Cuando organizamos reuniones en América Latina, a veces contratamos intérpretes simultáneos para que aquellos de nosotros que poseemos un limitado conocimiento del idioma español podamos seguir la conversación. Estos intérpretes son personas realmente dotadas, capaces de procesar palabras, contextos, significados y matices en nanosegundos. Ocasionalmente, ocurren divertidos tropiezos con los términos. Una palabra que se utiliza mucho en nuestras reuniones es “suelo”, que aparece con frecuencia cuando hablamos sobre “políticas de suelo” (en inglés, land policies). Pero “suelo” también se traduce como soil (es decir, “tierra” o “suciedad”). Así, gracias a algunos intérpretes, en ocasiones hemos participado en debates de alto nivel en los que se habla de urban soil policies (“políticas de suciedad urbana”). Esto me hizo reflexionar si los urbanistas podrían aprender algo de la agronomía.

Al igual que muchas de nuestras contrapartes, el Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo ha establecido metas ambiciosas. Por ejemplo, uno de nuestros objetivos es poder utilizar políticas de suelo innovadoras para mitigar el cambio climático mundial o adaptarnos al mismo. Intentamos promover ciudades resilientes en cuanto a lo financiero. Planificamos ayudar a todos los niveles del gobierno a recaudar los ingresos necesarios para poder invertir, cada año, billones de dólares en infraestructura. Nuestras metas están fundamentadas en la Nueva Agenda Urbana (NAU), un acuerdo firmado por los estados miembros de las Naciones Unidas en Habitat III, la última Conferencia sobre Vivienda y Desarrollo Urbano Sostenible de la ONU. Nuestras metas también se encuentran alineadas a los Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible (ODS) que, en 2015, reemplazaron a los Objetivos de Desarrollo del Milenio con el fin de que, a través de los esfuerzos que se hacen en todo el mundo, se logre un desarrollo sostenible para equilibrar los objetivos medioambientales, económicos y sociales para el año 2030.

Existen aproximadamente unas 650.000 jurisdicciones en nuestro planeta, entre las que se cuentan unas 30 megaciudades con poblaciones de más de 10 millones de habitantes, 4.321 ciudades con poblaciones de más de 100.000 habitantes, y más de medio millón de localidades con poblaciones menores a 10.000 habitantes. La implementación de la NAU y la consecución de los ODS requerirán que la mayoría de estos lugares sean alcanzados. ¿Cómo será posible cambiar el rumbo del desarrollo en tantos lugares?

Las organizaciones que intentan obtener mejores resultados en el ámbito social, económico o medioambiental a nivel mundial por lo general trabajan con teorías de cambio, es decir, modelos lógicos en los que se define un proceso a través del cual se alinean tácticas y actividades específicas con el fin de obtener el resultado deseado. Una teoría de cambio simplificada podría con-sistir en: 1) encontrar una innovación social o de políticas que haya tenido éxito; 2) estudiarla para comprender la razón por la que tiene éxito; 3) exportar la innovación a nuevos lugares; 4) medir el éxito obtenido; y 5) repetir los pasos 3 y 4 hasta que ya no sea necesario.

La mayoría de las teorías de cambio incluye maneras de extraer las intervenciones exitosas mediante la replicación y otros métodos. Sin embargo, existen problemas fundamentales con este modelo de “franquicias de cambio”. En primer lugar, no somos muy buenos en aprender del éxito o, incluso, de dar cuenta del mismo. Podemos observar si un proyecto o programa es exitoso pero, por lo general, sólo podemos dar cuenta de por qué funciona de manera hipotética y sin probarlo. Con frecuencia, nuestras hipótesis son incorrectas, por lo que los intentos para replicar las intervenciones se marchitan y mueren. En otros casos, resulta imposible replicar los elementos clave de un programa. Así, por ejemplo, los éxitos tan celebrados de la Zona para Niños de Harlem no pudieron repetirse en ningún otro lugar. Todavía esperamos ver el nivel o impacto que ha tenido el Fideicomiso de Vivienda de Champlain al ser replicado en otras ciudades que enfrentan una insalvable escasez de viviendas sociales. Además, aunque existe un creciente interés por parte de varias ciudades en todo el mundo, todavía queda por ver si alguna ha logrado importar con éxito la práctica que se desarrolla en São Paulo de institucionalizar la recuperación de plusvalías del suelo en su bolsa de comercio.

Tal vez una de las razones por las que no logramos transplantar estos éxitos sea que somos incapaces de clonar, con sus características únicas, a los líderes que los llevaron a cabo. Quizás no podemos movilizar los tipos de recursos que existen en Nueva York, Burlington o São Paulo. O, simplemente, replicar el éxito resulta más difícil de lo que pensamos.

