I can’t quite pinpoint the moment everything started. It was never one thing. I grew up in Santiago, two hours from the ocean, but it might as well have been the other side of the world. We didn’t have money for holidays. But we had a tent, and every summer my parents would take us camping for a month in North Patagonia – deep into places most people never reach. We had nothing but rain and forest and the Mapuche communities who sometimes invited us into their ceremonies. It was, I understand now, one of the greatest gifts I was ever given.

We had to find our way into nature through the back door, and what we found there opened everything.

My path moved from forests to mountains to conservation, and eventually – inevitably, in Chile – to the ocean. I worked with WWF when we created their first office in the country. I worked alongside Doug Tompkins, who gave up his fortune to buy land and protect it. And slowly, what began with trees and frogs found its way to the sea. In Patagonia, the connection between land and ocean is not subtle. You feel it. And once you feel it, the question of how to protect it becomes the only question that matters.

The work I do now at Blue Marine Foundation is often described as diplomacy, or policy, or conservation strategy. But if I’m honest, the word I keep coming back to is empathy. My job is to sit across from a minister or a president or a community leader and try to understand who they are and what they care about – not to trick them, but to genuinely meet them where they are. People are not generally trying to do harm. They are trying to feed their families, build their economies, leave something for their children. The conservation argument only works when it connects to those motivations. When it does, extraordinary things become possible.

I remember starting in Chile when we had less than one percent of our waters under marine protection. I genuinely did not know if we would get anywhere. Now, with the recent Juan Fernandez expansion, we are at fifty-four percent of our exclusive economic zone. One of the ten largest in the world. And what changed it was not just science, and not just NGOs pushing from the outside – it was a fishing community on a remote archipelago who came to us and said: we want to protect this. We want to stop the destruction. You don’t hear that very often. And when a community leads, politicians follow. That is the dynamic that has driven everything.