Into the great wide open

When Kris Tompkins retired as CEO of outdoor clothing company Patagonia, she did not put her feet up. She did not take up knitting or join a book club or do any of the other things retirees usually do. Instead, she moved to a remote, roadless corner of Chile with her husband, Doug, the cofounder of The North Face and Esprit. And then they got to work.

The idea was simple enough. They were always, she says, “outdoors people” – keen skiers, hikers, lovers of nature. And they’d long been witnessing how the wild places they loved were changing. “We came to understand that the planet was in trouble,” she tells me over Zoom from her home in California. It was time to do something about it, she says, so they committed themselves to saving as much wild habitat as they could.

This was 32 years ago, when they bought up their first few tracts of ecologically-important habitat with the mission of protecting the world’s last truly wild areas. Through Rewilding Chile and Rewilding Argentina, as well as their parent organization Tompkins Conservation, she has since helped create 15 national parks, including two marine parks between the two countries, protecting nearly 15 million acres of land and 30 million acres of ocean.

Top: Kris Tompkins on an expedition hike through Cape Froward National Park, Chile (Photo: Tamara Merino); Above: Philanthropist Kris Tompkins (Photo: James Q. Martin)

Doug tragically passed away in a kayaking accident in 2015, but that didn’t slow down Kris. “The basis of our strategy 32 years ago is the same as it is today: the acquisition and aggregation of territory,” she explains. They work with local NGOs and governments to create legally-protected areas on a national scale, including the Route of Parks in Chile, connecting 17 national parks for 1,700 miles from Puerto Montt to Cape Horn, and protecting 28 million acres in the process. “Half of our work is now rewilding species. We’re not finished until these territories are fully functioning ecosystems.” Reintroduced species include jaguar, red-and-green macas, Andean condor and Darwin’s rhea.

The latest project is creating Chile’s 47th national park – 315,000 acres of protected land around Cape Froward at the southernmost point of South America. “Doug and I had flown over the area and I’d always thought of it.” When the chance came to buy a big stretch of land there, Tompkins Conservation worked with a group of Chilean and international philanthropists to snap it up. “We decided we should put it on the map.” Set along the Straight of Magellan, this is an area of Guaitecas cypress forests and peatlands, some of the planet’s most valuable ecosystems for carbon sequestration, and home to endangered huemul deer and Ruddy-headed goose, as well as the indigenous Kawésqar people. “It’s hard territory, extremely wild, and very beautiful,” says Tompkins.

Above: Cape Froward (Photo: José Tomás Yaksovic)

Visitors are of course able to experience many of the areas protected by Tompkins Conservation, including the latest glamping experience in the appropriately-named El Impenetrable in Argentina, regarded as the second most important forest in South America and the most threatened by deforestation. Projects here include the reintroduction of jaguars and giant river otters, and guests can take part in everything from wildlife tracking to horseback riding and boat tours. “You can see the landscape is changing, and the species have come back in an extraordinary way,” says Tompkins. “There are maned wolf, caiman, capybara. It’s very rich.”

Her vision shows no sign of stopping. As she puts it, their plans are “really audacious.” And she loves that people can get involved. “We need to understand that the time is over where we can just go anywhere we want and leave nothing behind except tips. Coming here and seeing the areas, being involved in these projects, it changes your life.”

Above: Reintroduced species include jaguar and giant river otters (Photo: Beth Wald)

SDP tip: "Creating opportunities for our members to witness and experience the groundbreaking, large-scale conservation work being achieved by people like Kris inspires guardianship and greater collective action, both overseas and on our doorstep" – Charlie Darlington, Nature-Positive Tourism Lead at Scott Dunn