He dedicado las últimas tres décadas a intentar abordar problemas mundiales tales como la pobreza, la desigualdad y el cambio climático mediante intervenciones que pudieran crecer lo suficiente como para estar a la altura de la escala de estos problemas. Creía en la promesa de la innovación, ya fuera social, científica o relacionada con las políticas. Al igual que muchos de mis colegas y contemporáneos, creía que mi trabajo era encontrar una idea o práctica mágica que pudiera diseminarse en forma viral, replicándola o por combustión espontánea, sea como fuera. Me consideraba un explorador en búsqueda de una patata robusta que pudiera traer desde los recónditos extremos de los Andes para alimentar a las pululantes masas de Europa.

Sin embargo, hace poco he llegado a comprender la forma errónea en la que concebía mi trabajo. Resulta bastante fácil rastrear las innovaciones que se van dando en todo el mundo, y sólo un poco más difícil encontrar las causas hipotéticas del éxito de dichas innovaciones. Sin embargo, es sumamente difícil transplantar una política, herramienta o práctica novedosa, y puede resultar costoso reubicar nuevas medidas creativas y verlas marchitarse en suelo extranjero.

En retrospectiva, no sorprende que seamos incapaces de extraer innovaciones sociales o de políticas mediante la replicación. Cada abordaje nuevo despliega un complejo ecosistema social, político y legal. Para reducir dicha complejidad, adivinamos cuáles son los elementos que sobresalen en cada contexto complicado para llegar a la causa de su éxito. Resulta difícil, si no imposible, realizar pruebas controladas para confirmar nuestras corazonadas. Por lo tanto, en lugar de ello, utilizamos el método de prueba y error: extraemos los proyectos, programas o políticas exitosas y las transplantamos en otro lugar; luego, esperamos que echen raíces, lo cual ocurre en raras ocasiones. Cuando fallan las replicaciones, es fácil atribuir dichas fallas a alguna deficiencia en el lugar de destino. Sin embargo, si prestáramos más atención a preparar el terreno para recibir las nuevas herramientas, prácticas o políticas, podríamos tener más suerte a la hora de replicar el éxito.

Y aquí es donde podemos aprender algo del manual del agrónomo. El suelo es también un ecosistema complejo. Está compuesto de minerales, materia orgánica y trazas de elementos que les ofrecen sustento a las plantas. No obstante, el proceso mediante el cual las diferentes plantas extraen los nutrientes del suelo es extremadamente complicado.

El proceso comienza con las raíces. En un entorno natural, los tallos, las hojas y las flores de las plantas, así como sus raíces, evolucionan a fin de adaptarse a la complejidad del suelo y a la variación del clima. Al inventar la agricultura, interrumpimos este proceso de evolución con el fin de cultivar especies no nativas en nuevos entornos. Utilizando técnicas de prueba y error, y mediante la investigación científica, los agrónomos aprendieron mucho sobre cómo cultivar plantas nativas de un lugar en nuevos terrenos. Así, la patata, importada del Nuevo Mundo, se convirtió en un alimento básico en el Viejo Mundo durante el siglo XVIII. Sin embargo, al no tener en cuenta la complejidad del suelo y el entorno en su totalidad, se generó una serie de terribles consecuencias involuntarias, tal como la diseminación de plagas que dieron origen a una hambruna masiva en Irlanda y Finlandia.

Extraer un vegetal y plantarlo en otro lugar es una forma tosca de replicar el éxito. Los que se dedican a ciertos cultivos poseen maneras más sofisticadas de superar los problemas conjuntos que la complejidad del suelo y el clima traen aparejados. Los agricultores lo hacen abordando la planta como dos sistemas: el sistema de las raíces (que obtiene los nutrientes del suelo) y el sistema de las frutas o vástagos (que genera el producto deseado). Los viticultores toman variedades locales de una planta que ha tenido éxito y combinan sus raíces con la fruta de otra variedad diferente de la planta que se desea obtener. Los profesionales expertos los ayudan a combinar estos dos sistemas. Esta tarea fue celebrada por John Steinbeck en su obra Las uvas de la ira:

Los hombres que injertan los árboles jóvenes, las pequeñas vides, son los más inteligentes, porque su trabajo es el del cirujano, tierno y delicado; y estos hombres deben tener manos y corazón de cirujano para hender la corteza, colocar el injerto, cerrar las heridas y resguardarlas del aire. Estos son grandes hombres.

Por ejemplo, una bodega de Sonoma, California, que desee producir vinos utilizando una variedad de la uva Sangiovese puede importar las frutas de la región de la Toscana italiana e injertarlas en las raíces de una vid de la variedad Zinfandel que crece muy bien en el suelo local. No es necesario que los viticultores californianos sean científicos expertos en suelo para poder replicar una exitosa uva de la Toscana; sin embargo, sí deben poder identificar cuáles son las vides que se han adaptado con éxito a las complejidades del suelo local, y ser capaces de utilizar los sistemas de raíces para nutrir y promover el crecimiento de la variedad elegida. Además, necesitan la ayuda de profesionales expertos para combinar ambas partes de la planta mediante un injerto.

