By Kim Lisagor

It’s a sad day in Patagonia.

Despite a grassroots opposition effort that had spread across the globe in recent years, the Chilean government finally caved to corporate pressure and approved a $7 billion dollar hydropower project that will destroy one of the world’s most pristine places.

The Aysén region’s last two free-flowing rivers – rivers so pure you can drink the water without consequence – will be dammed to create up to 2.75 gigawatts of electricity, enough to power hundreds of thousands of homes.

The region will lose 220 square miles of land (almost ten Manhattans) and many, many livelihoods, and the resulting energy won’t be available to the people who live at its source. Instead it will be shipped to Santiago via transmission lines that will scar virgin forests for hundreds of miles.

I spent a few weeks here in 2007, doing research for the Patagonia chapter of Disappearing Destinations. Of all the places I visited for the book, this was by far my favorite. It was just emerging as a fly-fishing and ecotourism hotspot, but there was almost no travel infrastructure.

The lone road through the region didn’t exist until 2000, and that “highway” is still frighteningly narrow and mostly unpaved. It connects remote ranches and villages that lie in the shadow of a glacier whose runoff has carved rugged valleys all the way to the Pacific.

I was naive enough to believe that the support of the international environmental community would be enough to save it. I was wrong.

It will take twelve years for the project to be completed. There’s still time to see it if you can.

>> See original article by Kim Lisagor here.

About the Author: Kim Lisagor

Kim Lisagor, TIES Advisory Board member, is a journalist who covers travel and the environment. She is co-author (with Heather Hansen) of the award-winning book, Disappearing Destinations: 37 Places in Peril and What Can Be Done to Help Save Them. Based in San Luis Obispo, California, she teaches journalism at Cal Poly and chairs the International Service Committee for the Rotary Club of San Luis Obispo Daybreak.