Late one night, I slipped naked into a lake full of stars down along the serrated edges of southern Chile, where on satellite images of the earth at night, the tail of South America blends into the black sea. Rivers and lakes do not emit light, nor do ice caps or chains of mountains. The sky rippled ahead of me as I swam through the cold water of Patagonia. I pushed my arms into this darkness, felt it across every inch of my skin, took it into my mouth and drank.

To understand a place, you need to drink from its many waters. For weeks in Patagonia, I have been drinking from holes in the ice, dipping my cupped hands into creeks, dousing my water bottle in rivers. Exploring the Río Baker from glacier to sea, I have hoped to grasp one of these last dark places on earth. My quest brought me to the proposed Baker 2 dam site, currently a waterfall where cloudy gray tongues of the river heave over an edge with steel-bending force, sheets of mist ripping into the air. This waterfall is where one of five local dams is being planned (two on the Baker and three on the Río Pascua). Concrete would stand 340 feet over my head, switchbacks blasted into the canyon, cranes swinging with cycloptic heads above ropes and cables, machines of industry and progress piercing the air with back-up warnings as men in hardhats roll out blue scrolls, hold up radios, sit eating lunch over a siphoned, dry riverbed that once carried the largest river in Chile.

I don’t know why I want this river to run. I could not sit at a table with a microphone and explain it. I don’t know why the heart breaks when we have drawn and quartered yet another landscape, named it as ours, used it to fuel our every global ambition from paper clips to plastic cups. But god do I want this river to move, another dark thread binding the surface of this planet, another path uninterrupted.

It is not just the dam that will change this place. Dams will require an infrastructure of roads, highways, and new supply ports. Many who live in this sparsely populated region fear what this could do to their lives as small towns become busy construction centers, and as future industries pour in through newly established routes.

After visiting the waterfall, I thrash upward through a thousand feet of thick vegetation and granite outcrops.Finally, I stand in the wind in a country of waterfalls, streams plunging all around me. I see the lay of the land from up here, ragged summits rising from a gleaming white ice cap. Clouds snag on the highest blades of rock, or, rather, those high rocks make the clouds, their warm, hard bodies touching cold westerly winds, drawing moisture that has been circling the globe looking for a place to land. This is the earth rising up on its toes, reaching into the sky and raking thought it as it passes, bringing down rain and snow; ice for the glaciers, water for the rivers. This is not done for anyone. It simply happens. This is how rich the world is, miracle upon miracle for no one.

Standing on this high point, I see it is not about dams or transmission lines, or even about that river way down there. It is about what we want to do with our time here, how we want to leave this place. The day is coming when the rarest resource will not be oil or even water, but a place that does not smell of us. Maybe we won’t even notice the passing of an era as we crawl deeper into our shells of light, but we notice it now. We can say for sure that it was real, that there was once a place where you could feel in your bones a greater world, where you did not possess their air or water, and a river did not stop for you.

I come here from a highly developed country with a long-standing infrastructure of interstates and power grids, every major river dammed. Asking Chile not to do the same smacks of environmental imperialism, but I do not wish for this country to be undeveloped, only to develop differently. Maybe building dams is the best that can be done down here, serving civilization at large by pumping hydroelectricity to mines and cities in the north, assembling independent energy for South America (although recent studies say that the dams will lead to an expensive over-supply that could be handled much more efficiently by using alternative sources). On the other hand, consider what would be lost.

When you look at the image of earth at night, do you find hope where the darkness of the Himalayas shoulders into the blaze of India, where Siberia, Sahara, and the interior deserts of Australia hold our advances at bay? Let your eye follow the southern curve of South America. Nothing is there, the gap not yet closed. Gauchos cut their lassos out of cowhide. Rivers race from beneath glaciers. Pumas wait in the shadows. At night, you can still pour yourself into a lake, sending a ripple through the stars.

Click here and join forces with our partner – the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) – to  keep Patagonia free from dams. Then take a minute and sign the Rios Libres petition, too.

Read  the following letter from  NRDC’s Executive Director for more information about why we must act now.

******
Dear Concerned Citizen -

This may be our last chance to save Patagonia’s wildest rivers from a massive hydroelectric scheme.

Government officials in Chile are now conducting what will likely be the last phase of environmental review for the HidroAysén hydroelectric dams, before deciding once and for all whether to give this destructive plan the go-ahead.

Tell Chilean officials to reject this scheme to construct five dams on two of Patagonia’s most pristine rivers: the Rio Baker and Rio Pascua.