A medida que pensamos en forma más expansiva acerca de la práctica de introducir nuevas políticas, herramientas y abordajes en los miles de lugares que necesitan ayuda para encontrar soluciones en cuanto al suelo, estamos aprendiendo muchísimo. Aprendemos formas de preparar el suelo para adoptar nuevas prácticas: por ejemplo, entendiendo las “reglas del juego” que definen el espacio local de políticas y proponiendo la revisión de las normas para permitir el desarrollo de las nuevas políticas. Otra opción sería estudiar el ecosistema institucional local para identificar quiénes son las partes interesadas más importantes e invitarlas a que, juntos, podamos iniciar el desarrollo de nuevas prácticas. Estamos aprendiendo que los particulares u organizaciones locales exitosas son la “raíz” que sustentará las innovaciones importadas y permitirá que se desarrollen saludablemente. Y también estamos aprendiendo que injertar una innovación importada en esta raíz local es una tarea delicada.

Muchas organizaciones se enfocan en identificar y premiar la innovación urbana, es decir, las intervenciones mágicas que nos ayudan a superar los problemas derivados de nuestros insistentes esfuerzos para urbanizar el planeta. En el Instituto Lincoln prestamos más atención al proceso de replicar el éxito. Continuaremos documentando y compartiendo lo que aprendamos en cuanto al transplante de innovaciones. Ya sea que las ciudades utilicen la recuperación de plusvalías del suelo para financiar la infraestructura, ofrezcan viviendas sociales permanentes a través de fideicomisos de suelo comunitarios, o mejoren las escuelas públicas a través de sistemas de financiamiento público más resilientes respaldados por el impuesto a la propiedad, cada una de estas intervenciones deberá echar raíces en el suelo local para poder tener éxito. Esperamos poder estar allí para monitorear e informar los éxitos obtenidos.

On September 27 to 29, 2016, the International Land Conservation Network (ILCN), a project of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, hosted the “Workshop on Emerging Innovations in Conservation Finance” at Las Majadas de Pirque, near Santiago, Chile. The workshop drew 63 participants from eight counties, who came together to discuss tools and concepts that are strengthening conservation finance in the Western Hemisphere and beyond.

The policies, practices, and case studies discussed at the workshop represented a broad spectrum of innovative financing mechanisms to address challenges posed by development and climate change. Topics included value capture in Latin America; the restructuring of insurance markets to make cities more resilient and financially sustainable in the face of intensified storm events; financial incentives for conservation as written into Chilean and U.S. law; compensatory mitigation; conservation finance-oriented networks; the role of civil society and conservation finance in carrying out the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement; the potential role that capital markets might play in addressing climate change; and, particularly, Chile’s emerging global leadership in land conservation.

The workshop organizers greatly appreciate the productive contributions of all participants and the support of the many partners who made the workshop possible: the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University; Fundación Robles de Cantillana; the Harvard Forest, Harvard University; Las Majadas de Pirque; Qué Pasawww.landconservationnetwork.org.

Below follows renowned author Tony Hiss’s experience at the workshop and observations of Chile’s stunning natural resources and inspiring conservation efforts. 

—Emily Myron, Project Manager, ILCN

For North American conservationists, even a whirlwind visit to Chile can feel like encouragement from the future—an encounter with a strong beam of light shining northward. That’s thanks to the nature of the place, a showcase of spectacular landscapes neatly arranged in a tall, tight stack along the country’s narrow ribbon of land between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes Mountains. Equally it has to do with the people in that country and what groups and individuals have been doing during five-and-a-half centuries to protect these indispensable landscapes.

At a meeting I got to attend last fall at Las Majadas de Pirque, a kind of marzipan palace-turned-conference center outside Santiago, it became clear that a North and South American partnership, which got its start during several decades of quiet collaborations among conservationists in the United States and Chile, is already creating a sort of hemispheric force field of conservation concern. As a result, the partnership’s co-anchor, Chile, a country whose name according to one derivation means “ends of the earth,” feels like a close colleague though it remains more than 10 hours away from New York City on a plane.

Building on this affinity, the meeting—called the “Workshop on Emerging Innovations in Conservation Finance” and hosted by the Lincoln Institute’s International Land Conservation Network (ILCN)—gathered dozens of conservationists, officials, and investors from both countries, with further representation from around the Western Hemisphere, to think through an increasingly urgent challenge: Given how fast the biosphere is warming and changing, governments alone can’t afford the trillions of dollars needed to secure and then care for the places that have to be held onto for all time to save biodiversity. 

Despite the severity of the problem, it’s a huge jump forward when two countries that strongly support conservation—and each with so much worthy of conserving—team up to find new solutions. “What good timing,” Hari Balasubramanian, a Canadian consultant who thinks about the business value of conservation, said of the three-day conference. “Conservationists have always been in the perpetuity business. And now we need to work even harder at financing and managing protected lands so they will last.” 

Laura Johnson, director of the ILCN, concurred: “The idea that we can develop new tools for financing big visions for conservation is still relatively recent. Can we find the resources needed to meet the daunting challenge of creating lasting land and water conservation? The conference was intended to help answer that question.”

