounded in media and science and technology studies, can shed light
on the politics of the media artefacts involved. Furthermore, without negating or, rather, while still
embracing the ontological capabilities of these technologies, this approach can also be instrumental
in further complicating the animal subjects that photographs, videos, blips on a screen and
crunched satellite data bring forth, and in resisting the simplistic yet prevalent sentiment in ecology
research that, with these technologies, wild animals “tell us what they feel, what they see”
(Wikelski, quoted in Shah, 2021).
Undoubtedly, it is difficult to grasp the mediating role of these technologies because, as
Latour (1994, p. 36) argued, the actions that we try to measure are subject to blackboxing, a process
that makes the joint production of actors and artifacts entirely opaque. This is why focusing on
the ontological consequences that technologies can have reveals the importance of continuing to
concentrate on the question of mediation. Indeed, if we understand mediation as a ubiquitous
process that transforms, generates or creates subjects—such as you as a reader, Galetto as a
rewilding practitioner pitted against local ranchers, or a Patagonian puma as an object of care, as
I will discuss in the following Chapter—instead of merely bringing us together or connecting us
as extant subjects and objects, then we can agree with Grusin when he states that mediation
“remains among the most pressing questions of our time” (2015, p. 147). This is a question that
Peters invites communication theory to take on, considering that “our very existence depends on a
vast array of techniques for managing nature and culture” thus far ignored “due to their supposedly
poor qualities of meaning-making” (2015, p. 3).

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CHAPTER 5. BETWEEN CARE AND CONTROL: THE PATAGONIAN COUGAR’S TALE

Rewilding has become popular in the last decade as a cost-effective solution to the
preservation of biodiversity, a “hands-off’ approach centered in letting nature “go wild” (“again”).
However, as the previous chapter has also discussed, rewilding can, in practice, entail an intensely
active management of species that typically relies on the use of wildlife tracking technologies.
Specifically, I explored how the technologies deployed by FRA–camera traps and satellite
collars—were employed to practically and rhetorically construct a conservation narrative
predicated on the spectacular ‘drama’ of wildlife living as well as on extolling the technology
employed by the rewilding team as an enabler of objectively good conservation work. This chapter
builds directly on that, though it recenters these technologies as enablers of care, understood as
the principle that guides the attention FRA pays to the handful of species targeted for their
rewilding project, but especially so to the animal considered central to the ecosystem: the cougar
or puma. While the figure of the puma is a prominent character in the conservation narrative FRA
puts forward as the apex predator or “ecosystem’s architect,” this chapter argues that its body also
reveals how the practices sustaining this initiative are predicated on controlling future animal
behaviour just as they are on preserving it.
One sunny and windy morning, I joined the FRA rewilding team as they conducted a
maintenance tour around some of the cameras traps. This time, though, we were also joined by a
communications representative from FRA who, although lived permanently in Buenos Aires, was
helping at the Cañadón Pinturas Gateway for the season. In fact, he was fulfilling an important
role as he was the staff member who gave the rewilding talk most nights at the mountain lodge,
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La Posta de los Toldos. I had just attended that presentation the night before and, as we discussed
it in the ride, he explained that though it was supposed to be a 15-minute conversation, it usually
ended up taking longer because tourists get really excited about it and ask many questions at the
end. Immediately after, he commented
“… all the kids like the pumas. For example, there was this German kid, he was a little boy,
and he really wanted to see a puma. When his family came back from a hike, I told them
about the project, this and that. And the boy really wanted to see pumas, so they went out
again to do the Koi hike to see if they could spot one. In the end, they didn’t and the father
told me that the kid was very disappointed. And he was, in fact, crying. So I told him: ‘I’m
sure there were pumas and they saw you.’ That got him to crack a smile. Poor guy.”
(Interview, Los Toldos, 2020)
The interaction this quote describes is very telling. Firstly, it shows us how international tourists
come to visit Patagonia to observe charismatic wildlife (an endeavor attractive enough to count as
entertainment for families with young (male) children), demonstrating that
“Western conceptions of the relevant bits of the world, transmitted through NGOs (…)
through the bodies that fund them, and through the tourism market itself, arrive at
destinations long before the ecotourists and shape those destinations to fit those
conceptions” (West & Carrier, 2004, p. 491).
Secondly, the selection of one hike over another based on the probability of encountering an animal
is indicative of the fact that “wild” places are, in fact, designed with certain purposes. Thirdly, by
casting the space outside the mountain lodge as one were animals can observe humans without the
possibility of humans looking back, the rhetoric of the project (and FRA staff) reifies the idea of
“nature” as a foreign, qualitatively distinct space inhabited by others where humans can visit and
photograph, but where they do not belong. All of these themes coalesce in the final point we can
ascertain from this interaction, namely that while ecotourism is presented by FRA as an instrument
that will sustain these conservation efforts in the long run, it can quickly subordinate wildlife
protection to wildlife viewing.
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The critical approach this last section of the work takes towards this case study is primarily
informed by science and technology studies (STS) that explore the boundaries between care and
manipulation. Indeed, care and control are two sides of the same coin, as conservation practices
rooted in care are inevitably shot through with questions of (bio)power, from who gets to enact it
and for whom, to why it is being done at all and what the desired outcomes are. This chapter sets
out to answer some of the questions that the idea of (certain) humans caring for nonhuman species
entail by looking at how that concept is materialized in technologies, techniques and fragments of
discourses. Typically, conservation NGOs justify their intervention by deploying a type of crisis
rhetoric that creates the space and need on which they later act and resort to a science-based
discourse to present and legitimize their approach. However, because these newly predominant
actors operate under a logic marked by the neoliberalization of conservation evidenced since the
1970s, NGOs like FRA need to perform conservation in ways that will attract donors and enable
further power accumulation. These conditions of existence of “rewilding Patagonia” as a
discursive formation are what the chapter explores first. This lays the necessary ground for what
follows, which is a discussion on the irreparable tensions that those rules of formation impinge on
rewilding as a care-oriented practice and rewilding as a development-oriented project.

