January 25, 2002	Friday	Ziqa’ad 10, 1422

LONDON: Kris McDivitt thinks big. She plans to save 1.5 million acres of South American wilderness and create four national parks. “This is our latest purchase,” says the former head of the giant Patagonia clothing company as she looks at photographs of an Argentine swamp she bought last year.

Her new property will provide 280 species of birds with access to an environmentally rich habitat - and allow her, and her husband Doug Tompkins, to escape the torrential rains that soak the huge areas they have also bought in Patagonia. In the past year, McDivitt has snapped up 260,000 acres of land in Argentina as she launches a non-profit foundation, the Patagonia Land Trust.

“We are just getting going in Argentina,” she says flipping through a catalogue of the foundation’s ecosystems. “It is an intact forest. Biodiversity can flourish and remain undisturbed.” She concedes that some of the land will need 200 or 300 years to recover from overgrazing by sheep, but says that she sees her foundation guiding a master management plan “for the next 1,000 years”.

On the other side of the Andes in Chile, Tompkins is equally ambitious. The co-founder of the billion-dollar North Face outdoor gear company has spent eight years buying land to make the 800,000-acre Pumalin Park - a temperate rainforest complete with snow-capped volcanoes and glacial fjords. He plans to give it to the government. This couple, who own more than 2 million acres in Chile and Argentina, are “eco barons”, multi-millionaires buying swathes of wild, barely inhabited land around the world to conserve some of the world’s remotest places.

Celebrities including Ted Turner (10,000 acres), George Soros (one million acres) and Luciano Benetton (two million acres) have also jetted down to South America to do their conservation bit. Sylvester Stallone, Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas are buying land. The same phenomenon is taking place in South Africa, where businessman Adrian Thompson has bought 45,000 acres, stocked them with lions and other mega fauna and, after ripping out all sign of previous human habitation in one 7,500-acre area, has had it declared Africa’s first privately owned official wilderness area.

Meanwhile, Gordon Moore, co-founder of the giant Intel computer empire, last month gave US dollars 261m to the American charity, Conservation International to buy land and to carry out research in 25 of the world’s most scientifically important biodiversity “hot spots” - mainly in Brazil and the tropics. Moore intends this to be just a downpayment on his plan to raise $6 billion for conserving the world’s most biologically rich places.

“There are more and more of these projects,” says McDivitt. ”People are very interested in leaving something more permanent than a wing on a museum. And, really, how many Citation jets can you own?” A second-hand 1998 Cessna Citation sells for about $3 million, and land in Patagonia, the Amazon, South Africa and developing countries is very cheap. In many areas of