Marine Harvest Denounced
United States millionaire and self-proclaimed deep ecologist, Douglas Tomkins, owns 300,000 contiguous hectares of beautiful forest, fjords, mountains and hot springs right within the Palena and Aysén Region of Chile (regions X and XI respectively). He has worked for over ten years in converting his property into a nature sanctuary administered as a Chilean foundation, to become the world’s largest privately owned Natural Park. Salmon farmers however are also a part this picture, since they exist in every neighbouring cove of Tomkins’ utopia. One of Tomkins worst eye-sores is a Marine Harvest farm site located hear an island not more than a 500 meters from his coastline. He claims that the company is surpassing the production limits of the concession area and has installations outside of the concession boundary. The original concession solicitation was for 12 circular cages of 20 meter diameter, to reach a maximum production of 600 tons. According to Tomkins the site has 20 cages of this size, some of which occupy a surface area larger than declared in the company’s environmental impact statement regarding the concession site. The recent denouncement by Tomkins is the second that he has made to the National Fisheries Service regarding this site since January of this year.
