Kris and Douglas Tompkins - renowned conservationist, founder of The North Face - overcame controversy and adversity to to save a Patagonian paradise. Now others can learn how they did it.
Rewilding public lands in Patagonia and beyond: Q&A with Kris Tompkins
In the early 1990s, Kris and Doug Tompkins began buying up vast amounts of land in Chile and Argentina and setting it aside for conservation.
Since the early 2000s, their non-profit Tompkins Conservation has donated over 800,000 hectares (2 million acres) of wilderness in Chile and Argentina, which spurred the permanent protection of nearly 6 million hectares (15 million acres) and the establishment of 13 new national parks.
The Tompkins had performed “a kind of capitalist jujitsu move” as Kris Tompkins put it in her 2020 TED talk: “We deployed private wealth from our business lives and deployed it to protect nature from being devoured by the hand of the global economy.”