Sixteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

In early 2018, then-President Michelle Bachelet decreed the 200,000 acre Valle Chacabuco as Parque Patagonia National Park. The decree followed several years of re-wilding efforts by its U.S. owners after a century-long run as a wool producing estancia. In this paper, the controversies that surrounded the creation of Parque Patagonia are used to reveal the social, economic, and ethical conflicts that reliably emerge between preserving and enhancing environmental sustainability, on the one hand, and preserving and enhancing socio-cultural sustainability, on the other. These conflicts in turn introduce a discussion of the ambivalent socio-cultural impacts imposed on a place when capitalized transnational ecotourism threatens to overwhelm a particular place. Transnational ecotourism often presents to inhabitants of particular places as a new species of colonialism, in this case coupled with an unwelcome and strident environmentalism that is at odds with their own generations-deep knowledge of their place. In this analysis, I argue that proposed ecotourism development should and can instead be an opportunity for the inhabitants of a place to enter into public deliberation with those promoting such development. Necessary facets of public deliberation are introduced using a dialogical account of deliberation as conceptual framework. The controversies surrounding Parque Patagonia are used to illustrate how public deliberation proceeded and deformations to it developed.