Chile’s Special Nature

Of course, not every visitor gets to stay in such an elegant setting as Las Majadas, but it’s easy for North Americans to feel at home in Chile—and not just because of the abundance of bookstores in Santiago or the gleaming high-rises in the city’s financial center, nicknamed “Sanhattan.” The countryside’s succession of landscapes and climates eerily echo those along our own Pacific coast west of the Sierras—though rather than being mirror images of each other, the relationship between the two countries is more like the upside-down reflection you’d see if you were standing on the edge of a lake: with deserts in the north, Patagonian glaciers and fjords far in the south, and in between a sunny Mediterranean area, like that of central and southern California, and a foggy temperate rainforest region, like in Oregon or Washington. Our fall is their spring. And Chile is as long as the distance from New York to San Francisco, but its western and eastern boundaries—the Pacific and the ridge line of the Andes—are always closer than the distance between Manhattan and Albany, New York.

Yet Chile’s “sister landscapes” can still be humbling to North Americans: Chile doesn’t just have deserts, it has the world’s driest desert—the Atacama, known as Mars on Earth, with clear night skies that will make it the first “starlight reserve” in the Western Hemisphere. Within a year, this professional astronomer’s paradise will be home to 70 percent of the world’s great telescopes: an ELT (Extremely Large Telescope) the size of a football stadium now under construction will supplement an existing VLT (Very Large Telescope), amid talk of an OWL (an Overwhelmingly Large Telescope) that could someday, according to the European Southern Observatory, “revolutionize our perception of the universe as much as Galileo’s telescope did.”

In the more southerly Valdivian temperate rainforest region, foggy and chilly and with dense understories of ferns and bamboos (our “cold jungle,” as Pablo Neruda, the Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet, called it, “fragrant, silent, tangled”), many of the trees are among the world’s most ancient. “Today,” said one awed visitor (Ken Wilcox, author of Chile’s Native Forests: A Conservation Legacy), “the opportunity to walk for days among living things as old as the Sphinx is possible only in Chile.” 

The monarch of these cathedral-like forests of evergreens—siempreverdes, in Spanish—is the alerce, a shaggier, slightly shorter but much longer-lived cousin of the North American giant sequoia. Even more striking is the 260-foot-tall monkey puzzle tree, which like the alerce towers over the surrounding forest canopy, where its dead-straight, spindly trunk is topped by an intricately snarled crown of thickly overlapping branches entirely covered with sharp, prickly leaves. Think of an umbrella with too many ribs blown inside out by a thunderstorm. “It would puzzle a monkey to climb that,” said Victorian lawyer Charles Austin—though it might be more accurate to call it a dinosaur puzzle tree since there are no monkeys in Chile, and the tree’s thorny leaves, unchanged over eons, evolved to repel the giant herbivore reptiles that roamed Gondwana, the ancient southern supercontinent that began to break up 180 million years ago.

Then there’s Patagonia. The sparsely populated southernmost third of Chile is a place of uncompromising immensities and what’s been called “extreme geography,” where everything is outsized and stunning—peaks, glaciers, islands, fjords, forests. The landscapes look retouched in photographs and leave even the best writers gasping for adequate descriptions. The iconic logo of the Patagonia clothing line—which I had once supposed to be a fanciful, Shangri-La concoction of jagged, imaginary peaks silhouetted against bands of unlikely-looking orange and purple horizontal clouds—is actually a rather oversimplified, understated, subdued sketch. In fact, the mountains, clouds, and light are all quite real. And the graphic doesn’t begin to convey the 5,000-square mile Southern Patagonian Ice Cap right next to the ridgeline (an ice cap is to a glacier as a paragraph is to a word), or what one mountaineer, Gregory Crouch, author of Enduring Patagonia, calls “the wind, the gusting wind, the ceaseless, ceaseless wind.” It’s a landscape still so unknown that for 50 miles to the south the border separating Chile and Argentina has yet to be established. Many visitors to the region sense a return to a time just after the beginning of things.

Threats to the Landscape

This extraordinary country was a fitting backdrop for the energy in our Las Majadas conference room. The passion that these extravagant landscapes have evoked in Chileans is transformational, enduring, and contagious. Conference organizer James N. Levitt, manager of land conservation programs at the Lincoln Institute, summed up the feeling in all of us when he said that Chile’s “destined to become one of the most important green focus points on the planet.”

Of course, it’s a complex story with overlapping currents. For the country’s most powerful industry, mining—a mainstay of the national economy—the landscape has been a husk, something to peel away to reveal something else with greater value: copper. Chile exports a third of the world’s copper and depends heavily on the $11 billion it brings in annually for the government. Since Spanish colonial times, what’s underground has always trumped what’s on the ground. Neruda said, “If you haven’t been in a Chilean forest, you don’t know this planet,” yet until recently a forest would be felled if it impeded the development of a mine. It wasn’t until this decade that a Chilean court ruled that a tree-clad, Mediterranean slope not far from Santiago has more value standing than excavated; protected in 2013, that area is now the San Juan de Piche Nature Sanctuary. During a visit there, we got to crush a pungent, clean-smelling leaf from a peumo tree, a 65-foot evergreen with cracked gray bark, allowing us to participate in an experience unforgettably captured by Neruda: 

I broke a glossy woodland leaf: a sweet aroma of cut edges brushed me like a deep wing that flew from the earth, from afar, from never… I thought you’re my entire land: my flag must have a peumo’s aroma when it unfurls, a smell of frontiers that suddenly enter you with the entire country in their current.