If approved, HidroAysén would flood more than 12,000 acres of untouched wilderness, which is home to the only existing healthy population of the already-endangered Andean deer, the huemul, and two dozen other threatened species.

The project would also clear-cut a 100-yard-wide swath through national parks and protected areas for the transmission line needed to carry the energy 1,200 miles north.

Even though the HidroAysén project has been in the works for years, its proponents have yet to assess its real environmental impacts on this renowned region.

A technical study done by NRDC and our Chilean partners shows that the dam project is not even necessary. There is more than enough energy from projects already approved to meet Chile’s future energy demands.

Please urge Chile’s government to say NO to the HidroAysén dam proposal and to protect this irreplaceable expanse of breathtaking rainforests, glaciers, fjords and rivers.

Thank you for helping to protect Patagonia, truly one of the last wild places on the planet.

Sincerely,

Peter Lehner
Executive Director
Natural Resources Defense Council

Catch a film full of amazing imagery, adventure and an important message at a venue near you.

Check back often to see where else you can see this inspiring environmental documentary.

October 7, 2010 - Flagstaff Mountain Film Festival, Flagstaff, AZ

November 13, 2010 – 11th Annual River Runners Festival/Grand Canyon Youth Benefit  - 6:30 pm, Flagstaff, AZ

November 20, 2010 – Boulder Adventure Film Festival w/spoken word  performance by Craig Childs, Boulder, CO

November 26, 2010 – Paonia Paradise Theatre w/spoken word  performance by Craig Childs, Paonia, CO

January 14-16, 2011 – Wild and Scenic Environmental Film Festival, Nevada City, CA

February 20 -27, 2011 – http://www.sedonafilmfestival.com/, Sedona, AZ

February 25, 2011 – Ventura at the Poinsettia Pavilion, part of the Wild and Scenic Film Festival.  With special guests Yvon and Malinda Chouinard.

March 17 – 19, 2011 – http://www.adventurefilm.org/film_festival/chile/index.aspx,

South American Debut in Santiago, Chile.

March 18, 2011 – http://www.azriparian.org/2011/2011Spring.htm benefit for ARIZONA RIPARIAN COUNCIL ANNUAL MEETING, Yuma, AZ

March 26, 2011 -http://www.wccongress.org/ Wild and Scenic Film Festival,

To help Western Colorado Congress raise $ and awareness.

April 27 -28, 2011 – The Ridgewood Guild Film Festival.

May 6^th -18^th 2011- http://www.reelearth.org.nz/ Environmental Film Festival in New Zealand.

Patagonia Without Dams: The majority of Chileans passionately oppose the dams and transmission line.

Express your opposition to HidroAysen’s proposal to dam the Baker and Pascua – two pristine rivers deep in the heart of Patagonia, Chile by signing our petition HERE.

Help us get at least 1,000 signatures to let Presidente Pinera know that the international community wants Patagonia to remain pristine and without dams.

Sign our petition at: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/Keep-Patagonia-Wild/.

The rivers, wildlands and people of Patagonia need your voice!

6170 miles. This is the distance between Flagstaff, Arizona and Puerto Bertrand, Chile – the town closest to the source of the Rio Baker. This creates a formidable gap (the equivalent of driving from Boston to San Diego and back) between where many of us live and the rivers we are fighting to protect. Why then, are 5 folks from Flagstaff and 2 from Colorado so damned concerned about a river and a watershed that are so far from home?

The simple answer is this: we believe rivers should flow freely – from source to sea – as nature intended. But, there’s more. We are also motivated by the missteps made in our very own backyard.  We live in the shadow of Glen Canyon dam -  aka “America’s most regretted environmental mistake”[1] and we constantly grapple with ‘what could have been’ if this place had not been lost. This dam stands as a beacon, reminding us of a past heartbreak and calling us to action in order to prevent others.

The lessons we have learned from the tragedy at Glen Canyon have made many of us in the Southwest unwilling and unable to stand by and allow the same mistakes to be made again, even in remote regions that are thousands of miles away. Despite the geographic distance between where we lay our heads and Patagonia, our connection to these rivers is strong and the need to stand up for them remains close to our hearts.

Recently, a few members of the team re-visited Glen Canyon Dam bringing with them newfound knowledge and experience as a result of our trip in Chile.

We were lucky enough to catch a glimpse of this graceful creature bounding it’s way across the rocky moraine leading up to the Neff Glacier. The ecosystems of the Baker and Pascua rivers support a high degree of biodiversity, including documented populations of the endangered huemul deer.

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