BIODIVERSITY CRISIS AND NGOS
The main “problem” that rewilding as a conservation solution targets is biodiversity loss and
ecosystem degradation. At the beginning of 2022, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC), arguably the world’s leading authority assessing the climate change
phenomenon, warned that climate warming was putting a large portion of the world’s biodiversity
and ecosystems at risk of extinction. The report IPCC released explained that near-term warming
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and increased frequency and severity of extreme events will place “many terrestrial, freshwater,
coastal and marine ecosystems at high or very high risks of biodiversity loss” (IPCC, 2022a, p.
13). As was later picked up in the popular press, the average global temperature increase of 1.1
degrees Celsius since the XIX century has extinguished 47% local populations of the 976 species
surveyed in 2016 (see Wiens, 2016), while the projected increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius could
represent a high risk of extinction for up to 14% of all plants and animals on land (Jones, 2022).
The IPCC report also recognized the interdependence of climate, biodiversity and people, which
is why it integrated natural, social and economic sciences “more strongly” than in earlier
assessments (2022, p. 3). It is also why the authors stress that tackling these challenges and
effectively adapting to the myriad of manifestations climate change entails will require multiple
actors working together, governments, the private sector and civil society.
These facts constitute the fragment of the widely available scientific discourses on climate
change that actors such as conservation NGOs utilize to construct their own discursive projects
and legitimize their actions. To be sure, this work is not negating the reality of anthropogenic (
“capitalo-genic” if considering Moore’s (2017) Capitalocene or “colonialism derived” if following
Whyte (2016)) climate change nor the starkness of the loss of nonhuman life, which as Van Dooren
(2014) has aptly noted, implies the loss of entire ways of life. Rather, what it seeks to problematize
is how certain actors in the conservation sphere utilize what now amount to incontrovertible facts
to form and sustain a particular discursive formation. What it notes, then, is that in partnership
with those scientific discourses, environmental crisis narratives, especially the biodiversity loss
version, are powerful rhetorical devices that not only provide legitimacy but justify interventions.
Specifically, these alarmist discourses are the means through which agents, such as nation-states
or, more recently, (international) NGOs, claim rights to stewardship over land, wildlife and
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resources. By appealing to those narratives, “technical experts and managers assert rights as
‘stakeholders’ in the land and resources they say are under crisis” (Roe, 1995, p. 1066).
For example, when tourists lodge at FRA’s only mountain refuge in Gateway Cañadón
Pinturas, La Posta de los Toldos, they are exposed to such a narrative nightly through an official
multi-media rewilding presentation. Held in a living room primarily accessed by those who will
be staying in one of the rooms, the presentation clearly asserts that “we are experiencing the biggest
extinction crisis the world has ever seen” (Presentation, Los Toldos, 2020). To revert this is
precisely FRA’s mission, which they aim to accomplish by creating national parks—the legal
category that grants the most protection to a piece of land—and by instituting “wildlife programs”
that restore the health and functionality of affected ecosystems, something that, in turn, can sustain
“turismo de naturaleza” or ecotourism. This message was reinforced through a 6-minute,
professionally produced YouTube video—titled “Rewilding: The Journey to Return to Nature”—
where an introductory placid succession of high-quality images of the most iconic wildlife of
Argentina was suddenly and dramatically interrupted by a series of news broadcasts decrying the
present extinction crisis that is endangering one million species. Followed by a series of facts,
displayed in white against a black background with dramatic music, the video then introduced
FRA’s executive director, who unequivocally asserted that
“What we are experiencing today is an extinction crisis that results from an economy based
on extracting every single resource and that considers nature a mere resource for humans.
Exploiting them, squandering them, we’re consuming our own habitat and our chances of
living on this planet” (Fundación Rewilding Argentina, 2020, English subtitles)
After a brief appearance of the Foundation’s conservation director in this video, the audience
sitting in the Foundation’s cozy mountain lodge was exposed to the definition of rewilding, which,
according to the disembodied voice of the male narrator, meant “… to protect and restore natural
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environments, with all their species and amazing processes, in order to turn them into an engine
for local development through turismo de naturaleza [ecotourism] activities” (Fundación
Rewilding Argentina, 2020).
Given the dire context, the practices that ensue are to (re)enclose the land that was once
organized as estancias in order to create protected areas where FRA can effectively unfold
“rewilding,” which they understand to be “an active ecosystem restoration to accelerate nature’s
own recovery times so that they acquire that resilience, that capacity to restore and sustain itself
against change” (Heinonen, quoted in Dickinson, 2021). But, as the language above demonstrates,
rewilding is a system of statements that conjoins “conservation” with “ecotourism,” thus forming
a regularity typical of discursive formations (Foucault, 1972, p. 38). Among the conditions of
existence for that order is the phenomenon of the neoliberalization of conservation, marked by
different market-oriented mechanisms that seek to incorporate conservation as an integral
component of capital accumulation and, in so doing, embed these projects in a logic that further
commodifies “nature” (Büscher, 2012; Büscher et al., 2012, 2014; Corson et al., 2013). Some of
these mechanisms include carbon markets, which claim to mitigate greenhouse emissions via
offsets (Lohman, 2011); species and wetlands banking, promoted to offset negative environmental
impacts due to industrial development in supposedly fungible ways (Robertson, 2004; Sullivan,
2013); the REDD+ initiative (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation),
which promises to reverse deforestation by linking forest conservation to carbon markets
(Angelsen, 2009; Fletcher et al., 2016); and ecotourism, which promises to redress the
socioenvironmental problems caused by mass travel.
That last mechanism is particularly important in this analysis because, as explained in
Chapter 2, the expansion of protected areas around the world has gone hand-in-hand with the
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growth of nature-based tourism, later defined as ecotourism, because this activity has been
conceptualized by a myriad of agents (within the tourism industry, the outdoor industry and the
nonprofit conservation arena) as a “non-extractive activity that can be performed in ecologically
relevant places without compromising their sustainability” (Barrena Ruiz et al., 2019, p. 745).
Protected areas like national, provincial or privately owned parks, work to organize the territory
into extractive and non-extractive uses, into exploited spaces—such as ranches were locals still
conduct sheep rearing activities—and “natural places” that can be visited and consumed by people
through this practice of nature-based tourism (see Rutherford, 2011). The premise is that because
there is evidence that people will pay to travel to faraway places to observe wildlife and wild
landscapes, then this nonhuman world will be saved if it is developed as a tourism product that
attracts investment for sustainable development. Thus, if tourists will pay, local people and
governments have an incentive to conserve those sites or animals that visitors would want to see.
And, because those tourists who visit leave capital, the conservation endeavor itself can be funded
in the long-term and thus create a self-sustaining conservation-ecotourism nexus.
Although these type of projects entail multiple actors, the neoliberalization of conservation
is also marked by the rollback of the state as a driver of conservation, which is why the need for
action that is rhetorically created by those crisis narratives is quickly taken up by NGOs who, in
turn, have developed closer relations with the corporations they take donations and marketing
lessons from. Brockington (2009) has identified some sources for the increasing power and amount
of these new actors, especially in what pertains to well-funded organizations and philanthropic
foundations. These include the size and scale of philanthropic foundations, the development of
closer ties with industry and business, as well as the support of wealthy individuals who want to
make significant donations without setting up their own organizations. Indeed, the philanthropic
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foundations that are sustaining biodiversity and wildlands conservation projects are directly linked
to corporations through their origins and funding. For example, FRA’s project in Patagonia is
presently primarily funded by the Wyss Foundation and the Frejya Foundation: the former one
was endowed by Hansjörg Wyss who made his fortune by founding and then selling to Johnson &
Johnson his medical device manufacturer company, Synthes, while the latter is sustained by Anne
and Carl Deanne who inherited their fortune from Disque Deanne, a finance and real estate investor
who at one time controlled the General Motors Building and an array of shopping centers in New
York, Massachusetts and Georgia (see Bagli, 2010; Hansjoerg Wyss, n.d.). As we will see later,
this matters because, just as Tompkins’ beliefs in deep ecology and in the concept of a regenerative
wilderness guided his land purchases, so do the “wishes” of the funders alter the course of action
FRA takes. But it also matters because the neoliberal capitalist logic that gave birth to this
Foundation also lodged itself in its idiosyncrasy, as noted by a long-time member of Aves
Argentinas, who on a ride along route 40 very clearly said to me:
“it is very important to understand that CLT (Conservation Land Trust) is a sociedad
anónima [corporation] because when you understand that CLT is a sociedad anónima, you
realize that it is a company and that it thinks like a company… not like an NGO. There is a
difference there; it’s like Flora y Fauna [now FRA] is the NGO of the corporation… like the
Coca-Cola Foundation is to Coca-Cola” (interview, Perito Moreno, 2020).
FUNDACIÓN REWILDING ARGENTINA
In 1992, the Conservation Land Trust (CLT) was formed by Douglas Tompkins as a “private
operating foundation incorporated in California, created to acquire land for Pumalín Park and
support other conservation projects in Chile and Argentina” (Milestones, 1991-present, n.d.). In
1997, CLT-Argentina emerged and immediately began to work on a newly acquired patch of land
of 11,400 hectares in Esteros del Iberá, Corrientes province. In 2009, Fundación Flora y Fauna
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was born to further support the Iberá project, though it was rebranded as Fundación Rewilding
Argentina in 2020.
Even though the latest IPCC report has urged to bring together “scientific and technological
know-how as well as indigenous and local knowledge” in order to obtain more effective solutions
to the crises outlined in its pages (2022b, p. 2), FRA follows in the footsteps of its founder and
fails to effectively engage in productive ways with the local population, including agricultural
producers and other conservation organizations working in the area. For example, Miguel
O’Byrne—the president of FIAS, one of the organizations that gathers and represents agricultural
producers in the province—met with FRA’s CEO, Sofia Heinonen, to stake their position and
express that “who exercises more conservation than he who was raised for generations in the field
and has lived all his life off of the animals?” (Interview, Rio Gallegos, 2020). He expressed that
while he wanted to explore options for coexisting, seeing that it was not conservation what the
social group he represented was against but the Foundation’s “fundamentalist” attempt to remove
all the anthropic signs, the response from Heinonen simply was that “our project is different.”
Similarly, Aves Argentinas staff were consulted by FRA about the idea of removing some guanacos
from a neighbor’s property and bringing them to La Ascensión, the wild natural reserve FRA owns
but is already administered by APN, both to demonstrate that they knew how to handle and
transport the animals but also to add specimens to La Ascensión, around where Sebastian Di
Martino, the Foundation’s scientific director, thought were few to none. The Aves staff expressed
disagreement with this possibility because not only were there guanacos higher up in the property,
but because
“if you’re going to work with guanacos, you’re going to have to do it in a much more social
way because the human-animal conflict here is with pumas and guanacos. It’s a textbook
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definition of human-wildlife conflict. What occurs today with these animals is that the
ganaderos hate and kill them because they are considered a plague, a pest...” (interview,
Perito Moreno, 2020).
Later in the conversation, FRA admitted that they had already made up their minds about what
they were going to do because ultimately, as Heinonen put it, “it’s my campo and I do what I
want.”
What emboldens FRA to go about their projects high-handedly is the large budget they
operate on. Environmental NGOs committed to the creation and maintenance of protected areas,
such as FRA, reap donations in a highly competitive funding environment from people who seek
to preserve environmental services, like maintenance of soil fertility or stabilization of the climate.
In this context, powering through a project to present it as a case of “successful conservation”—
especially one that, as in the case of FRA in Santa Cruz, can boast the creation of an entirely new
national park as well as a rewilding project that uses “state-of-the-art research techniques and a
solid scientific framework” (Fundación Rewilding Argentina, 2019a, p. 78)—can accrue large
sums of money from private fund-raising. As one FRA employee explained to a journalist during
a press “event” I attended, the Foundation has a “potpourri of donors,” almost exclusively
international, and they try to work with bigger corporations as these grant more leeway and less
oversight in the execution of the donations. The staff member also explained that donors
sometimes come with an idea of what project they would like to “participate in,” which obviously
presumes knowledge of the Foundation’s conservation work, while other times they are shown
viable options based on the projects the Foundation has at the moment. For example, while
Hansjörg Wyss and the Wyss Foundation provided the capital to purchase all the land of the
Argentinian PNP, it was the Freyja Foundation who provided the financial means to create hiking
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paths in PP as well as develop the rewilding project. Today, other than the Wyss and Freyja
foundations, FRA reports Arcadia Fund, DOB Ecology, National Geographic, Oceans 5, Patagonia
Inc., Mimi and Peter Buckley, Leonardo Di Caprio Foundation, The Bromley Charitable Trust,
LC Kvaal Habrok, David and Susan Rockefeller, Parrot Wildlife Foundation and Artis Zoo as their
donors for the fiscal period of April 1
st
2019-March 31
st
2020 (Fundación Rewilding Argentina,
2019a, p. 122). During that time, they report to have raised “more than $17.2 million in total for
specific and general purposes” and, from that total revenue, 99.48% came from grant funding,
“largely foundations and individuals, which add up to 91% of our grants” (Fundación Rewilding
Argentina, 2019a, p. 118).
The production of apparent success stories and “the presentation of ‘successful’
conservation” (Benjaminsen & Bryceson, 2012, p. 351) are essential marketing strategies for
NGOs to distinguish themselves in a highly competitive funding environment. If these institutions
operate in the “global economy of appearances” (Tsing, 2005, p. 57) then dramatic performance
becomes essential. This explains why FRA (and Tompkins Conservation) is so media savvy,
producing high quality short videos with vignettes of the stories they want to tell as well as hyper-
real and panoramic photographs of the nature—all of which are accessible on social media—they
are redefining along the way. These are all ways through which “spectacular performances [engage
in] conjuring spaces for effective conservation interventions-cum-profitable investments” (Igoe et
al., 2010, p. 498). The first of the images below (Figure 5.1) is a screenshot of an Instagram post
that shows a photograph of a tourist van against an incredible (or incredibly illuminated) light-
contamination-free night sky parked in Cañadón Pinturas Gateway/Portal, one of the stations
within PP (not PNP) where tourists can spend the night and experience “the wild,” which as the
captions in the post explain, can be something akin to experiencing “freedom.” The second image
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is a photograph published in national newspaper La Nación that depicts another of FRA’s
projects—El Impenetrable—located in the province of Chaco where, incidentally, the poorest
conglomerate area of the country—Gran Resistencia, where 44.6% of homes and 51.9% of people
are poor, while 13.3% of homes and 16.9% are indigents
50
—can be found (INDEC, 2021). Figure
5.2 shows a luxurious type of camping installation, nowadays known as “glamping” or glamorous
camping, that includes beds with mattresses in a spacious and sturdy tent “inspired by those that
can be found in South African parks” equipped with nightstands (adorned with fresh flowers),
mosquito nets, chairs and benches, trashcans, rugs and solar-powered lamps, all of which “were
made by local artisans” (Herrera, 2021).

50
Indigentes are considered to be those who lack the necessary means to purchase the food they need to
satisfy average caloric needs whereas pobres are those who can cover that basic caloric need but lack access
to other basic services and goods, such as transportation or education (see INDEC, 2016).
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Figure 5.1: Screenshot of Instagram post depicting the accommodations in Cañadón Pinturas
Gateway where motorhomes can be parked next to a common area that includes facilities such
as toilets and showers, a washing station and a woodfire stove (Fundación Rewilding Argentina,
2022). Figure 5.2: Photograph depicting the inside of one of the three glamping tents available
for tourists next to the Bermejito River in Chaco province (Herrera, 2021).

Other times, the audiovisual narrations deployed conjure up urgent problems in need of
timely solutions, such as the case described above of a six-minute professionally edited video that
dramatically describes the biodiversity crisis the planet faces and prescribes a solution they are
uniquely qualified to offer. The proficient, market-savvy branding strategy the Foundation follows
is not limited to the digital world but rather manifests in how they curate the parks experience.
FRA is very deliberate with the aesthetic they pursue, which is also something directly inherited
from Douglas Tompkins who was so particular about details—a sign that read “No detail is small”
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hang in his Esprit office—that, wanting his park signage to be pleasing and elegant, he had the
local hardware store add a new shade of green to their inventory, which they called “Tompkins
Green” (Franklin, 2021, p. 186). Even though the mountain lodge Posta de Los Toldos is in a very
remote location in a province in the south of Argentina, it looks like it could belong anywhere. As
the image below depicts (Figure 5.3), the living area of the lodge, which is accessible to all visitors
not just those who spend the night, is an ample, cozy-looking space, with state-of-the-art heating
furnaces, modern light fixtures, wood furniture and—despite FRA’s foundation in a deep-ecology
philosophy that places humans equally with other species—real, not faux, sheep and lamb skins
for humans to sit on. The modern touches do, sometimes, seem out of place to the locals, such as
Basalo who expressed that no one in Los Antiguos could afford the type of bronze bathroom
faucets they put in the public restrooms at La Ascensión.

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Figure 5.3: Photograph depicting the lobby/common use are of the mountain lodge, La Posta de
los Toldos. The room has a large table were guests can have meals provided by the restaurant or
eat their own, as well as a spacious sitting area, all decorated with sheep skin. (REFUGIO LA
POSTA DE LOS TOLDOS - Prices & Hostel Reviews (Perito Moreno, Argentina), n.d.).

All of FRA’s sponsored gateways or portals have the same type of sign, a white wooden
board mounted on top of a rock structure and framed by a classic looking black structure, with the
same black font. Furthermore, as noted in the introduction and also visible in Figure 5.3, FRA is
misleading in how they utilize the “Parque Patagonia” brand: even though the La Ascensión Portal
is not officially part of PNP because the state only has dominion over the land and not jurisdiction
(which the province did not cede), the sign on the entryway reads “Parque Nacional Patagonia”
(see Figure 5.4). What is also evident in that image is that the same aesthetic employed for PNP
Argentina has been used in PNP Chile, further cementing the desired binational identity of the
park/s. As someone working in tourism, Basalo was very aware of this and referred to it
specifically when she explained that, at the time La Ascensión was being organized, the
“intervention project” FRA proposed entailed organizing vista points along the route with parking
for five cars, as well as installing some shelters and signs in the style described above. She also
mentioned that they wanted to do this next to Valle Chacabuco, which is one of PNP’s portals on
Chile’s side, close to the border crossing at Paso Roballos, “with the aesthetic of the signs in Valle
Chacabuco… so then, who administers this? Everything looks the same, so it tells you who is
administering all this” (Interview, Los Antiguos, 2020). She admitted that although she managed
to tone down the signs they wanted to install along Scenic Route 41, they still looked like the ones
in Figure 5.4, and that she could not stop FRA from doing so even though there already were some
signs and landmarks present as the province developed an audio guide for visiting tourists.

