Archive - Feb 26, 2009

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It is not every day that a Wall Street bank finds itself in possession of a chunk of land 50 times the size of Manhattan, covered in pristine forest, windswept grassland and snow-capped mountains. But that's the position Goldman Sachs found itself in, in 2002 when it bought a package of distressed debt and assets from a US company called Trillium.

The resulting conservation project in the very south of Chile has been hailed by the bank and its partners, a US-based NGO, as an example of how the public and private sectors can work together to safeguard the world's last remaining wildernesses. Chilean environmentalists are more skeptical but, even so, have largely applauded the project.

The story of what is now known as the Karukinka nature reserve dates back to the 1990s when Trillium bought land on Tierra del Fuego - a cluster of inhospitable islands between Chile and Argentina - clinging to the southernmost tip of South America. The company planned to use the land for logging and wanted to cut down the lenga - a type of beech tree found only in this part of the world.

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