Patagonia

Through relationships built on the ground, we will find the communities and conservationists quietly doing extraordinary work.

We will film, photograph, and report directly from the field, from places most conservation media never reaches.

Organisations found in the field will each receive $5,000 USD in seed funding.

Patagonia spans the southern end of South America, roughly one million square kilometres, split between Argentina in the east and Chile in the west, from the Río Colorado and Bío Bío line down to Tierra del Fuego and Cape Horn.

The Andes run the length of it, creating a stark east–west divide: Chilean Patagonia is wet, fjord-cut, forested, and glaciated, while Argentine Patagonia is dry steppe and grassland lying in the mountains' rain shadow.

The Southern Patagonian Ice Field is the largest ice mass outside Antarctica and Greenland, feeding glaciers such as Perito Moreno. Offshore, the coastal zones of the Valdés Peninsula and the Patagonian Shelf are among the most biologically productive marine areas on Earth. At the southern tip, Tierra del Fuego is shared between both countries and faces the Drake Passage toward Antarctica.

Indigenous peoples occupied Patagonia for thousands of years before European contact. The Tehuelche and Mapuche on the plains and in the north, the Selk'nam (Ona), Yaghan, and Kawésqar in Tierra del Fuego and the channels further south, the latter groups notably adapted to a maritime, near-subarctic existence.

In 1520 Magellan's expedition became the first Europeans to reach the region, and gave it its name (Patagonia is thought to derive from "patagón," a term used in early chronicles for the local inhabitants, though the exact origin is debated).

For most of the colonial period, Patagonia remained outside effective Spanish control due to the region being too remote, too harsh, and too thinly resourced to be worth subduing.

In the late 19th century Argentina's "Conquest of the Desert" (1870s–80s) and Chile's parallel "Pacification of Araucanía" brought military campaigns that killed and displaced large numbers of indigenous people and opened the land to state control and settlement.

A sheep ranching boom followed, especially from the 1880s–1900s, backed heavily by British and other European capital and settlers. This created the vast estancias that still define much of the landscape and economy today, and it also drove serious ecological degradation of the steppe grasslands.

In 1865 a Welsh settlement developed in the Chubut Valley. The colony sought to preserve Welsh language and culture, still visible today in towns like Trelew and Gaiman.

From the 20th century onward Patagonia became a byword for remoteness and adventure (Darwin, Chatwin's In Patagonia), later a site of oil and gas development around Comodoro Rivadavia, and in recent decades the focus of major conservation and rewilding efforts, most visibly Tompkins Conservation's national park donations to both Chile and Argentina.