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Figure 5.4: On the left, the sign for Parque Nacional Patagonia Chile at the entrance of the
Valle Chacabuco Portal (Bernhardson, 2019). On the right, the sign for Parque Nacional
Patagonia at the entrance of La Ascensión Portal/Gateway which is not, in fact, legally part of
the national park (Author, 2020).
TAKING ON REWILDING
The signs FRA utilizes to demarcate the “natural spaces” ready to be visited, the fashionable
installations for tourists, the images on social media, the language deployed to equate wildness
with freedom constitute the different elements that form wilderness as a heterogenous ensemble
which, although elaborated at different sites, give shape and cement rewilding as a discursive
formation. As noted, presenting successful conservation is a key strategy to court donors, but it is
also important to produce and circulate the system of representation that the construct of
“Rewilding Patagonia” is.
One of the elements of this formation is rewilding itself, understood as a cost-effective
solution to help revert the biodiversity and ecosystem losses. Beyond that, though, rewilding has
been deemed by some scholars as a “novel,” “rapidly developing,” “transformative approach” to
conserving biodiversity, which explains why the term has gained popularity in the last decade and
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why several projects have now been implemented in multiple countries (Pettorelli, Durant, & du
Toit, Johan, 2019, p. 1). Following Sullivan, “wilderness” and conservation of “the environment”
were already “portrayed and perceived as exciting, exotic, erotic, and glamorous—as ‘sexy’”
(2011, p. 335). Rewilding is precisely a conservation practice centered on the idea of
wilderness/wildness that aims to restore an ecosystem’s functionality, but its attractiveness is ever
higher because, in practice, it is combined with “state-of-the-art research techniques and a solid
scientific framework” (Fundación Rewilding Argentina, 2019a, p. 78). As I exposed in the
previous chapter, rewilding as a conservation practice entails its own set of technologies and
practices. But the devices utilized are themselves sexy: they lend themselves easily to be built up
on social media as symbols of legitimate, innovative and savvy conservation efforts. It is no
surprise that FRA’s account on Instagram is populated with short videos and images that represent
the technology as an actor on par with the wildlife itself.
In “Producción de Naturaleza” [translates as “producing nature” or, more accurately, “the
production of nature”], a book published by CLT (see Jiménez-Pérez, 2018), Kris Tompkins
explained in the prologue how, after years of climbing, hiking, skiing and adventures in “natural
places,” her husband and she began working in conservation by purchasing land to restore. She
also states how a friend invited them in 1997 to fly over a northern region of Argentina, Esteros
del Iberá, to see if they would be interested in developing conservation projects there. That is how
Tompkins conservation “landed” [sic] in Corrientes province, a place Kris Tompkins originally
thought was “hot and full of bugs” and from where she wanted to quickly leave, but which her
husband’s interest was piqued by, which is why, to her surprise, Doug Tompkins purchased his
first agricultural ranch in the region (McDivitt-Tompkins, quoted in Jiménez-Pérez, 2018, p. 7). It
was only after they began work there that they realized that Iberá was “a gold mine for
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biodiversity” (idem, emphasis added) and what prompted them to open up a completely new area
of work: rewilding.
After Doug Tompkins passed, Kris Tompkins continued to enact his vision and by 2015,
she already had multiple territorial stakes in Argentina, which included more than 150,000 hectares
in Esteros del Iberá as well as over 160,000 hectares in the Atlantic coast of Santa Cruz. Both of
these eventually became national parks, Iberá in 2018 and Monte León, in 2004. While the
rewilding component was present before, it was around this time that she “realized” that “she was
not just making national parks” but that “her fight was to return to the wild” (Franklin, 2021, p.
302). In her words,
“conservation, generally speaking, is the conservation of territory - taking it out of the
possibility of production. So you're setting things aside, whether they're national parks or
city parks. Rewilding involves conservation and then goes beyond that. If you look at a lot
of national parks in the United States, often those parks have beauty but not health. Take
Yellowstone for instance. Since the wolves came back to Yellowstone, they have changed
forever the way the ecosystem functions, actually taking it back to what it was for millions
of years” (McDivitt-Tompkins, quoted in Doherty, 2020).
Consequently, when their project in Esteros del Iberá had wrapped up, Kris Tompkins “vowed to
double down on the reintroduction of lost or nearly extinct species, on bringing back wildlife”
(Franklin, 2021, p. 302) and is arguably why Fundación Flora y Fauna changed its name to
Rewilding Argentina.
Kris Tompkins’ conception of rewilding rests on the idea that nature will “restore” itself if
left to its own devices; in fact, she has stated that “you have to count on [rewilding] happening
almost entirely naturally once you reclaim the land because you’re talking about millions of acres”
(Doherty, 2020). As the previous and present chapters suggest, rewilding as a practice is much
more complex than what that statement reveals as letting nature “do its thing” requires
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technological intervention and surveillance, as well as manipulation of the animals’ bodies and the
very construction of Patagonia as a natural, wild place. Furthermore, if that statement were true in
practice, then parts of the targeted region in Santa Cruz would already classify as wild as some of
the estancias Tompkins Conservation purchased in Chile and Argentina had been abandoned for
some time, arguably “leaving nature alone” except for the remaining decaying fences. Whether
true material impediment for wild animals to move about the territory or merely a symbol of an
economic model they want to vanish from the region, removing those is one of the first “jump-
starts” to the rewilding process. Kris Tompkins has always batted away critics who raised concerns
about the effects of turning grazing land into a national park or reintroducing animals that kill
livestock arguing that the soil was overfarmed and that “in 100 years, no one would be able to
imagine the land as anything other than national parks” (O’Donnell, 2021). Removing signs of the
past and of economic activities that are placed as passé is instrumental, then, to creating a landscape
where humans can rewild themselves:
“The human mind honestly lost its ability to relate with a non-human world, and if you
can’t understand your connection and dependence on where you live, you’re buggered (…)
So that’s how I see rewilding: brining back species that have been extirpated, restoring the
place, and then rewilding ourselves” (Doherty, 2020)
51
.
Much like her husband before, Kris Tompkins continues to negate the reality of the people who
inhabit the places she wants to rewild for others like her. Put differently, it is very hard to argue
that the ranchers in Santa Cruz who feel directly affronted by the couple’s vision or “Doug’s
dream” do not relate with the non-human world; they might do it in a way that could be construed
as violent—their practices do entail the commodification of animal bodies who are raised as raw

51
This quote is extracted from an interview published on the Forbes website. Interestingly, the article has
hyperlinked the last part of Kris Tompkins’ sentence, “rewilding ourselves,” to the website of a company
that sells collagen- and “medium chain triglycerides”-based products and shares “6 easy ways to being to
rewild yourself in a modern world” (Ancient + Brave, n.d.).
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goods or inputs in a production equation based on extraction of natural resources from the soil and
of these animals’ lives—but they certainly have a connection and a quite literal dependence on
where they live. This is not legible to the Tompkins because it is not a legitimate, acceptable way
to relate to the non-human world or, rather, to the non-human world that belongs in their imaginary
of Patagonia.
Rewilding harbors more contradictions than it can disentangle when it comes to positioning
humans and “nature.” On the one hand, many practitioners of rewilding—such as those who
created FRA and continue to run it—believe that “the problem with humans is that we are now so
far removed from nature” (Saucedo, head of wildlife conservation program at PNP Chile, quoted
in Franklin, 2018). Certainly, this is a normative construction that can be inferred from what was
stated in the overview of the concept of “the wild” offered in the introduction: only when defining
“culture” and “nature” as ontologically, non-commensurate, entities can a statement such as that
be formed. The contradiction arises when we consider that those same practitioners also believe
that “the complex web of life thrives in the absence of human intervention” (Franklin, 2018). At
face value, it may not seem like a contradiction given that this statement too arises from the
ontological binary aforementioned. As Sullivan states, even if modern science of conservation
biology considers that biodiversity conservation requires the separation of “wild nature” from
people, “this distinguishing of natural history from human dwelling is itself an understanding and
an orientation associated with the construction of human-non-human relationships guiding
European Enlightenment ideals” (2011, p. 335). The tension lies in the fact that humans are
simultaneously at fault for not being “closer” to “nature” and the fact that they also should not
intervene or otherwise alter “nature,” seeing the almost irreparable damage they have caused.
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In this context, the only possible course of action available to move forward—which in this
case is more like going backwards in time—is to have humans visit “nature” in ways that are
presumed non-extractive, experiential, sustainable and responsible. This takes care of the “human”
part of the rewilding equation, by prescribing a place and subjectivity and forbidding others. But,
if humans are expected to visit and take pictures, there needs to be something they can go to and,
crucially, there needs to be something attractive to observe and experience. At the same time,
rewilding, especially as defined and operationalized by FRA, is about actively re-furbishing the
ecosystem (now, supposedly sans humans) and its functionality. This means that the humans at
FRA expect to care for wildlife and the environment with wildlife tracking technologies and the
application of principles of conservation biology and ecology. All of these—from the imaginary
of wilderness that fractures nature and culture into two realms, and the protected areas and national
park, to the presentation of a biodiversity crisis and the techno-human intervention for careful
repair—constitute disperse elements that, brought together, produce rewilding as a discursive
reconstitution of “the wilderness idea.” What I contend here is that neoliberalism, much as
mercantilism did in the XVI century and liberalism in the XIX, works as a crucial rule of formation,
condition of existence or political-economic logic that binds the contingent unit of this instantiation
of wilderness as a discursive formation. In what follows, the chapter analyzes the problematic
tensions and shortcomings that necessarily plague this particular system of dispersion.
BETWEEN CARE AND CONTROL
Presented as a “concept in English,” rewilding is defined by FRA as “a conservation strategy aimed
at restoring ecosystems by bringing back, through active management, species that are locally
extinct or whose population numbers are low” (FRA staff in presentation attended personally by
author, 2020). Although the initiative is carried out by targeting and working with a handful of
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native species, the key aim is ecosystem restoration, which makes this a case of what Svenning
(2017) calls “trophic rewilding,” an approach fundamentally anchored on the presence of large
animals (apex predators) who set in motion a cascade of trophic interactions that promote self-
regulating, biodiverse ecosystems. Consequently, most of the attention is placed on the Patagonian
cougar, locally referred to as puma and dubbed “the system’s architect” by the Foundation
(Fundación Rewilding Argentina, n.d.). This is coupled with the fact that this species is seemingly
the one that needs the most protection, as it has been systematically hunted ever since sheep
ranching was introduced in the region, which occurred during the incorporation of Santa Cruz as
a national territory towards the end of the 19
th
century as we saw in Chapter 1 (Coronato, 2010;
Garcia Brea et al., 2010). But, as it happens, pumas also are very charismatic animals (Lorimer,
2007), an elusive species for humans that elicits touristic attraction and draws financial support
very easily.
CARING FOR PUMAS
Care is a slippery concept and I am approaching it from a feminist STS perspective that interprets
it as an ethico-political issue (Puig de La Bellacasa, 2011), an organizing principle marked by
‘non-innocent politics’ that work to organize, classify and discipline bodies in its name (Martin et
al., 2015, p. 636). It is, in other words, a ‘selective mode of attention’ that cherishes some things,
lives or phenomena as its objects and, in the process, actively excludes others with varying degrees
of violence (Martin, Myers, and Viseu 2015, 627). As such, practices rooted in care necessarily
entail relations of power evidenced by the fact that there is always a party that cares and another
who is cared for, and sometimes a third one that is taken care of (see Bocci, 2017). In most
conservation projects, different coalitions of practitioners and institutions work together to
preserve endangered nonhuman lives by making decisions about the type of care a species requires
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which, in turn, precipitates a series of conservation practices, from supporting reproductive efforts
(caring for) to forcefully removing impinging introduced species (taking care of).
Thus, conservation practices that strive to preserve biodiversity by caring for (certain)
animal species always entail some manipulation of nonhuman bodies, which manifests in various
attempts to control or manage aspects of their behavior. For example, Rinfret (2009) has
effectively framed species management techniques that use advanced technology as a form of
disciplinary power that seeks to preserve and manipulate or control the “wildness” of the targeted
animals to foster certain types of human-animal encounters, such as for example disciplining
tagged bears to eat bark and pine nuts rather than trash to avoid encounters with national park
visitors. Similarly, in his work on Lesser conservation, Reinert (2013) explains that data on
migration routes obtained through telemetry allowed researchers and conservationists in Norway
to manipulate (that is, discipline) the Lessers into taking the safest migration routes in order to
enhance breeding success. In so doing, these projects wield bio-power, understood as “set of
mechanisms through which the basic biological features of [the animal] specie[s] become the
object of a political strategy” (Foucault, 2007, p. 1). In fact, eradicating some (“invasive”) species
for the protection of others (“native”) has been studied as a form of actualizing biopolitics (Dicenta
2020; Lorimer 2015;Van Dooren 2014; Reinert 2013; Bergman 2005).
As was explained in the previous chapter, when FRA began working in Patagonia their
assumption was that they would experience something similar to what they had already seen in
Esteros del Iberá; that is, they thought Patagonia, a place known for its fragile ecosystem, was
another “scenario without actors,” a place so ravaged by desertification and other agricultural-
production-derived problems that local species had become locally extinct. Thanks to what the
camera traps revealed, they realized that the targeted species were, in fact, present in abundance.
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Direct observation of these species is also possible: even though they do not typically let
themselves be seen, pumas are spotted, so much so that APN is able to make inferences about the
health of the population. For example, one of the park rangers stationed in PNP stated in an
interview that
“even though there is no study that determines whether there are a lot or a few of them,
you can see pumas here, we see many around and they are a key link in the trophic
cascade. This area has some populations that are relatively well; we have seen female
pumas with up to three cubs which is… When a species doesn’t have enough prey or
resources available, they don’t have that many cubs” (Colleselli, quoted in Dickinson,
2021).
Seeing that they would not need to introduce or re-introduce pumas in the region, FRA focused on
learning more about the predator-prey dynamics, which is also deemed key to securing the
presence and role of the puma as apex predator. It is in this context that the clusters of satellite data
points that might signal predation described in the previous chapter become coveted signpost to
the animals’ feeding grounds.
Ultimately, knowing more about what and how the pumas predate through the mediation
of wildlife tracking technologies and approaching the data from ecology and conservation biology
are the ways in which FRA constructs and carries out rewilding. It is also how FRA enacts care:
the NGO is the party that cares and the pumas are the entities being cared for. Framing this as a
matter of care charges rewilding with strong affective and ethical connotations, and works to direct
us to a notion of material doing, of caring as an ethically and politically charged practice (Puig de
La Bellacasa, 2011, p. 90). Doing so also helps foreground the “darker side” of caring, namely the
violence committed in its name.
As explained in the previous chapter, whenever satellite collars or other resources (such as
the Foundation’s veterinarian, who resides in Buenos Aires) become available, the rewilding team
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sets out to conduct “campaigns” to trap pumas and fit their bodies with the technology. The snares
they use are essentially nooses made of a steel wire that wraps around the paw of a puma if the
animal steps entirely inside the circle made by the wire. However, because of its design, the more
the captured animal tries to release itself from the trap, the more the metal rope constricts its paw,
generating lesions and significant inflammation. How bad this can get depends on “the animal’s
temperament,” according to Galleto, who having reviewed the videos captured by the nearby
camera traps, has seen pumas who try to fight off the trap for a short while and then lie down and
nap, and others who got so nervous that they fought hard and even began chewing rocks nearby.
When the human team is either alerted that a trap has been activated or they encounter that an
animal has been trapped when they are doing the rounds, they gather roughly eight meters away
from it and prepare the first shot. The first drug they administer is a tranquilizer which, according
to Galetto’s explanation, does not put to sleep but rather relaxes the animal. He did not specify
which drug they were employing, though the chemical immobilization of felines typically entails
the use of cyclohexanes (such as ketamine, the drug FRA does use, and tiletamine) and these drugs
are combined with tranquilizers such as xylazine or medetomidine “to avoid the rough induction
and incoordination often associated with cyclohexane use in felids” (NexGen Pharmaceuticals,
2021; see also Lescano et al., 2014). The team follows the protocols associated with the drug but
to know how much to administer, they first need to estimate the weight of the animal at a distance,
based on what their senses, past experience and general knowledge tell them. The room for error
this experimental situation creates is magnified when considering the terrain where this is done.
For example, the pumas in this region tend to be larger and heavier than pumas elsewhere (FRA
has trapped an 80kg puma) which can create problems: one time, the team shot a trapped puma
and, after observing that the individual was failing to demonstrate any of the signs associated with
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the tranquilizer, they were at a loss on how to proceed because they could not ascertain whether
the drug shot had effectively and fully entered his bloodstream or whether he simply needed to be
shot again with a higher dose.
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Around fifteen minutes after the first shot, assuming the team deems the first drug to be
working, they shoot the animal again with the second drug, ketamine, the anesthetic that puts the
animal to sleep for approximately fifty minutes. Here too they also need to guess or make an
educated decision about how much “keta” to administer, though the effects of overdose with this
one are more severe as they can make it more difficult or traumatic for the animal to wake up.
During this time, the team first tackles the activities that require more bodily manipulation, such
as weighing the animal—and thus confirming whether the amount administered was correct and
estimating the dose needed to revert the tranquilizer—determining the age (estimated by the wear
of its canines), whether anti-inflammatory medicine is needed (depending on how affected the paw
is) and collaring, something they do only if the individual is an adult and a female. What is left for
the end of the fifty-minute window the anesthesia provides is the measuring of morphological
characteristics because, in their view, this is not as important and can be left undone if the
anesthesia begins to wear off prematurely. After this, the animal is given a third drug, one that

