Life Lived Wild: Adventures at the Edge of the Map

by Rick Ridgeway

As Yvon liked to say, it isn’t an adventure until something goes wrong. The boat made it to Chile, and our crew continued to Pumalín, where they met up with Yvon and Doug. By then Doug’s petition to the Chilean government to designate Pumalín an official nature sanctuary had been approved, and we filmed Doug showing our younger surfers and climbers around the future park, and then later, with Yvon, we filmed the two old guys sharing their views on the importance of wildland conservation with the young guys. “Most people see nature as nothing more than a basket of resources,” Doug said. “A cornucopia to benefit the human economy.” “They think we can live without nature,” Yvon added. “Or they think they’re better than nature because they can manipulate nature. They don’t think we need free-flowing rivers because if the salmon are blocked, no problem, they can just farm the salmon.” “They delude themselves into thinking they can live in a glass box above nature,” Doug added. “They don’t see that civilizations are as fragile as life itself. Bang, one day you’re dead. The Ottomans, the Romans, the Greeks, the Mayans. None of the globalists want to look at that possibility.” “Accepting that you’re going to die,” Yvon said, “that we’re all going to die—that all societies have a beginning and an end—doesn’t mean you have to give up on living, or that you have to become part of accelerating the end. Doug and I agree on that, but in other ways we’re opposites. He is more bothered ab...