At the same time, environmentalism has been part of a national healing process in a country still emerging from the shadow of what it calls “a different 9/11”—September 11, 1973, the day the Chilean military overthrew the democratically elected socialist government and set up a brutal dictatorship that lasted 17 years. Heraldo Muñoz, the country’s current foreign minister, has written that for many it was “a crushing loss of innocence. We had believed that our country was different from the rest of Latin America and could not fall prey to the horrors of dictatorship.” Conservation issues were one way for the country to start peacefully putting itself back to rights: widespread demonstrations in 1976 led to the alerce being proclaimed a national monument. “The military called us sandías—watermelons—green on the outside, red on the inside,” Raphael Asenjo, a veteran of those days, said at our meeting. He’s now chief justice of the new environmental court in Santiago. “But if we went to court, it was harder for judges to rule against us since we weren’t political.” The military, which championed free market reforms, unintentionally rallied new conservationists by subsidizing owners of ancient, slow-growing forests to chop down hundreds of thousands of acres of these trees—repositories, according to Rick Klein, founder of Ancient Forest International, of the oldest genetic information above water—and replace them with monoculture plantations of imported North American pines. The substitute trees are such speedy growers they’re ready to be mashed into wood pulp for export in as little as seven years. “Wood is Chile’s new copper,” was a boast of the early 1980s. 

The most dramatic conservation successes have come since the restoration of democracy in 1990—and they continue. By happy chance, I was seated next to Foreign Minister Muñoz, now the country’s champion of marine protection, on my flight down to Santiago. (He was one of the lucky ones during the dictatorship; his only scar from a single torture session is a finger that never healed properly.) Chile thinks of itself as a “tri-continental country” with claims on Antarctica and sovereignty over the Desventuradas, or Unfortunate Islands, a two-day boat ride west from the mainland, as well as over Easter Island, another five days farther away. In 2015, Chile created a no-take marine reserve the size of Italy around the Unfortunates. Illegal fishing is now, Muñoz told me, the world’s third most profitable criminal activity (after drugs and illegal arms sales). A much bigger 278,000-square mile Marine Protected Area (MPA) around Easter Island being developed with the local Polynesian community will be one of the largest in the world. Professional divers who’ve started exploring the Desventuradas waters liken the area to a Patagonia of the deep: “The walls of brightly colored fish make it nearly impossible to see the hand in front of your face. It’s only when we come to pristine places that we are reminded how it used to be before humans.”

Global Conservation Leader

The first protectors of this exceptional country were the indigenous Mapuche people from south-central Chile and southwestern Argentina. These canny warriors kept three successive armies at bay for 400 years—forces sent by the Incas and then the Spanish and finally the newly independent Chilean government—bottling up a growing population in the center of the country, south of the northern deserts. Much of Patagonia had no permanent settlements until the 20th century, and today 85 percent of Chileans still live in the Central Valley, where land in between big cities like Santiago is intensively farmed. Longtime vineyards are growing in size and number, joined more recently by an array of avocado orchards spreading up hillsides like sprawling subdivisions (“avo-condos,” we dubbed them as we drove past). 

With 19 percent of its land in a designated public park or preserve (compared to 14 percent in the U.S.), Chile is a global conservation leader. But 85 percent of Chile’s national parks and other protected areas are down south, while only one percent of the crowded center has that kind of security, though it is a special landscape in its own right, as one of the world’s five species-rich and distinctively Mediterranean ecoregions. Considering that 90 percent of all the land outside the park system is privately owned, this might sound like a discouraging prospect for conservation but in fact points the way to the future, thanks to a brilliant and unprecedented change to the laws of the country.

El Derecho Real

Just months before our conference, after eight years of persuasion and debate, the Chilean Congress unanimously passed the derecho real de conservación, or “real right of conservation”—a new kind of property right, that had, as Raphael Asenjo remembers, been considered “a crazy idea.” The law invites Chilean citizens to participate in conservation by setting up PPAs (privately protected areas) that will now have the same durability and legal standing as public parks. It democratizes the perpetuity business by making it a personal, voluntary act—and is also considerably cheaper. “We do not need to buy up the land to save it,” William H. Whyte wrote in The Last Landscape, a reverberating 1968 open space manifesto, pointing to “the ancient device of the easement.” Since medieval times, Whyte said, land ownership has been understood to be a “bundle of rights,” which allows property owners to peel off the right to develop their land and then separately sell or donate that right for less than the full purchase price of a property to a parks agency or a nonprofit group called a land trust. In the decades since Whyte’s clarion call, 24,700,000 acres of the U.S. landscape (an area nearly as big as Virginia) have come under easement. But though the idea has been spreading globally, the remedy wasn’t available in Chile because it’s a civil law country, such as Italy or Switzerland—unlike the U.S., which is a common law country.

