Paper short abstract:

This paper differentiates landscape form and ecological function to analyze ideas of wilderness and restoration in Torres del Paine National Park. We suggest that deepening state-market alliances in Patagonia intensify differences between conservation for ecotourism and ecological processes.

Paper long abstract:

This paper elaborates the distinction between landscape form and ecological function to analyze ideas of wilderness and restoration in and around Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park. At the start of the UN Decade on Ecological Restoration (2021-2030), the urgency of halting ecosystem degradation is clear. Restoration ecology projects in Torres del Paine, led by state (CONAF) and NGO actors, are oriented toward recovering from tourist-caused wildfires and impacts of ranching estancias that shaped the park’s trails and landscape. But the aim to reproduce particular landscape forms (e.g. lenga forests), which have become central to Patagonian ecotourism, potentially differs from conserving and restoring ecological function on that same landscape, as climatic change means a different spatial distribution of the region’s glacial, forest, and steppe ecosystems. Drawing on ecological habitat distribution models of the region’s three native Nothofagus species (coihue, lenga, and ñirre), fieldwork visits in 2019 and 2020, and satellite imagery from the past fifty years, we suggest that deepening state-market alliances in Patagonia reproduce the emphasis on conserving and even restoring particular landscape forms, intensifying the differences between conservation for ecotourism and ecological processes.