52
With guanacos, administering shots is even harder because they are too fragile to be trapped with these
snares, and thus are shot a distance. However, because of the effect of the strong wind, the team needs to
get much closer than what the ideal would be if they do not want to lose the dart; typically, this means that
they need to reduce the pressure of the shot and try to hit the guanacos from behind because if they hit them
directly with this high-pressure dart in the stomach area, they risk outright killing it. Furthermore,
accounting for the wind is beyond simple: sometimes, a guanaco might be straight ahead from the rifle’s
viewfinder and so the shooter might increase the pressure to get a straight shot that reaches it quickly. But,
if the wind suddenly stops the moment the shot is fired, they risk running through animal’s body. So, “in
the end you just have to try it and see if it works” (Galetto in rewilding presentation offered to the press,
Los Toldos, 2020).

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revers the effects of the tranquilizer, and the team observes, now from a greater distance, how the
animal wakes up from the procedure.
In its performance of rewilding as described above, FRA is not being careless; that is, they
are not failing to meet standards nor being unprofessional in their management of wildlife. They
are, in other words, being careful. Rather, the experimental and violent nature of this work is
characteristic of modern conservation science, particularly of movement ecology as described in
the previous chapter, whose reliance of geolocators is part of a wider digital reshaping of
conservation ideas and practice. Furthermore, FRA is acting like other conservation organizations
who have been leading users of these technologies in pursuit of more robust evidence-based
conservation decisions (Sutherland et al., 2004). The premise of these techniques is that more
knowledge will lead to better wildlife management and, ultimately, to the restoring of the
ecosystem, a greater good that justifies disrupting the lives of a couple of individual animals. Most
of the academic literature surrounding movement ecology originates in the natural sciences
because in its deployment of these “technologies of control” (Adams, 2017, p. 3), conservation
draws on longstanding science-based models of understanding nature. Consequently, it is mostly
its potential for animal research and conservation what gets talked about the most instead of the
moral and political entanglements implicated in the practices that constitute the modus operandi
of this scientific approach to conservation. To be sure, there is “something a bit irrational in the
idea that if only we had a little bit more information, we could somehow solve these problems”
(Benson, quoted in Yin, 2018), but a detailed critique of this scientism lies outside the scope of
this work.
The point is that this is another fragment of scientific discourse FRA is utilizing to
simultaneously define and deploy its overarching discursive project: the “wildlife cartographies”
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(Verma et al., 2016, p. 81) that emerge from deploying the technologies described before provide
an evidential base for territorial claims in the form of protected areas and therefore support
conservation’s ability to lay claim to that land. In this case, it specifically enables FRA to wield
power in order to care for the wellbeing of populations that are assumed at risk or in need of
protection, even though to date there are no substantive published studies determining an adequate
baseline nor reporting such a need. As Adams has clearly stated, “biodiversity conservation is a
biopolitical regime” that
“involves the exercise of power over both nature (keeping species and ecosystems within
specific bounds in terms of state and location) and humans (determining who may take,
kill or transform non-human lives and spaces)” (2017, p. 2)
This means that in its deployment of these technologies and through their practices and techniques,
FRA is enacting a form of care intrinsically linked with the exertion of power as control.
But, as the reader might remember from the previous chapter, it is not in FRA’s plans to
conduct a systematic census of the animal populations of interest. In fact, it does not seem to be in
FRA plans to conduct any systematic form of research. When discussing the work that Aves
Argentinas does with the maca tobiano and other species in the region, Galetto clearly stated that,
“For me, what needs to be clear is that Aves is a group of scientists, so they need to analyze
everything. We are more… we do this to be able to accionar [to act] quickly. We are never
going to be at the service of science’s requisites” (Interview, on the road near Los Toldos,
2020).
For the scientific director of FRA, Emiliano Donadio, the place for research in the project is more
nuanced than that. When we met, he defined the rewilding Patagonia initiative as “a restauration
project of ecological processes by way of incrementing the abundance of key species, such as
pumas and guanacos, that derives in the development of an economic activity based in tourism, in
wildlife observation” (interview, San Martin de los Andes, 2020). As he explained, the project had
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four different components: research, conservation and management, communication, and
economic development—this last one based in the conservation and management, and
communication ones. He admitted that the last three were the strongest components and that
“research… it is done as long as it does not bother too much” (interview, San Martin de los Andes,
2020). He believed that the fact that the Foundation had brought him on to join their executive
team was indicative of a change, of the realization that they had to include something research-
related to the project because “they knew who they were bringing,”
53
though he was also clear
about the fact that “for the Foundation, research is not fundamental.”
WILDLIFE TOURISM
What this chapter argues is that FRA is also exerting a much more prevalent form of control that,
although couched in conservation discourses, serves a very different purpose. Indeed, there is
another reason why FRA goes through all the trouble of trapping and collaring wild animals, and
why the ability to retrieve the wild animal (and its body) from the digital renderings of these
tracking and photographic technologies is central to this rewilding project. Just as they are
instrumental to rewilding as a conservation project, these technologies and their outputs are
equally at the center of rewilding as a development project that, in this case, entails manipulating
animal behavior.
Roughly ten minutes into the presentation offered by Galetto, the rewilding coordinator,
and after cursorily explaining how the animals were trapped and collared, he stated:
“In Torres del Paine [Chile], what they are doing with the pumas is turismo de avistaje de
depredadores [predator-sighting tourism], of the apex predator of the ecosystem. And we

53
Donadio was a CONICET researcher before joining and FRA and had conducted research on
pumas (with collars) in a different location with his own funding, which he then brough with him
as he joined FRA.
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want to replicate something like that here, with the goal of getting the locals to reassess
the species because if they see a monetary benefit, that reassessing will be much faster.
And to make sure that the pumas recuperate their territory in conjunction with all the
other local species.” (Presentation, Los Toldos, 2020).
This is the logic that Suzuki (2017) was referring to in the case of lions in Zimbabwe where the
trick was to get locals to regard these animals no longer as vermin that preyed on their cattle but
as an untapped source for profit. And, this further explains why this project is so concerned with
the management of people and their perceptions through images (see chapter 4).
Torres del Paine, a popular national park in the Chilean side of Patagonia roughly 900 miles
from the mountain refuge, looms large in the imaginary of the people of FRA. Even though he did
not expand on it during the presentation, this location—and one nearby ranch in particular—would
surface in conversations time and time again. The first mentioning of Leona Amarga occurred
when we were out in the field with an antenna, trying to see if we could hear some collared puma
nearby. Leona Amarga is the name of the commercial venture of a former rancher in Chile, who
“had sheep, but after the volcano eruption, he decided to quit sheep rearing. Now he charges
US$350 per person per day and gets many tourists per year.” According to their website, this
family-run estancia used to be a farm dedicated to rearing sheep but have now “decided to devote
this beautiful place to conservation, and thus provide a home for the local fauna on the close to
7,000 hectares belong to the estancia” (About Us, n.d.). What they offer is four safari-style tours—
“Pumas in the Wild, ” “Exploring the Land of the Puma,” “The Route of the Puma, ” and “Super
Puma Safari”—where visitors are guaranteed to be able to observe pumas and which can last
between 3 nights and 4 days, to 6 nights and 7 days. Typically, these safaris consist of two “viewing
sessions” or what they call “puma search,” one done very early in the morning for about four hours
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and the other in the afternoon for about three, and the operators provide all meals as well as
transportation to and from the airport.
The way in which this started, according to Galetto’s retelling, was when this rancher
managed to habituate a female puma to his presence. Eight or ten years later, and many cubs after,
the rancher has a host of pumas who have become used to human presence, which Galetto verified
when he visited:
“You arrive and there’s a puma over there, playing, and the female comes close to you, but
she ignores you completely. Then maybe a guanaco passes by, they go on high alert and
they walk right in front of you before launching into a sprint to chase the guanaco and you
are like, ‘wow.’” (Presentation, Los Toldos, 2020).
While his account might be somewhat overly enthusiastic, what makes this ranch and the tours
compelling to Galetto and the rewilding team is that the pumas of Torres del Paine, or at least those
who roam this farm, “do not hide” from people.
Also according to Galetto’s presentation, because it all started when the rancher managed
to habituate a female puma to his presence, FRA wanted to replicate that and thus were
concentrating on doing ‘habituation work.’ The main objective behind this strategy is to change
the perception and behavior that pumas currently display towards humans or, in Galetto’s words:
‘What we want to achieve is for us to become a neutral stimulus for the animal.’ The premise is
that, if we assume that the pumas have natural prey available, then they will not want to hunt us
and if, in turn, humans cease to hunt them and thus pose no direct threat, then they will not have
reasons to flee or escape from us when they cross our path.
It is at this junction that we begin to observe how the logic sustaining these practices of
conservation is predicated on controlling future animal behavior just as it is on caring for the
quickly disappearing animals. Just as the state exhibits bio-power through mechanisms and
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technologies that attempt to control the life of its “legitimate” subjects (and end the lives of those
deemed disposable, see Mbembe 2003) for their own welfare, so do these coalitions of actors
through conservation practices that equally seek to “ensure, sustain and multiply life” (Foucault,
1990, p. 138) by managing entire populations of animal species (see also Nally 2011). While this
animates FRA’s rewilding initiative, it is also the case that the project actively wants to habituate
pumas to the presence of humans so that their bodies can be put to work in the service of
ecotourism.
54
Considering that this commercial activity is predicated on selling a transcendental
encounter with a wild and natural landscape (Fletcher 2014), controlling or otherwise manipulating
how these pumas act around humans becomes instrumental to getting them to linger around us
when they spot us. At least, long enough, arguably, for tourists to be able to snap a picture. This
demonstrates yet another way in which animal life gets culturally and carnally rendered as capital
(C. Wolfe, 2003), a way that also hinges on the species divide (Shukin, 2009) and that, ultimately,
reifies the looking relations that position animals as others to be looked at, as much as it
commodifies their habitat.
Nowhere is this management more evident than in the bodies of female pumas, whose
predetermined nurturing behavior towards their cubs is weaponized against them. At the time of
my visit, Galetto was clear about the fact that
“We are focused on capturing and collaring females. If we wanted this to be something
scientific, ideally, you’d have 4 and 4. (…) The scientific part it’s… What we are interested
in is in the management of species and in securing their populations. That’s our goal. If