Common law in the United States and other English-speaking countries got its start in England after the Norman Conquest, when the new government attempted to coordinate regional customs by giving judges considerable leeway to decide what it was the customs had in common—making judges the main source of law. By contrast, the rest of Europe looked to rules that had been established for all time, it was thought, by the Byzantine emperor Justinian in a 6th-century compilation of Roman law. Under civil law, a decision not to build on a piece of land is considered a restriction on the main purpose of holding property, which is to make money for its owner. But recently, Jaime Ubilla, a Santiago attorney with global experience (he has a Tokyo MA, a University of Edinburgh Ph.D., and also speaks Mandarin), proposed that a derecho real de conservación is consistent with this age-old understanding, because modern conservation biology has shown that undeveloped land has ever-increasing value when kept in its natural state. So rather than constraining landowners, not building frees up a way for them to amass natural capital. The result is a law and a rationale that other civil law countries can now adopt.

In Chile, the hope is that one of the first areas to benefit from a derecho real will be the San Juan de Piche Nature Sanctuary, whose owners went into debt to challenge the mining interests in court. And the timing of that arrangement might just coincide with another unprecedented development in Chilean private land conservation—the impending donation by a single landowner of a gargantuan, all-in-one-go contribution to the country’s national park system. 

Tompkins Conservation

It began as a lark: young North Americans in a beat-up van—“conquistadors of the useless,” as they later called themselves—driving through South America in 1968 for another six months of “peak experience” skiing, surfing, and climbing before “coming to grips with entering the industrial work force.” They climbed Fitz Roy, the mountain now on the Patagonia label: one of them was Yvon Chouinard, who later founded the clothing company in 1973; another was Douglas Tompkins, also in the clothing business, who had started and just sold The North Face (financing the trip) and who, when he himself arrived back in California, founded Esprit, which he sold in 1989 to become what his detractors called an “eco-baron.” Tompkins moved to Chile and, in 1993, married Kristine Tompkins, until then Chouinard’s CEO at Patagonia. They bought two million acres of wild land in Chilean and Argentine Patagonia in chunks of tens or hundreds of thousands of acres, making them the largest private landowners in the world. Their aim was to build yet another brand, this one for perpetuity. The strategy: feed their land into Chile’s national park system through a series of deals, cumulatively establishing it as an irresistible force—a “gold standard” of protected places Chile will still be holding in trust for the world 200 years from now.

Doug Tompkins unfortunately died in a freak kayak accident over a year ago, so it’s been left to Kris Tompkins to complete their project, which will be announced within the year, according to a report at our conference from Hernán Mladinic, a sociologist and executive director of one of the future national parks and the Tompkins team member negotiating final details with the Chilean government. Kris Tompkins will donate her last million acres, the biggest-ever single donation of land to a country; in return, the government will add 9.1 million acres of state land, creating five new national parks and expanding three others—all in the same moment. A couple of the new parks have until now been Tompkins showcases: Pumalín, which shelters a quarter of the country’s remaining stands of never-logged alerce, and Patagonia Park, the largest grassland restoration project in the world, along with its keystone species like pumas and Andean condors—a project that also, as Kris Tompkins says, can remind people “what the world used to be like everywhere and might be again.” 

What does conservation look like from a 23rd-century perspective? In an unusually candid talk Kris Tompkins gave at Yale last spring, she explained that she and her husband had always thought at the largest scale. “Leverage for us is everything—every time you have a transaction in front of you, you’re looking at the possibilities of expansion, thinking where is the hustle in there to leverage?” They took the long view in order to plant an even farther-reaching vision. “Considering that you’re spending a few hundred million dollars on protecting land, you want to make sure your investment is as protected as possible. . . . I’m not going to work that hard if something’s only going to last 25 to 50 years.” 

They’ve always thought of themselves as developers, though on a different trajectory. This means working among people and within them, showing them that parks are a competitive business (“more profitable than copper,” as Mladinic says), but at the same time doing something internal that only takes effect gradually. In Kris Tompkins’ words: “When you’re dealing in large landscapes, the number-one thing you have to do, before you leave or kick the bucket, is get it so that the citizenry itself has fallen in love with and therefore become protective of their national park system. That takes maybe a generation, a generation and a half. A park’s a huge money-maker, but much more important, it becomes a point of pride. And then if some knucklehead comes along, which they do every so often, and attempts to fill the edges of, say, Olympic National Park, people will go berserk.”

The Cost of Saving Paradise

For almost every species, the natural world is a kind of fixer-upper rather than a ready-made dream home—a storehouse of raw materials that can be raided and refashioned. So we have birds’ nests and beaver dams, changes to surroundings that make life easier and strengthen the odds of survival. Medical anthropologists call such species-specific infrastructure ipsefacts—meaning “things they make themselves.” It goes beyond the realm of artifacts, our word for the changes humans make to the environment, by showing that what we do is a shared impulse; the urge to feather one’s nest is universal and inevitable. But weaving twigs and feathers into a small, shallow bowl has a minimal effect on the environment, and even beaver dams are disruptive and productive at the same time, creating large wetlands, upstream and down, that benefit many more species than they harm—whereas our reshaping of the world has brought Garden of Eden-like living conditions to many while casting out too many others and even destroying paradise.

