Paper short abstract:

Thinking through the lens of connectivity, I analyze the models and methods of Tompkins Conservation through the ‘infrastructures of conservation’ – la Ruta de los Parques de la Patagonia and the wildlife corridors of organization’s rewilding initiatives – envisioned to materialize these projects.

Paper long abstract:

Thinking through the lens of connectivity, I examine the models and methods of Tompkins Conservation as their project reorganizes the Chilean Patagonia. I propose to analyze the ‘infrastructures of conservation’ through the Ruta de los Parques de la Patagonia and the wildlife corridors of organization’s rewilding initiatives. Marketed by Tompkins Conservation, the Ruta is an elaboration and extension of the carretera austral, or the Southern Highway, constructed under the infamous Chilean dictator Pinochet in the 1980s. The highway laces together remote national parks and the ‘gateway communities’ positioned to capture tourist revenue, an infrastructural site to witness the articulated visions of state materialization and capital integration embedded within this model of conservation. The novel conservation method of rewilding relies on wildlife corridors to connect species, so engineering new interconnected ecosystems that purport a return to an earlier ecological moment. I suggest that the connectivity imagined through these new infrastructures of conservation provide a site to trace the competing visions for the future of the region held by conservationists, scientists, residents, tourists, state actors, and capital developmentalists.