54
As noted in the introduction, habituation of wildlife for ecotourism purposes is not necessarily a common
component of rewilding projects. However, as Jørgensen (2019, 57) has noted recently, nature tourism is
commonly integrated into rewilding projects as a promissory mechanism to create economic benefit for the
local community directly affected by the project. In this case, this is precisely the discourse that FRA has
adopted, making the conservation-development nexus a key characteristic of their “sustainable” rewilding
Patagonia initiative.
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we can produce something scientific with the data, that’s great. But that’s not our main
goal.” (Interview, Los Toldos, 2020).
This is why males trapped in snares were only marked (by a snip in their ears) while adult females
were collared. As he told the press members during that morning rewilding presentation,
“What we want to do now is capture two more females because this habituation work
becomes much more feasible with females that have cubs (…) That way, you habituate
more animals at once.” (Presentation, Los Toldos, 2020).
Female puma behavior is “in large part (…) directed toward raising young successfully” and their
adult “life history strategies are geared to raising offspring” (Logan & Sweanor, 2009, p. 110).
When they are born, puma cubs are altricial or highly dependent on the female for nourishment—
which initially includes her milk but continues even after they are weaned through the provision
of meat—as well as protection. Furthermore, at about four weeks old, they begin to learn how to
augment their instincts from their mother through play behavior and mock attacks (Logan &
Sweanor, 2009). Thus, the theoretical assumption the rewilding team handles is that if the mothers
are “comfortable” around humans or learn to tolerate human presence, then their cubs will replicate
that behavior. And the team certainly has a good window of operation to perform this habituation,
considering that cubs become independent from their mother and enter their subadult life stage
between one and two years of age.
At the time of my visit, the rewilding team was targeting some of the female pumas
introduced in the previous chapter, Puna and Kenkon. In order to conduct the habituation work
and thus replicate the desired interspecies relationships allegedly present in the Chilean
commercially oriented venture, Galetto and his rewilding partner rely on the tracking technologies
also described in the previous chapter. Starting from the visual representation of the pumas’
location on Lotek’s interface—the satellite geospatial data organized in clusters—they then go
back to the territory and superimpose those digital signals onto the physical space, trying to retrieve
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the real animal from the digital animal. Thus, whenever the satellite sent good data-points for them,
Galetto and his rewilding partner would attempt to recover the real Puna and Kenkon from their
digital footprints by tracing back those colored dots on the territory. Although, according to
Galetto, the animals typically fled when they spotted the humans near, they have had some
‘successful’ moments such as when they
“… went to see Kenkon and one of her cubs stayed, and though we were 50 meters away,
he remained there for 2 hours, started napping. We were sitting down, talking, and we
would take pictures and he remained impassive. Another time, we went to see him again,
but his mother stayed that time. She was further from us that time, but she was calm. She
started napping too. That is progress.” (Interview, somewhere near El Unco, 2020).
Hypothetically, one could argue that the rewilding FRA is conducting, an initiative that ostensibly
tries to place pumas and humans into some form of convivial coexistence in shared space, works
towards imploding the nature/culture binary that continues to structure our human and nonhuman
relations (D. J. Haraway, 2003; Latour, 1993). Indeed, much has been written about the potential
that paying attention to nonhuman others has in terms of bringing about a more sustainable future
(Kirksey et al., 2018; Kirksey & Helmreich, 2010; Van Dooren et al., 2016). In this context,
different works in STS have explored the role that technologies can play as modes of taking
account or noticing those nonhuman others in ways that can lead to intimate sensing (Helmreich,
2007; Vallee, 2018) and new meaning-making practices (Gabrys, 2012; Lehman, 2018). These
instances signal that technologies and their outputs, such as the photographic cameras and satellite
collars entailed here, could be a step toward forging forms of care that respect and respond to
difference (Altrudi et al. 2021).
Yet, the rhetoric that FRA deploys when referring to technology-assisted species
management as the modus operandi for enacting conservation recedes when they introduce the
habituation work being conducted. Instead, the discourse that takes its place characterizes the
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initiative as a commercial venture that commodifies the ecosystem by inviting tourists to “let the
wild discover [them]” (Fundación Rewilding Argentina, n.d., 2021b) Certainly, this belies the fact
that this “wild” continues to be very much constructed—not just in the already well reported Euro-
American sense that equates it with vast landscapes marked by infinite beauty and sublime excess
where (white) men go to be reinvigorated (Cronon 1996; Ward, 2019)—but as a designed
experience that seeks to make the space “interesting.” So, while the message to the public is “get
out and explore ‘the wild,”’ in practice the tourists walk trails that have been designed to traverse
areas of geographic interest and where encounters with wildlife are likely.
Furthermore, casting the native wild animals—particularly, the charismatic puma—as
“engines for local development” in the same breath that discusses restoring natural environments
functions “to entrain nature to capitalism, while simultaneously creating broader economic
possibilities for capitalist expansion” (Büscher et al., 2012, p. 7). It is, then, another instantiation
of “selling nature to save it” (McAfee, 1999), which not only expresses a profound tension but can
also have important biodiversity consequences considering that “only some species and places
have the requisite qualities to be turned into marketable commodities” (Holmes, 2012, p. 199). It
is thus not surprising that when Galetto explained that they were planning on training a man from
Perito Moreno, one of the two closest towns, to give the puma-habituation-practice the consistency
it needs to be effective, he concluded by stating that the idea was that he could, in the near future,
“sell guided tours.”
55

55
In April of 2021, one of the most prominent newspapers in Argentina published a story about a man who
“dared returning to his remote town in Patagonia to fulfill his dream” and is now an “entrepreneur” who
offers guided wildlife-sighting tours. This is the person Galetto mentioned would come as a 3-month intern
to help with the habituation work, an aspect not mentioned in the newspaper article (see Cinto, 2021).
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“PLAY AND INNOVATE”
At the beginning of this chapter, I offered neoliberalism as the prevailing logic that helps tie the
“heterogenous ensemble” (Edwards, 1996) of rewilding as a discursive project. One of the
characteristics of the neoliberalization of conservation is the relentless commodification of
“nature,” which in this case comes in the forms of subjecting animal bodies to arguably violent
practices (it seems safe to assume that shooting a tranquilizing dart is against the targeted animal’s
will) and modifying their behavior to support one of the key promises made by this initiative,
namely that conservation can be a sustainable development model. Offering spectacular images
(see chapter 4) as well as spectacular opportunities for wildlife viewing are indispensable parts of
conservation’s engagement with capitalism, and this is brought to bear here. However, another
characteristic of the neoliberalization of conservation is the roll back of the State, and thus of
public money, and the simultaneous dominance of NGOs in the conservation arena. As this work
has explained thus far, these organizations receive capital from individuals with enough power to
set or otherwise alter the course of a conservation project.
As established before, scientific research is not a priority for the Foundation. This manifests
in various ways, such as collaring only females rather than attempting a population sample with
more diversity in key variables such as sex or in the understaffing of the rewilding team on the
ground. For example, it took Donadio months to get funding to be able to purchase a truck that
would enable a future full-time researcher (either a masters or doctoral student) to systematically
check the different clusters of geospatial data. Crucially, though, it manifests in the types of
projects that can be done as well as in their timing. Even though one of the first questions tourists
ask when they stay at the mountain lodge is “Do you know how many pumas there are?” or that
“there needs to be enough pumas to effect trophic cascades” (Heinonen, quoted in Dickinson,
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2021), the Foundation simply “[doesn’t] know their numbers nor how many there should be for
the ecosystem to reach its capacity’ (Galetto in presentation, Los Toldos, 2020).
Despite that, as explained, they do not intend to estimate the population because that would
require several years,
“To publish and so forth, you need more time and someone to analyze [all the data]. We
only do a sort of first sweep for our own management purposes and to fulfill the
Foundation’s objectives. A scientific endeavor takes 5 years, and if we wait 5 years…. it’s a
long time to act. (…) So, we believe more in observing the animals and how they move
around the space and to start doing some tests, obviously nothing crazy, just tests.”
(Galetto in interview, Los Toldos, 2020).
The key element that this quote deals with is time. After having many conversations with FRA
staff it became clear that their priority is to accionar, to act in a way that quite resembles the “lean
startup movement” that takes the basic tents of the scientific method but that places a premium on
experimentation and innovation to quickly deliver results (Eisenmann et al., 2012; Chang, 2019).
The time strain here is not derived from the race to quickly place products in consumers’ hands
but rather from the pressure exerted by donors, who want to see their invested capital transformed
into tangible results that work to fulfill their vision. As with any research or conservation project,
funding is fundamental and thus the case of FRA’s rewilding initiative is, to a certain extent, no
different from any other project that requires external funding and thus has to meet certain
demands. However, what is evident here is that the timing of the project is dictated by the need to
act on that capital rather than by the times that a well-thought out or executed scientific research
plan would demand. To be sure, I am not claiming that a scientific approach is the absolute best
approach to conservation; rather, I am pointing out that an evidence-based conservation approach
rooted in “solid scientific framework” (Fundación Rewilding Argentina, 2019a, p. 78) is in direct
tension with the requests brough on by donor capital.
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Earlier in this work, I introduced the Freyja Foundation, the main donor FRA has for their
rewilding project. This Foundation was created by two siblings who, after their father passed away,
“sought the outdoors as a means to escape their pain,” a place with transformational power (Freyja
Foundation, n.d.-b). Drawing on the philosophy of deep ecology to ground their ethos, the siblings
are “here to save the planet” which is why they “continuously play and innovate to develop new
ways to do things” (idem, emphasis added). This notion of playful intervention to “save the planet”
is very much in line with the description Galetto offered of their strategy, which combines
observation and experimentation. As he explained in another conversation,
“we have to accionar [act] because we have a new donor that is asking us to change
everything now and to act now and so we have to make propositions” (Galetto, somewhere
near Los Toldos, 2020).
The need to act and perform change is a result of the Freyja Foundation’s involvement, an
organization whose self-defined strategy is to invest “with concrete objectives of ‘impact’
outcomes and financial returns.” (Freyja Foundation, n.d.-a). The same market-oriented
mechanisms that influence FRA’s strategy to change locals’ perceptions of pumas—from pests to
conduits for profit—are evident in this donor, who intends their impact investments “to generate
competitive market rate returns” (idem).
The limitations that this neoliberal logic impose on the research component of FRA’s
overarching program were more deeply felt by Donadio, who very clearly understood that “they
don’t want research, they want results now” (interview, San Martin de los Andes, 2020). Therefore,
he knew that he could not say to the donors “Um, well… first we need three years to properly
evaluate how the guanaco migrations are occurring” because he could anticipate that the response
would be “What three years? I want huemules [South Andean deer] here tomorrow” (idem). The
results Freyja wants to see pertain precisely to what is mentioned in Donadio’s second statement;
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that is, these donors want to see an abundance of wildlife in PNP, a collection of animals who will
show themselves to the people who this Foundation wants to “connect” to the outdoors and thus
offer a truly adventurous and healing experience:
“Setting out to find [the gaze of the puma] through the park’s 40km-trail system is an
exciting adventure. In northwestern Santa Cruz, Argentina, we study pumas with satellite
technology to understand their ecology and transform them into allies for local
development based on wildlife viewing” (Freyja Foundation, 2021, emphasis added).
These two siblings are avid climbers and enjoy hiking, and regard “the outdoors” as their higher
power. Much like the Tompkinses, they have a penchant to “save the planet,” and they do so by
approaching “nature” through the same ideology and practices that enabled their wealth
accumulation. What is at stake here is that embedding a conservation effort in a context that
prioritizes that investments deliver “inflated-adjusted, market-rate returns” (Freyja Foundation,
n.d.-a) creates a fertile ground for a capitalistic-oriented control to overtake care.
Amid these tensions, what can, paradoxically, lose ground in the “heterogenous ensemble”
that rewilding Patagonia constitutes is the wellbeing of individual animals, further disturbing the
murky ethical terrain of subjecting their bodies to science-based practices to usher in the era of
animal “big-data” (see Kays et al., 2015). During my time in Patagonia, expressions pertaining to
the recency of this initiative, namely that “they had just deployed,” that “all of this is very recent,”
or that “we have just started working on this,” punctuated several of my conversations with
different members of FRA and tended to be used to explain that whatever information they were
sharing was preliminary. I thought that, at times, this veered from simple precaution in affirming
the validity of the data they had to outright justification of a haphazard approach to research. When
I brought this up with Donadio, it became clear that the answer, once again, laid on the neocolonial
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dynamics that permeate this project where certain powerful actors from “central” countries get to
determine the times and the nature of conservation in “peripheral” ones. He explained that
“It fell on us… Suddenly, we received the money from this woman [in reference to Anne
Deane, one of the sibling founders of Frejya Foundation], they [FRA] hired me and said: we
have to fit collars. Okay, let’s fit some collars and then we’ll see. Sometimes it works out
like that, it’s not always a tidy situation where all is designed before the work begins. We
have to deal with that and move forward. What is the alternative:
- ‘Tell the donor no, that during the first year we are going to design….’
- ‘But the donor wants the pumas with collars’
- ‘Well, no, tell them to hold on’
- ‘No, they are not going to hold on. Let’s fit the collars’. (San Martin de los Andes,
2020)
Much like PNP’s superintendent who operated under a scarcity mentality that preferred to plow
ahead and gradually solve issues rather than organize politically to demand a better alternative,
Donadio is willing to accept that these are the rules of the game, what one must contend with in
order to do “something.” He was satisfied about the work that had been achieved during that initial
year despite the lack of resources and overall thought that the effort FRA was putting on research
was unprecedented. And yet, he did also express: “Honestly, I feel terrible. These pumas have had
collars for over a year and, out of all the information we could be extracting, we are only using a
small percentage.”

