Fuente: The Guardian<\/p>\n
During an elegant dinner in the wilds of Patagonia, Kris Tompkins<\/a> suddenly remembered the fresh guanaco carcass down the road. She rose from the table and drove us to the nearby grasslands of Patagonia national park<\/a>, gushing about the possibility of staying up all night with a torch in hope of spying a mountain lion come to feast on the dead llama-like creature.<\/p>\n Tompkins searched the golden hillsides for the 100kg carcass she had spotted hours earlier. Had lions dragged it into the underbrush? Were the Andean condors circling above preparing to finish off the remains?<\/p>\n As she drove, Tompkins narrated her quarter century-long effort to reintroduce threatened and locally extinct species to the wilds of South America \u2013 ranging from giant anteaters and jaguars in northern Argentina to Darwin\u2019s rhea, a species of ostrich native to southern Patagonia. When Conservaci\u00f3n Patag\u00f3nica<\/a> \u2013 the NGO she helped found \u2013 bought the land that became<\/a> this park, the guanaco population was struggling to compete for food and space with an estimated 25,000 sheep. But since the sheep were sold and the fences removed, native guanaco herds have flourished from an unsustainable population of several hundred to an estimated 3,000.<\/p>\n After purchasing a 222,000-acre property in 2004, Tompkins and her husband Doug, who died<\/a> in a kayak accident in 2015, dedicated the following years to their conservation effort. Using hundreds of volunteers, Conservaci\u00f3n Patag\u00f3nica has converted these overgrazed sheep ranchlands into a world-renowned example of ecological restoration by reintroducing and breeding native species as part of a comprehensive rewilding programme.<\/p>\n First coined in the 1990s by environmental activist Dave Foreman, rewilding<\/a>\u2013 large-scale wilderness recovery that allows natural processes and native wildlife to flourish \u2013 has migrated from fringe fantasy to the mainstream of conservation biology. Scientists increasingly believe the complex web of life thrives in the absence of human intervention and is often heavily influenced by mountain lions, wolves and other \u201capex predators\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cI am a big non-human advocate. I get along better with the non-human world probably than the human world,\u201d said Tompkins. \u201cI would like to change the way national parks look at rewilding everywhere in the world where there are extirpated species, [and to] make it one of the goals of national parks everywhere. As they say, landscape without wildlife is just scenery.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cCompared to South America, with a lot of wildlands left, in Europe it is much more about restoring natural processes in large landscapes to let wilder nature develop,\u201d said Frans Schepers, managing director of Rewilding Europe. \u201cIn Europe, the rewilding movement has large areas in which there has been a successful comeback of wolves to Germany, elk to Denmark, Iberian lynx to Spain and bison to central and eastern Europe.\u201d<\/p>\n