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ABC's Jeffrey Kofman showed us the southern Andes where "mountains plunge from their snowy summits into the ocean." There, Doug Tompkins, the American millionaire founder of the Patagonia and North Face sportswear brands, has purchased an 800,000 acre expanse of wilderness to create the Pumalin National Park as a gift to the nation of Chile. Construction is prohibited on the preserve. "Pumalin cuts this narrow country in half," Kofman observed. "Chileans who live in the south have to take a long ferry ride to reach the center or drive through neighboring Argentina" because Tompkins refuses to allow a road.
By contrast, NBC's Don Teague showed us plans for the 4,000-mile Trans-Texas Corridor, a privately-constructed, privately-operated network of turnpikes "designed to move much of the traffic off of Interstates." A 1,200-foot-wide transportation ribbon would bypass major cities, combining freight railroads, passenger bullet trains, truck highways and toll roads for cars to speed traffic from Mexican border crossings at Laredo and McAllen "with few on and off ramps" past Waco to Gainesville. The corridor will "plow across farmland, gobbling up more than half a million acres."
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