FINAL REMARKS
This chapter has problematized rewilding as something necessarily conducive to a more
sustainable future given that, as the discussed case study evidenced, it can be both a conservation
practice and a profitable touristic venture. What is left to foreground in these concluding remarks
is how the articulation of rewilding—understood as an entity that necessary harbors these tensions
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given the conditions of existence that explain its unity as a discursive formation—reproduces ideas
of control and domination arguably at the center of the present state of environmental degradation.
Even when bracketing the problematic assumptions rewilding makes about the return to a
“dehumanized,” “wild” past, we are still left with an initiative that works by capturing nonhumans
(both, literally and figuratively) and releasing them physically, as fauna to be looked at in safaris
or other wildlife-viewing ventures and objects to be scientifically studied, not to mention digitally,
as de-animalized and playfully accessible renditions on social media, as the previous chapter
demonstrated.
These practices beget wrestling with the idea of care and what is conducted or committed
under its name. If, as I suggest here, we consider that conservation practices are rooted in a notion
of care in that they attempt to care for species that are disappearing due to human-driven climate
change, then we must also consider the asymmetrical power relations those same practices are shot
through. In this project, the techniques deployed amount to technologies of control, what Rinfret
(2009) has called a form of disciplinary power, that seek to preserve the animals’ wildness in a
way that controls human-animal encounters to promote economic utility. This is done by shaping
animal behavior to conform to preferred management practices in ways that also preserve what
humans consider to be their wildness. Thus, just as the technologies applied here work to mediate
the very existence of the animals (see Chapter 4), the disciplinary techniques demonstrated in
FRA’s project also work to mediate their wildness by reshaping it in a way that better meets the
needs of humans.
Here, I explored the case of the Patagonian puma, but the tension between care and control
this site demonstrates pertains to the phenomenon of ecotourism in general given that this form of
tourism, by attempting to merge conservation with (“sustainable”) development, displays a logic
267

that, in practice, can subordinate the concern for environmental conservation and respect for local
communities in order to attract ecotourists and their money (see West & Carrier, 2004). Even if
the imperatives and the timings of capital were not forcing researchers to put the cart in front of
the horse by attaching pieces of equipment to animals for show, FRA’s rewilding project still
inherently behaves like other extractive development projects that base their functioning in
investing wildlife or land with economic value. Its practitioners believe that given the resistance
local communities have demonstrated, the only “unfortunate” way for things to move forward is
to have those people find “an economic side” in the project (Donadio, interview, San Martin de
los Andes, 2020). But, as the analysis presented in this chapter shows, the commodification of
“nature” includes but is not limited to that aspect; rather, in the system of representations that
“rewilding Patagonia’ is, the life to be restored never ceases to be a “resource” and as such it can
continue to be exploited (in rhetorically non-exploitative ways) and manipulated to offer an
experience, turn a profit, provide competitive market returns, or perform successful conservation.
This is precisely why the tensions discussed here are presented early on in the chapter as
irreparable. According to a forthcoming publication by FRA (titled Rewilding in Argentina), “the
collapse of the megafauna is associated with the arrival of modern man” and they date the
beginning of that process for Argentina back to 13,000 years ago (Di Martino et al., 2022a). They
later add that the prehistoric process of defaunation became more pronounced 500 years ago with
the advent of European colonization and their technological advances, including hunting dogs,
large-scale agriculture and the horse as a transportation means, and they quote naturalists who,
after visiting Corrientes province in 1784, wrote “Where man lives, neither trees nor plants nor
animals remain” (de Azar quoted in Di Martino et al., 2022b). Ultimately, these discursive
fragments build their overarching statement, namely that the modern human (Homo sapiens) is
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responsible for that megafauna extinction which took with it, in turn, the ecological roles they
performed. That is why when FRA defines a “complete ecosystem” as one that contains “all the
species that evolved there, meaning those that inhabited it from historic times,” humans are simply
not part of it. And yet, it is humans, with their science and advanced technologies, to whom,
inevitably, FRA assigns the task of turning back the clock.

269

EPILOGUE

In March of 2020, as I was wrapping up my field work, the world started to shut down as a response
to what would later be declared a pandemic, brought on by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Certainly, there
are many things that can be said about this collectively shared experience and we will still be
grappling with its effects for many years to come. But, just as the Coronavirus pandemic uncovered
many underlying structural problems in our societies, it also exposed the susceptibility of certain
practices, such as tourism, to external events. As the stay-at-home orders rolled in and international
(and national) travel came to a halt, I thought of how much more distant and solitary remote and
sparsely populated regions, such as northwest Santa Cruz, became.
In that part of Patagonia, local dwellers are being asked to drop the economic practices
their families have been conducting for over a century and to adopt a whole new set organized
around ecotourism, which is perceived as essentially a service economy that will put the region
“on the map” and create new development opportunities while also enabling the conservation of
this arid, steppe-dominated Patagonian ecosystem. Surely, it is possibly to chalk up a tourism-
halting global pandemic as a very rare event, not a sufficient cause to contest the viability of a
modernization project predicated on branding this area as a destination. But in this place,
something as simple as the wind can prevent people from “getting outside” to visit “the great
outdoors.” One Saturday during my fieldwork, I attended a festival of sorts with a musical act
FRA organized in La Ascensión, which included access to the food and souvenir offerings typically
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available there over the weekend.
56
At this time, FRA was still organizing and lending support to
these events because, as they had learned from the negative experience of the nearby national park
they also contributed to fashioning, Monte León, creating a protected area and leaving it in the
hands of APN—a federal administration with funds that are perpetually stretching park rangers
thin—was not an adequate recipe to bring about the success their model promises. On this
particular sunny Saturday, the staff member in charge of liaising with local entrepreneurs told me
he was expecting around eighty or ninety people to come. When we got to La Ascension, there
were not many people in sight but, deciding that maybe it was simply too early for people to start
arriving, I went on one of the available hikes. Upon returning a little over two hours later, there
still were not many people on sight and the band had had to reposition their stage inside of the barn
because of the roaring wind. By the end of the day, I would venture that a total of thirty people
attended the festival, all of whom were either local or from nearby communities.
Whether it is ethical to promise local people that they will be able to make a living based
on an economy organized around tourism in a place where the contingent of visitors shrinks as
soon as one of the defining elements of the region makes its entrance, and which is only truly
“open for business” during the summer season, is up for discussion. But, more fundamentally,
because this form of development is inherently tied to the model of conservation FRA proposes,
what is also up for discussion are its benefits seeing that, just as the soil it seeks to preserve, it
erodes on windy days.