One of the thorniest and most critical subjects at the conference came up during conversations about paying for perpetuity. Government and private donors have been traditional mainstays of land conservation, but they’ve pulled back since the worldwide 2008 recession. Getting the business and investment community more involved has to be the next step.They control $16 to $18 trillion in global savings, which, as David Boghossian, managing director of a Massachusetts-based socially responsible investment firm, told us, makes them “the most potent force for change available.” This is 30 times more than what’s in the hands of generous global philanthropists—money that seems like “decimal dust” in comparison.

Boghossian spelled this out in a presentation called “Making Impact Investment Boring.” Impact investing, a term only coined within the last decade, means hoping to do well financially while also doing the world a good turn. It’s a growing trend but remains years away from dullness and dependability—Boghossian’s desired state for impact investing, as an everyday transaction that feels as safe and comfortable as opening a bank account. 

The thorn has to do with the “opportunity cost,” the likelihood that an investor can make more money by creating an adverse impact on the landscape, since in this regard businesses have traditionally been set up on a semi-ipsefactual basis. Under business as usual, any inadvertent damage to the environment won’t affect the bottom line. It’s an externality, considered an acceptable trade-off; the planet takes the risk, not the investor. In this regard humanity has acted like other species, as if the landscapes we tinker with are as inexhaustible as the sun above, as unchangeable as gravity.

But thirty years ago, it began to sink in that the world has only a finite supply of raw materials, and sustainability became a watchword. Ten years ago, as climate change turned into something people noticed firsthand, it has been hitting home that long before oil and coal run out, their widespread use will warm the planet in a way that could compromise everything—“the landscapes, the waterscapes, and the skies that provide our common foundation,” Levitt said.

Until now, conservationists and the business community have always shared a kind of long and unspoken chess game. Businesses use up certain pieces of land before conservationists can counter by putting flanking pieces off limits, in effect taking them out of the game. But now it’s not only the players at risk; it’s the room where the game is being played. The externalities are coming indoors, and the business community will need to bolster conservation efforts just to protect its own interests.

That is what we experienced at the conference—a shift in the nature of reality, a realignment of focus that was more than just a shift in the underpinnings of conservation finance. 

A rose beneath the thorn: if it takes a village to raise a child, maybe it’ll take a hemisphere to shepherd the environment, with business leaders and conservationists working together to save the planet. 

Tony Hiss was a New Yorker staff writer for more than 30 years and is now a visiting scholar at New York University. He is the author of 13 books, including The Experience of Place and most recently In Motion: The Experience of Travel.

Photograph: BABAK TAFRESHI/National Geographic Creative​

When we organize meetings in Latin America, we sometimes hire simultaneous translators to allow those of us with limited proficiency in Spanish to follow the conversation. These translators are a gifted bunch, capable of processing words, context, meaning, and nuance in nanoseconds. From time to time, they get tripped up in amusing ways. One commonly used word in our meetings is suelo. It comes up frequently when we discuss políticas de suelo, which translates as “land policies.” But suelo also translates as “soil,” and, as some translators would have it, we’ve participated in high-level discussions of “urban soil policies.” This left me reflecting on whether urbanists might learn something from agronomy.

Like many of our partners, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy has ambitious goals. For example, we hope to use innovative land policy to mitigate or adapt to global climate change. We seek to promote financially resilient cities. We plan to help governments at all levels find the revenues needed to invest trillions of dollars annually in infrastructure. Our goals are embedded in the New Urban Agenda (NUA), an agreement signed by United Nations member states at Habitat III, UN Habitat’s recent Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development. They also are aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that replaced the Millennial Development Goals in 2015 to guide global efforts to achieve sustainable development that balances environmental, economic, and social objectives by 2030.

There are an estimated 650,000 jurisdictions on our planet. These range from around 30 megacities with populations over 10 million people; to 4,321 cities with populations exceeding 100,000; to more than a half-million places with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants. Implementing the NUA and achieving the SDGs will require reaching most of these places. How is it possible to change the path of development in so many locations?

Organizations trying to improve social, economic, or environmental outcomes at a global level typically work through theories of change—logic models that outline a process through which specific tactics and activities align to produce a desired outcome. A simplified theory of change might be: 1) find a successful social or policy innovation; 2) study it to understand why it succeeds; 3) export the innovation to new places; 4) measure its success; 5) repeat steps 3 and 4 until no longer necessary. 

