Hello everyone, first of all, I beg your patience please. I want to talk to you in Spanish and this requires that I talk with my notes, I'm sorry. I grew up in California, in my great-grandparents' field. That field was sold when my cousins, my brothers and I were adults. At that time, our generation wasn't willing to take on the heavy burden of running an agricultural field. However, the loss of that landscape left us lost, rootless, aimless. For the first time, I felt that something valuable may be better understood, not for its presence, but its absence. For 23 years my working life went together with Yvon Chouinard. It began in a modest tin shed, in Ventura, and came to be the Patagonia company. Over time, I became its CEO and I helped building a company in which creating the best products and doing it while caring for the planet was more than just a tagline. I already knew him, but I met Douglas Tompkins again in 1990 when I visited El Calafate. Doug was an entrepreneur. He had founded the company The North Face ESP. And by the late '80s he had decided to commit the last third of his life to what he called "paying his rent for living on the planet". At about the same time I hit 40 and I was ready to do something completely new with my life. The day after I retired from the Patagonia company I flew 6,000 miles South to Patagonia and I joined Doug on our first conservation project. We were in one of the most remote places on Earth and yet, industrial aquaculture grew like cancer around the edges Pumalín Park. Gold mining, dam projects in rivers and other threats reached the region. The noise of the stampede of global economic growth could be heard even in the farthest latitudes of the Southern Cone. Progress is typically seen in very positive terms. But from where we were standing we could see the dark side of industrial growth. When the vision of the industrial world is applied to the natural systems that support all life, we start treating Earth like a factory that produces all the things we think we need. And, as we are all already aware of, the consequences of that worldview are destructive to human welfare, to our climate systems and wildlife. Doug called it the price of progress. Doug and I wanted to be a part of the resistance to that direction of global society. When we acquired wildlife habitat in Chile and Argentina we went for big, wild and connected. Some areas were pristine, others needed healing and to be rebuilt. Finally, our foundation bought more than 2.2 million acres from willing sellers, in order to create privately managed protected areas, with public park infrastructure like campgrounds and trails, it was all welcome. Our goal was to donate that land in the form of new national parks. I could describe it as a kind of "jiu-jitsu capitalism". We deployed private wealth created in our business life to protect nature from being devoured by the hand of the global economy. It sounded good, but in the early '90s in Chile where philanthropy to save wild lands was completely unknown, we faced tremendous suspicion, and sometimes downright hostility. Over time, we began to win people over. In the last 27 years we have permanently protected about 15 million acres of temperate rainforest, Patagonian steppe, grasslands, coastal areas and wetlands. We helped create 13 new national parks composed of our land donations and adjoining federal lands. Fifteen years ago we asked ourselves: beyond protecting the land and the landscape, how can we create fully functional ecosystems? That's when we started asking ourselves who were missing. What species had disappeared or were vulnerable. But first, we had to consider: How do we eliminate the reason why these species became extinct in the first place? The solution, so obvious now, hit like a thunderbolt. The idea of rewilding changed the nature of everything we do. Unless all members of a community are present and flourishing, it's impossible to create fully functional ecosystems. We started to introduce native species to the Southern Cone. In the Iberá Wetlands, we brought giant anteaters, pampas deer, peccaries, red-and-green macaws, absent for over a hundred years in Argentina. The capstone to Iberá's recovery will be the return apex carnivores to their rightful place. Jaguars on the land, giant otters in the water. After several years of trial and error, we produced cubs that will roam free in the wetlands of Iberá for the first time in over half a century. Jaguar populations can recover in the area of Iberá Park, of 4.2 million acres, with low risk of conflict with neighboring ranches. In the Chilean Patagonia we are rebuilding the ecosystem with endangered huemul deer, lesser rhea, puma and condors. When almost five years ago we lost Doug in a kayaking accident, the power of absence hit me one more time. At the foundation we decided that our mourning would be the fuel to step up our work. In 2018, we helped create new marine national parks in the Southern Atlantic Ocean, and in 2019 we completed the largest private land gift in history, donating more than one million acres, an area larger than Switzerland, to create national parks in Chile. This public-private partnership has already created five new national parks, and expanded three other. The power of absence is of no use if it leads us to nostalgia or despair. It's only useful if it motivates us to work to somehow restore what has been lost. In fact, the first step to rewilding is to be able to imagine that it is possible. That the abundance of wildlife is not a fable from a long time ago, but part of a better and more beautiful future. We believe it's possible. We experienced it. I leave you with these thoughts. We have an urgent challenge. If what's at stake is survival, the diversity of life, human dignity, and the health of non-human communities, then the answer must include rewilding the Earth as much and as quickly as possible. And this gets us to the core of the question. Are we ready to do what it takes to change the end of this story? The massive changes that the world has gone through to stop the spread of COVID-19 gives me hope. It shows that we can join forces under desperate circumstances. It's like a trial run to respond to today's climate crisis. Globally, we are learning to work together in ways we would have never imagined. I know you've heard all this. But if there was ever a moment to awaken, is now. It was never clearer that everything is connected to everything else. Our interdependence. Every human life is affected by the actions of all other human lives around the world. And the fate of humanity is linked to the health of the planet. We have a common destiny. We can flourish or we can suffer. But we're going to do it together. We are far past the point where individual action was a choice. In my opinion it's a moral imperative that each of us steps up to reimagine our place in the circle of life. And not in the center but as part of the whole. No matter where you are, no matter what you have, get up every morning and do something for the things you love, for what you think is the truth, that's our part. Today and ahead. Thanks a lot.