WISCONSIN—On a Wednesday morning in January, nearly 200 Forest Service employees logged into a virtual presentation that transported them to the heart of the Patagonian region of Chile. At the end of the hour, this remote corner of the world felt much closer to home.

Speaking from their organizations in Chile, presenters built a bridge to the experiences of their Forest Service counterparts. What they found in common was that successful conservation efforts think globally in terms of our shared responsibility for the world’s most precious landscapes—and they act locally by partnering closely with neighboring communities.

The presentation, titled "Rewilding Chile," was part of the Eastern Region’s FS Talks, a speaker series that features short, powerful virtual presentations, often by experts outside the Forest Service, to offer employees a fresh perspective on their work.

Guillermo Sapaj, director of strategy from Rewilding Chile, and Carolyn McCarthy, director of communications from Tompkins Conservation, opened a unique window on the relatively recent effort to create new public lands in Chile.

“While national parks and forests have been destinations for Americans and international tourists for over 100 years, the appreciation for such areas in Chile has been undergoing a notable cultural shift, growing steadily in popularity,” said Derek Ibarguen, forest supervisor on the White Mountain National Forest, who facilitated the presentation.

Tompkins Conservation was founded by Kris Tompkins and her late husband Doug Tompkins in the 1990s to restore and protect lands in Argentina and Chile. Rewilding Chile, an offspring organization of Tompkins Conservation, is dedicated to this work in Chilean Patagonia, a region that stretches to the southernmost tip of South America. As stewards of vast expanses of wilderness, these collaborative efforts are not only reshaping landscapes but also redefining the relationship between communities, biodiversity and the global public.

In the early 1990s, the Chilean Patagonia had 10 national parks comprising 18 million acres. Through the collaborative efforts of Tompkins Conservation over the past 30 years, there are now 17 national parks comprising 28 million acres.

But creating national parks through large-scale land acquisitions—which gives those lands the highest possible level of protection—is just one pillar of Rewilding Chile’s three-pillar strategy.

The second pillar, ecological restoration, looks beyond the parks as boundaries and considers whole ecosystems, making the most of opportunities to protect biodiversity and increase connectivity of key landscapes to avoid habitat fragmentation.

Community outreach, the third pillar, also transcends these boundaries. Working with local communities near the national parks is key to Rewilding Chile’s eco-centric ethic to “empower these communities as the main line of defense of these protected areas,” Sapaj said.

This pillar resonated strongly with the Forest Service audience, inspiring a question about how to balance ecological restoration goals with other interests of the community, like economic development.

Sapaj acknowledged that the social aspects of conservation can be even harder to navigate than the ecological.

“It's a lot about recognizing the different interests that all these collections of actors have in the landscape and trying to formulate strategies aligned with those interests,” he said. “And sometimes, of course, those interests collide.”

The key is to build trust, Sapaj added, and to show how conservation efforts also contribute to people’s livelihoods and strengthen their identities associated with the land.

He also pointed to the concept of bioculture, which approaches biodiversity by recognizing how it connects to the Indigenous way of understanding nature and yields mutual benefits for landscapes and people.

McCarthy noted that engaging all communities today makes conservation efforts more durable tomorrow. “Working with communities is so important for conservation because they’re the main stakeholders and they’re the people who will defend it long into the future after we’re gone,” she said.

For the Forest Service employees who attended, the Patagonian story served as a reminder that the conservation narrative transcends geographical boundaries. The virtual presentation concluded with a call to action for our agency to embrace a collaborative approach to conservation in the face of environmental challenges.