56
Please note, the entrepreneurs are only there on the weekends, not weekdays, though the local bus only
works the routes that provide access to La Ascensión on weekdays and is not operative during weekends.
The quote I was given by the local remis agency in Los Antiguos for a round trip was expensive, even for
someone who was being benefited by the exchange rate.
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RE-WILDING “PATAGONIA,” RE-CIVILIZING “MAN”
As the first chapters have demonstrated, Patagonia has historically been a region existentially
exposed to exogenous centers of power. As such, this land has been made to signify various things,
but it has always been a wilderness against which powerful and powerless subjects have been
defined. Even though it has seen human inhabitants since at least the late Holocene or early
Pleistocene, the imperial Europeans powers that “discovered” and colonized “the New World”
constructed it as an empty territory without legitimate owners, and the individuals these
“righteous” explorers encountered as they descended from ships were interpreted as bodies closer
to animals or literary monsters than human beings. This Patagonia was a land of myth that appeared
in some maps next to drawings of fire-spitting dragons that, when physically encountered by the
Europeans, was inscribed in writing as a savage and ugly space, a “wild” place that bore no signs
of civilization, a construction that ultimately legitimized imperial colonial expansion and settling.
A few centuries later, the reconstitution of those othered individuals as “la barbarie” also justified
the political, military and economic advance of the newly constituted postcolonial liberal State
which wanted to tap into the stream of enlightenment, reason and progress that emanated from
Anglo-Saxon Europe. Then, Patagonia was still a dangerous though void place, a wilderness that,
despite its unruliness, held economic potential and as such needed to be ordered and brought to
the fold of progress, a task best done through pastoral development. Today, it is the direct
descendants of those pioneers who helped expand the national territory southward who are, once
again, being constructed as relics of a by-gone era, conservative bastions that need to get on with
the “green” times if they want to avoid withering. In the contemporary reconstitution of Patagonia,
one that finds its roots in the 1930s but begins to take shape in the 1960s and explodes at the turn
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of the XX century, the space was transformed into a reverentially sublime wild, unconquered rather
than unruly, that became open to experiential and transformative temporary visitation.
What the description above also shows is that the idea of wilderness, as manifested in
rhetoric, practices, spatial arrangements and technologies, has, over time, worked not only to create
powerless or powerful human subjects but it has also defined the boundaries between what counted
as human or civilized and what amounted to nature or uncivilized. This is why this work argued
early on that framing wilderness as a discursive formation worked to understand this construction
as the context in which a rigid nature/culture divide was held to be fundamentally true. Consider
for a moment Hegel’s famous dialectic of self-consciousness evidenced in the master-slave
conflict, which posits that it is only by seeing ourselves in relation to other humans in society that
we can determine our sense of self and our positionality. Analyzing this fictitious wilderness as a
discourse that, though malleable, retains performative coherence over time, makes it possible for
this contribution to recast that interhuman dialectical tension as a human/nonhuman one and thus
argue that it is only by crafting a particular nature that certain humanness can be recognized.
As I discussed in Chapter 2, for Stormer, the aesthetics of Ansel Adams’ landscape
photographs of nature had the fundamental effect of creating a rhetorical space through which a
certain vision of humanity could be enacted, invoking into being a mass human subject—a group
of unindividuated spectators who formed a “public” within mass mediated discourse—who, facing
the limits of itself against the sublime, was invited to recognize and renew itself, a humanistic
rebirth. By discursively constituting Patagonia as an experience, a wild sublime place, a pristine,
untouched and virgin land where the greens are luscious and the blues are vivid and which hosts
no conflict other than wildlife drama, the actors that constitute what amounts to mainstream
conservation today, such as environmental NGOs or Foundations, are crafting a space against
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which a particular human can recognize itself in its humanness. Through its rewilding discourse,
understood as a reconstitution of the wilderness discursive formation, FRA invites visitors to find
and re-connect with a core humanness they seem to have lost somewhere in the cultured, urban
city; that is, to reconnect with their “inner wild” (to “rewild” or “restore” ourselves as much as the
nature around us), a freedom-like, “pure” state of being open to some form of transcendental
experience brought on by the awe-inspiring and adventurous wildness of Patagonian wilderness
(this is probably best encapsulated in one of FRA’s Instagram video posts titled “In wildness is the
preservation of the world, see Fundación Rewilding Argentina, 2021g). When invited to visit
Cañadón Pinturas to “let the wild discover ‘you,’” a majestic location where the canyon seems to
infinitely extend, this discourse of wilderness is prompting human subjects to affectively
rediscover themselves in their finiteness. FRA’s propositions address a public “you” through its
imagery of discursively rewilded spaces, a public that, though invited to physically experience
them, is nonetheless equally discursively constituted through these representations even if they
never set foot in Santa Cruz. Because these natural spaces are constructed through a discourse
anchored in an imaginary that exquisitely presents Patagonia as a sublime space—an ontologically
separate place whose otherness human visitors are expected to discover and relish in—the
seemingly universal human subject that emerges is one whose ontological boundaries as human,
as something essentially distinct from nature, have been purified and reified.
In this discursive construction, the rawer or wilder Patagonian wilderness is, the more
cultivated the humans who “visit” become. While FRA is addressing an international audience, a
mass “you,” the humanness that is discursively reborn through rewilding is not, despite FRA’s
treatment, a universal one. Because this formation is brought together by a neoliberal logic and
operates in a context of global capitalism through which neocolonialism operates, the human
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subjects constituted by this discourse are modern individuals of capitalist culture who, from the
1960s onwards, find in “nature” an escape from urban-industrial labor. In this sense, Patagonia is
a unique playground that needs to be preserved, much like nature as a performative frontier needed
to be preserved for the cohort of American men in the XIX, from Theodore Roosevelt to John
Muir, who prompted the formation of national parks. Ultimately, this is why I referred to Patagonia
in Chapter 1 as the land of once and future others.
REWILDING AS NEOCOLONIAL AND NEOLIBERAL CONSERVATION
The analysis of rewilding put forth in this dissertation is specific to the empirical case on which it
focuses, which means that under different conditions this conservation/development discourse is
likely to manifest differently. Even in Patagonia, the formation discussed in the preceding pages
competes for discursive hegemony because there it is one discourse in an economy of discourses.
As I showed in Chapter 3, the local ranchers are fighting to resist what they construe to be a neo-
colonialization of the region prompted by wealthy foreigners who, whether to “evade taxes” or to
“save the world,” are attempting to impart a new spatial order that obliterates their ways of life.
Certainly, the alternative formation they are trying to (re)impose is not without its problems, as I
have also explored. But it does raise questions about which actors get to practice “conservation”
and determine which nature to preserve—to care for—versus which should be doing so.
The tension arises from the fact that the present planetary climate change is a phenomenon
with a necessarily global scope, but the land is still politically organized into autarkic Nation-States
with specific histories and inhabited by diverse communities with particular idiosyncrasies.
Certainly, all human and nonhuman life shares the same planet, and there are no “natural” spaces
“untouched” or outside the scope of “culture,” and thus these different political organizations need
to be held accountable. But jumping over international borders that “nature” fails to recognize,
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disregarding local bureaucracies that are either “too slow” or not “radical” enough, and disavowing
cultures that engage with “wilderness” in ways not coopted by a neoliberal sublime, is the
continuation of the type of power that white men from influential Western countries have
historically wielded.
As we know from the alternative and critical conceptions of the Anthropocene—from
Capitalocene to simply “colonialism” that have emerged—some of the current circulating
discourses around climate change and biodiversity crisis work to strengthen the already powerful
position of those whose extractive and polluting economic practices have done significantly more
damage to “nature.” As this case has demonstrated, it is plain cheaper and, given some of the
structural weaknesses countries in the Global South face, easier to demand that a group of around
fifty families “in the middle of nowhere” Santa Cruz stop rearing sheep for the sake of the health
of the Patagonian ecosystem (a “global good”) than presenting the same demand to, for example,
the agriculture sector in Texas, a state where 13% of the cattle in the U.S. comes from. Similarly,
it is easier to be outraged about the deforestation rate of the Amazonian rainforest than to engage
with the fact that many of the financial actors that invest in the companies involved in that
deforestation as well as the purchasers of the products are based in the U.S. and Europe (see Did
U.S. Companies, 2020).
In this context, it becomes clear that neocolonial conservation is not just a cultural artifact
that can be contested or changed through a newer set of ideas and arguments. Instead, as Kashwan
et al. have argued, “neocolonial conservation is a political and economic project that needs to be
reined in and countered through concrete changes in political and economic systems” (2021, p.
17). This is something that political ecology scholars have argued for some time now, as they have
critiqued the discourses and practices of development and conservation in relation to humans and
276

non-humans by focusing on the workings of political economy and power. Theirs and other
scholars and activists’ work has produced an abundant number of possible alternatives to
conservation—including those around “buen vivir,” “radical ecology democracy,” “wellbeing
economy,” reinvigoration of the commons, economic “degrowth,” “steady state economics,” youth
movements demanding an Earth uprising and, more recently, “convivial conservation” (see
Büscher & Fletcher, 2020)—that demonstrate that assuming that neoliberal capitalism is “the only
game in town” is patently absurd.
REWILDING AS A COMMUNICATION SUBJECT
By rethinking what critical, non-dualistic and, sometimes, decolonial conservation endeavors can
look like in the XXI century, the contributions from politically ecology have ultimately
demonstrated that things could have been and could still be otherwise, just like STS scholars
typically do. Some of them have also shown how “nature” has been spectacularly imagined across
time and space, something that media studies that focus on animal and nature representation have
also done. Considering this, the present work makes the case that critical analyses rooted at the
intersection of STS and media studies can make a tremendous contribution to the discussions and
present debates around conservation and its future.
The confluence of both disciplines has found a comfortable place within the somewhat
amorphous field of communication, especially around media technologies (Gillespie et al., 2014).
As Chapter 4 has discussed, media technologies, their outputs and the representations they
engender are fundamental not just to this rewilding initiative in particular, but to the general
ordering of human/animal relations. Their mediation, understood as a communicative process of
disclosure of being, becomes even more essential in a context where “everywhere animals
disappear” (Berger, 1972, p. 261) or where, as others and I have already argued, “nonhuman others
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are likely to continue to become manifestable to people as media renditions” (Altrudi et al., 2021,
p. 6).
Roughly in the middle of a recent biography on Douglas Tompkins that casts him as an
illuminated savior of “nature,” the author reproduces verbatim a long quote from J. Michael Fay,
an American ecologist and conservationist, where he commends the Tompkins couple for being
so successful conservationists. He attributes this to the fact that they are businesspeople instead of
tree huggers in a context where, he sees, more businessmen are deciding that conservationists do
not know what they are doing. Towards the end, he exclaims: “Just think about if there were 500
individuals like them or 1,000 individuals like them on earth! The planet would be a completely
different place” (Fay, quoted in Franklin, 2021, p. 172). By framing some conservation initiatives,
such as “Rewilding Patagonia,” not just as a neoliberal conservation project but as a media practice
embedded in a discursive system that could easily have been otherwise, communication scholars
can intervene to begin critically answering that question.

278

GLOSSARY

• Aves Argentinas: one of the NGOs working in Patagonia to study and preserve the macá
tobiano
• APN: Administración de Parques Nacionales, equivalent to the U.S. National Park Service
• CAP: Concejo Agrario Provincial, equivalent to Ministry of Agriculture for Santa Cruz
province
• Carancho: Crested caracara, a large bird of prey usually found in open and semiopen areas
who often forages on the ground and is an opportunistic hunter and scavenger.
• CONICET: Concejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (Scientific and
Technical National Research Council) is the main Argentine government agency that
fosters and co-ordinates science and technology research in the country.
• Chinchillón/es: Lagidium wolffsohni also known as Wolffsohn’s vizcachas, are a rare
species of rodents in the family Chinchillidae. This species occurs in southwestern
Argentina and adjacent Chile.
• Chinchis: see chinchillones.
• Choique: Rhea pennata, also known as Southern rhea, is the second largest flightless bird
of the Americas and inhabits the steppes of Patagonia
• Criollos: A term used originally to describe people of Spanish descent born in the colonies,
though, through time, this has come to have different meanings, sometimes referring to the
local-born majority.
• Coirón: a plant part of what is commonly known as “grasses’ (Monocotyledonous
flowering plants), typical of Tierra del Fuego and Santa Cruz provinces.
• Estancia: rural estate of varying acreage, typically consisting of one primary large
residence and smaller “posts” around the property destined for caretakers and rural
workers.
• FIAS: Federación de Instituciones Agropecuarias de Santa Cruz, political entity that
represents agricultural producers in the province
• Gallineta: Rallus antarcticus, also known as Austral rail, is a species of bird in the family
Rallidae, found in southwestern Argentina and adjacent Chile.
• Gendarme: Border patrol officer who belongs to Gendarmería, Gendarmerie or
something similar to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency.
• Huemul: Hippocamelus bisulcus or south Andean deer is an endangered species native to
the mountains of Argentina and Chile.
279

• INTA: Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria [National Agricultural Technology
Institute], is a federal extension agency in charge of the generation, adaptation and
diffusion of technologies, knowledge and learning procedures for the agriculture, forest
and agro-industrial activities within an ecologically clean environment.
• Macá Tobiano: Podiceps gallardoi, also known as Hooded Grebe, is medium size
waterfowl found in isolated lakes in the most remote parts of the Argentinian Patagonia,
listed as critically endangered by the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of
Nature).
• Meseta: plateau, a flat and elevated landform that rises sharply above the surrounding area
on at least one side.
• Peón: rural worker typically stationed in a particular estancia
• Tehuelche: Name in mapuches’ language used to describe the native population of
Patagonia, particularly those of the Chubut and Santa Cruz province.
• Vinagrilla: Aquatic plant, subspecies of the genus Myriophyllum (or water milfoil) native
to South America.