Most theories of change include ways to scale successful interventions through replication and other means. But there are fundamental problems with this “franchising change” model. First, we are not very good at learning from success or even accounting for it. We can observe whether a project or program is successful, but we usually provide only untested hypothetical accounts for why it works. Often our hypotheses are wrong, and attempts at replication wither and die. In other cases, it is impossible to replicate key elements of a program. Thus, for example, the celebrated successes of the Harlem Children’s Zone have not been repeated elsewhere.  We have yet to see the scale or impact of the Champlain Housing Trust copied in other cities that face insurmountable affordable housing shortages. And although there is increasing interest from cities around the world, we have yet to see any that have successfully imported Sao Paulo’s practice of institutionalizing land value capture in its stock exchange.

Perhaps we fail to transplant these successes because we can’t clone the unique leaders who drove them.  Or maybe we can’t mobilize the kinds of resources that one can find in New York, Burlington, or Sao Paulo. Or perhaps it is simply much harder to replicate success than we think.

I’ve spent the last three decades trying to address global challenges like poverty, inequality, and climate change with interventions that could grow sufficiently to meet the scale of these problems. I believed in the promise of innovation—social, scientific, or policy-related. I, like many of my colleagues and contemporaries, believed that my job was to find a magical idea or practice that could spread virally, by replication, or through spontaneous combustion, whatever it took. I thought of myself as an explorer looking for a sturdy potato to bring back from the far reaches of the Andes to feed the teeming masses of Europe.

I’ve only recently come to understand how badly I misconceived my job. It is fairly easy to scour the globe for innovations and only a tad more difficult to construct a hypothetical account for their success. But it is really hard to transplant a novel policy, tool, or practice, and it can be costly to relocate creative new measures and watch them wither on foreign soil.

Looking back, it is not surprising that we were unable to scale social or policy innovations through replication. Each new approach unfolds in a complex social, political, and legal ecosystem. We reduce this complexity by guessing at the salient elements of each complicated context to account for success. It is difficult, if not impossible, to do controlled tests to confirm our hunches. So instead we use trial and error, uprooting successful projects, programs, or policies and planting them elsewhere, hoping that they will take root. And they rarely do. When replications fail, it is easy to attribute failure to a deficiency in the destination. But if we paid more attention to preparing the ground to receive new tools, practices, or policies, we might have more luck at replicating success.

This is where we can take a page from the agronomist’s playbook. Soil, too, is a complex ecosystem. It is composed of minerals, organic matter, and trace elements that offer plants sustenance. But the process through which different plants extract nutrients from the soil is a very complicated process.

It starts with the roots. In natural settings, the stems, leaves, and flowers of plants and their roots evolve to adjust to the complexity of the soil and the variability of climate. With the invention of agriculture, we interrupted this evolutionary process in order to cultivate non-native species in new environments. Through trial, error, and scientific inquiry, agronomists learned a lot about how to cultivate plants that are native to one place in new terrains. Thus, the potato, imported from the New World, became a staple in the Old World in the 18th century. But failure to account fully for the complexity of soil and environment generated some terrible unintended consequences, such as widespread blights that led to mass starvation in Ireland and Finland. 

Uprooting a vegetable and planting it elsewhere is a crude way to replicate success. Growers of certain crops have more sophisticated ways to overcome the joint challenges of soil and climate complexity. They do this by treating a plant as two systems—the root system that delivers sustenance from the soil and the fruit system, or scion, that produces the desired output. Vintners find successful local varieties of a plant and combine their root stock with the fruit stock of a different desired variety of the plant. Skilled practitioners help them to weave these two systems together. This job was celebrated by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath:

The men who graft the young trees, the little vines, are the cleverest of all, for theirs is a surgeon’s job, as tender and delicate; and these men must have surgeons’ hands and surgeons’ hearts to slit the bark, to place the grafts, to bind the wounds and cover them from the air. These are great men.

For example, a winery in Sonoma, California, that wants to produce wine using a Sangiovese varietal might import the fruit stock from Tuscany and graft it to the root stock of a Zinfandel vine that thrives in the local soil. The California vintners do not need to be soil scientists to replicate a successful Tuscan grape, but they do need to identify the vines that have successfully adapted to the complexities of the local soil and use their root systems to sustain and promote the growth of their chosen varietal. And they need skilled practitioners to graft the two parts of the plant together.

As we think more expansively about the practice of introducing new policies, tools, and approaches to the thousands of places that want help finding answers in land, we are learning a lot. We are learning about ways to prepare the ground to adopt new practices—understanding the “rules of the game” that define the local policy space, for example, and proposing revised rules to enable new policies. Or studying the local institutional ecosystem to identify all of the important stakeholders and inviting them to the table to help initiate new practices. We are learning that successful local people or organizations are the “root stock” that will sustain imported innovations and allow them to thrive. And we are learning that grafting an imported innovation onto this local root stock is a delicate task.

Many organizations focus on identifying and rewarding urban innovation—the magical interventions that help us overcome problems that result from our insistent efforts to urbanize the planet. At the Lincoln Institute, we are paying more attention to the process of replicating success. We will continue to document and share what we learn from transplanting innovation. Whether cities use land value capture to pay for infrastructure, create permanently affordable housing through community land trusts, or improve public schools with more resilient public finance systems buttressed by the property tax, each intervention will need to take root in local soil to succeed. We hope to be there to monitor and report on this success.