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APPENDIX. ON METHODS

Inspired by Casper (1997), what follows is a pseudo “coming out” tale of methodological strategies
and limitations. Since these pages are placed as an annex rather than a stand-alone piece, I will
limit my account to discussing methodology and associated concerns without restating neither the
analyses nor content already described.
This dissertation is the product of fieldwork and historical, interpretive research as it
combines multi-sited interviews with stylistic and critical discourse analysis. Regarding the latter,
I have engaged with a wealth of primary and secondary sources. To write the historical part, I
consulted some of the original texts written by European and Argentinean chroniclers, as well as
deferred to the works of many Latin American scholars who have written extensively about
Patagonia. To portray the main characters in this work, I engaged with texts written by FRA or
about the Tompkinses, and reports and other documents put together by some of the agricultural
organizations. I also spent hours scrolling through the images and videos posted on different social
media platforms by FRA and Tompkins Conservation, as well as an entire documentary depicting
the ranchers’ plight. As can be inferred from Chapter 4, this work is very much concerned with
the mediation of reality by photographs and videos, which is why visual analysis ranks on par with
textual (linguistic or rhetorical) analysis. The study of these representations includes a stylistic
analysis of the media texts that focuses on its denotative level and thus assess the material image
and narrative at their most manifest, external qualities (Beltran, 2018). But the interpretation of
visual images also addresses questions of cultural meaning and authority to unearth the power
relations that produce and are articulated through ways of seeing, imaging and imagining. Because
visuality is a discourse and discourse produces the world as we understand it, this work has relied
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on discourse analysis as a critical methodological approach to explore how images construct
specific views of the social world (Rose, 2001).
In regard to the former, I spent one summer season in Patagonia (Jan-March 2020) during
which I visited multiple locations in Santa Cruz and Rio Negro provinces. I established a “base
camp” in a hostel in Los Antiguos and while some interviews were conducted there, the bulk of
the fieldwork occurred in the spaces between that town and the neighboring Perito Moreno and
Bajo Caracoles towns. In total, I have spoken to over thirty-seven individual people, some of whom
I talked to twice or more, all in Spanish (see Table 1). Most of these were semi-structured
interviews of varied length, from a couple of minutes with a local townsperson to over an hour
with other informants. Entering the field, I had a set of questions prepared, though some were
either reformulated or discarded as a result of the experiential reality of the studied subject. This
also means that prior to conducting this work, I had engaged with theoretical literature and I let
the sensitizing notions that derived from those texts inform my research, even if it did not
determine the scope of perceivable findings (Timmermans & Tavory, 2012).
Individual Activity/Industry Location
Agnone APN La Ascension
German Ambiente Sur Rio Gallegos
"Kini" Aves Argentinas Various
"Gise" Aves Argentinas NW Santa Cruz
"Morgan" Aves Argentinas NW Santa Cruz
"Sabrina" Aves Argentinas NW Santa Cruz
Pablo Conservation Various
Navarro FRA La Posta
Prati FRA La Posta
Daniela FRA La Posta
"Nicolas" FRA Various
Emanuel FRA Various
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"Juanma" FRA Various
"Marian" FRA Various
"Fabian" FRA various
Donadio FRA SM de LA
Fernando INTA Los Antiguos
Roa Rancher & INTA Los Antiguos
Celia Rancher Perito Moreno
Puricelli Rancher Perito Moreno
"Garito" Rancher NW Santa Cruz
O'Byrne FIAS Rio Gallegos
Williams FIAS Rio Gallegos
Manero Wildlife director CAP Rio Gallegos
Bertinat Pvcial Env. Officer Rio Gallegos
Vitone Tourism Various
Daniel Tourism Los Antiguos
Basalo Tourism Los Antiguos
Federico Tourism Los Antiguos
"Matias" Mountaineering club Various
"Pedro" Mountaineering club Various
"Nelida" Librarian Los Antiguos
"Marta" Museum Los Antiguos
"Marcos" Businessowner Los Antiguos
"Luis" Businessowner Los Antiguos
"Silvia" Businessowner Los Antiguos
"David" Businessowner Los Antiguos
"Neno" Businessowner Los Antiguos
Table 1: List of informants I interviewed or had significant conversations with. The quotation
marks signify that the name is a pseudonym and the “various” under location means that I
talked to that individual more than once at different locations.
Other interviews were primarily “go-along” (Kusenbach, 2003), meaning conversations I
sustained with informants as they went about doing their work routines. I have been part of a
“press” trip that took me, my fixer, two members of nearby mountaineering clubs and an FRA
communications staff up the plateau, where we walked for two days and camped the night. I have
321

joined the rewilding team on three separate occasion as they went about their routine, replacing
the batteries of the camera traps and retrieving their memory cards or scanning the waves with an
antenna to see if we could catch the presence of a nearby puma. Though much of this did not end
up reflected in the work at this time, I spent several days as a guest at Aves Argentinas’
headquarters, where they dissected the corpses of killed (invasive) minks for research in a lab
though there were no functioning toilets. Because part of FRA’s project is premised on tourism, I
also made sure to explore the sites that are routinely marketed. Thus, I have done yoga where local
men, some fixed peones some temporary workers, used to shear hundreds of sheep; have eaten the
local pastries, pies and cookies, and drunk the tea and the beer entrepreneurs offer to tourists in La
Ascension. I visited Cueva de las Manos twice and partook in other tourist-oriented activities,
from visiting estancias that specialized in producing cherries and other “fine fruit” (like
raspberries, blueberries, marionberries) to visiting the local museum and doing some of the FRA
designated hikes. I also spent two nights in the mountain lodge, La posta de los toldos, where I ate
the food provided by another local entrepreneur, listened to their rewilding talks, participated in
their stargazing activity and observed the interactions staff had with tourists throughout the day.
I did not treat obtaining data and analyzing it as separate realities; rather, both activities
were simultaneous and iterative, and I continued to “case” the data in different theoretical
configurations as I went along the writing process (Timmermans & Tavory, 2012). Following what
Dicenta stated in her own dissertation, the order of the research was the result of “iterative, open-
ended, and interconnected processes of analysis and investigation,” during which “questions,
interpretations, and arguments are in constant renegotiation” and which only ends “when writing
and publishing deadlines mark an end” (2020, p. 35). For data analysis, I did subject the work to
routine time-consuming methodological sequences, including taking field notes (to have a more
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permanent record of my observations and emergent questions as well as thoughts and preliminary
interpretations), precisely transcribing recorded interviews (to ensure that I thoroughly
familiarized myself with the data), and coding and clustering data to create themes (such as “land
appropriation,” “technological mediation,” “species care,” “tourism,” etc.) and sub-themes (like
“ranchers,” “photographs,” “habituation,” “safari,” etc.).
One of the hardest things about doing fieldwork in Patagonia is the vast distances one needs
to traverse between locations of interest. Indeed, I had vastly underestimated how long it took to
get to multiple points as well as how hard it could be to do so: there is one important route that is
entirely paved, scenic national route 40, as well as some other streets in the center of the towns I
wanted to visit but, other than that, the rest are rough roads best (and sometimes only) managed
with SUVs. This imposed the biggest limitation on my work because I could not drive a car. This
meant that I had to rely primarily on my fixer and secondarily on my interviewees to move about,
making their schedules the primary dictators of my time there.
What alleviated this situation was that my fixer lived in Los Antiguos, was in the tourism
industry and was working in collaboration with FRA on some projects. He was an important node
in the network made by townspeople, FRA, producers, entrepreneurs, tourist agents, APN, Aves
and others because not only had he lived there for more than twenty years at the time of my visit
but he had been an FRA employee when the Foundation began to work in the region. Additionally,
some of his family members had been instrumental in the formation of PNP and he sustained
friendly relationships with park rangers. I am offering this characterization because I directly
profited from these associations, as I am sure that being introduced by him made access to some
people not only possible but easier.
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Access to other social sectors was negotiated differently. For example, a distant family
member put me in contact with a friend that worked in INTA and knew someone else in INTA,
Los Antiguos. I arranged to meet this contact before arriving and, once there and through
snowballing, he led to another INTA employee who, in turn, helped put me in contact with leaders
of the organizations that represent agricultural producers. Similarly, another family member
happened to know the director of Aves Argentinas, and the connections that followed from there
got me access to the provincial official who administers the Environment Office. Overall, despite
its large surface, Santa Cruz is a small province of tightly woven circles and thus it is not too
strenuous to simply follow the thread that emerges after the first contact is established.
What also helped me obtained access were my credentials as a national studying abroad.
As the reader should be able to appreciate by now, Patagonia continues to be very much “under
the influence” of external centers of power. Given this historically rooted outward-facing
appreciation of presumably prestigious foreign institutions, being a graduate student in an
American University translated as legitimacy to all the social groups I interacted with. For
example, an FRA staff I spoke to asked me a lot of questions about what it was like to study abroad
and we talked a fair amount about this. More pointedly, one of the producers I met confessed to
having googled me before speaking and, being impressed about the image USC transmitted, read
me as something other than an amateur. Similarly, one of the leaders of the agricultural
organizations asked to see my curriculum vitae before scheduling a meeting. Ultimately, my being
an Argentinian interested in this topic and in Patagonia seemed to stabilize all other differences
between me and the agricultural producers affected, while being an international student interested
in conservation and technology topics did the same with FRA members.
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Because I had only brought a carry on and a backpack, I had a limited wardrobe and,
knowing that I was going to be hiking and camping, I only packed clothes that would fulfill that
purpose. Between that and the fact that I had gotten some of those at my local REI, I am under no
illusions that I did not stand out in the locations I visited. I should preface that by stating that
because these places get a significant amount of tourists who share some of my characteristics—
young, rather fit-looking, with clothes from easily recognizable outdoor industry outfitters,
carrying a bulky backpack, etc.—I looked like just another tourist and, because residents are
accustomed to their presence, I blended in. The difference was that, unlike them, I hung around
for longer than one or two days. Los Antiguos has only two or three restaurants, but only one is
consistently open and offers the most reliably Wi-Fi service, so I would frequently go there to have
lunch. After the first few days, the waiter’s curiosity won and he finally asked me, after either
bringing me cherries or flan, why it was that I was there for so long. Other times, particularly when
I was visiting Santa Cruz’s capital, Rio Gallegos, I had people confuse me directly with FRA staff.
Ultimately, being assigned the label of “student” worked to open doors and I leaned in that
identity, meaning that everyone who agreed to talk with me knew exactly who I was, where I was
coming from and what I was doing.
57
I did vary how I presented my research, though; sometimes,
I described it as a study on rewilding and its associated technologies (which it is) and others I
simply stated that it was a study in the formation of PNP and the conflict it engendered (which it
also is). Because of this, I have chosen to use the actual names of the FRA staff whose names and
images are publicly available on their website; even when I only took notes instead of record, they
knew what was at stake in the conversations and interactions I was a part of. Similarly, I have
reproduced the names of all but one of the agricultural producers I spoke to because they are

57
The research was conducted under IRB # 19-00835 at USC.
325

themselves public figures. I do not expect that these informants would feel misrepresented if they
read the quotes I have chosen to employ, though some might be upset about the analysis weaving
those together or shocked that “I was not just a benign, friendly graduate student in their midst”
(Casper, 1997, p. 251). Thus, while my story would hold up should the facts be brought to the
informants’ attention (Goffman, 1989, p. 126) , the choices I made about information control still
constitutes a “Shallow Cover” strategy whereby, by announcing the research but leaving its goals
vague, the “researcher is announced but the research foci are not compromised” (Fine, 1993, p.
276).
This is a work that certainly “studies up,” that is that studies people with more power than
the researcher (Casper, 1997, p. 245). In theory, FRA constitutes a major non-profit affecting
everyday human and nonhuman lives, situated in a culture of power and affluence, therefore raising
questions of responsibility and accountability (Nader, 1972). Practically, this manifested in the
fact that I could not negotiate access to other members of FRA’s executive team other than the
scientific director. Similarly, some of the agricultural producers I spoke to, such as those who were
also political representatives, are also situated in an institutionalized culture of power. However,
some of the settings in which I conducted interviews or was part of a conversation were far from
elite and, if we determine hierarchies by integration within elite social networks and income, one
could argue I was “studying down” simply because of the privilege granted by my institutional
association, the research funds I had access to in order to complete this dissertation, claiming the
metropolitan Los Angeles to be my temporary residence and having a stable wage that, while
meager, was still expressed in U.S. dollars.
One of the main goals of this work was to show how the politics of neoliberalism as an
ideology and capitalism as a system of production have permeated modern conservation and how,
326

in turn, that enables a neocolonial discursive formation to take hold in Patagonia. Conservation-
at-large is a cultural problem that exceeds this particular instance, it is simultaneously a matter of
concern and a profoundly political endeavor. Thus, peeling the layers of “the onion of scientific
and technological constructions” (D. Haraway, 1988, p. 578) to show its historical specificity and
contestability was, at times, uncomfortable. In other words, my own analysis cornered me in places
where I did not want to reside, such as pro agricultural exploitation and anti-science camps. Neither
positionality is true. In the first case, I do not condone agricultural exploitations that pay no
attention to the sustainability of its practices, though I do not believe that this activity should be
altogether removed and certainly not in the way it has been attempted. In the second, like Benson
would never say “we don’t need science” (quoted in Yin, 2018), I would never venture that “we
don’t need conservation” but I also cannot give this activity carte blanche just because I also hold
it as the morally right thing to do. Walking this fine line with humility was hard and I know that
there are many passages in the pages that preceded this section where it appears that I fell on either
side. Like Casper said, “striving to be methodologically accountable to informants is hard enough
work; layering political accountability on top of that only deepens the contradictions” (1997, p.
257). Thus, my goal for this work was not to brush away the contradictions or implications, but
rather to let them abound while still elaborating a clear argument, thus providing good fodder for
thought.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Altrudi, Maria Soledad (author)

Core Title Rewilding Patagonia

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Degree Conferral Date 2022-08

Publication Date 07/06/2024

Defense Date 04/22/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag CARE,discursive formation,OAI-PMH Harvest,rewilding,tracking technologies,wilderness

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Dunbar-Hester, Christina (committee chair), Jenkins, Henry (committee member), Kelty, Christopher M. (committee member), Peterson, Jennifer A. (committee member)

Creator Email altrudi@usc.edu,soledad.altrudi@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC111369230

Unique identifier UC111369230

Legacy Identifier etd-AltrudiMar-10812

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Altrudi, Maria Soledad

Type texts

Source 20220708-usctheses-batch-951 (batch), University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the author, as the original true and official version of the work, but does not grant the reader permission to use the work if the desired use is covered by copyright. It is the author, as rights holder, who must provide use permission if such use is covered by copyright. The original signature page accompanying the original submission of the work to the USC Libraries is retained by the USC Libraries and a copy of it may be obtained by authorized requesters contacting the repository e-mail address given.

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu