Kristine Tompkins is one of the world's most successful conservationists. She's the president and co-founder of Tompkins Conservation, which is a non-profit that purchases land in South America, largely in Patagonia and creates national parks. Before dedicating her life to land preservation, Kris spent 25 years working for Patagonia, the company. She was one of the first employees and eventually served as CEO.
Kristine Tompkins is one of the world's most successful conservationists. She's the president and co-founder of Tompkins Conservation, which is a non-profit that purchases land in South America, largely in Patagonia to create national parks, boost regenerative economies, and bring back missing species through rewilding. Before dedicating her life to land preservation, Kris spent 25 years working for Patagonia, the company. She was one of the first employees and eventually served as CEO.
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Kristine Tompkins:
I retired on a Friday and moved to South Chile two days later on Sunday with two little bags. And I don't want to be overly dramatic, but in some ways, it saved my life.
Shelby Stanger:
Kris Tompkins is one of the world's most successful conservationists. She's the president and co-founder of Tompkins Conservation, which is a non-profit that purchases land in South America, largely in Patagonia and creates national parks. Before dedicating her life to land preservation, Kris spent 25 years working for Patagonia, the company. Yes, that Patagonia, the legendary brand that makes gear, packs, puffer coats and more. The company was founded by Kris's childhood friend and famous outdoorsman, Yvon Chouinard. Kris was one of the first employees and eventually served as CEO.
In 1990, after more than 20 years at the brand, Kris went on a trip to the southernmost tip of South America to explore Patagonia, the place. Kris ended up falling in love, moving to Chile, and working to establish 15 new national parks. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-Op Studios production, brought to you by Capital One. Kris Tompkins, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living. We're excited to have you on.
Kristine Tompkins:
Thank you very much. Nice to be here.
Shelby Stanger:
What about when you were growing up, made you so attracted to living on the fringes, but yet connected deep into nature? Did you grow up in a busy city and you were like, "Nope, I'm going to move to the most rural place in the world?"
Kristine Tompkins:
No, I actually grew up in this little ag town that I'm in at the moment, and we moved to Venezuela, to the Orinoco Basin when I was eight years old, and stayed down there for three years. My father was in the oil business and all the Venezuelan oil fields were being discovered at that point.
Shelby Stanger:
How interesting.
Kristine Tompkins:
It was in the late '50s. And then he died there and we came back to the ranch here, and we were called the hooligans. We were outside all the time. Even though our father died early, he always, I think, had a really strong impact on me as the baby of the family, that he was a go-getter, just pick up your family and take them to Venezuela in the '50s and impressed upon us to be great at whatever we do, go for it, no limits, that kind of stuff. And I think that's where it started, that even though I don't really remember him very well, but I do know from everything I've heard and my instincts tell me, I'm probably quite like he was.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay. So we should probably just talk a little bit about Patagonia. You were one of the first six employees there. How did you get that job?
Kristine Tompkins:
No, I met Yvon when I was 15 and I went to the local high school here and I didn't really fit in. So I started hanging out with Yvon, my older brother and some other people at the beach. He had that beach house next to our family beach house, and I was 15, he was 28 or so. And then I went to college and my mother insisted coming home the first summer that I get a job, which, a job, that was shocking. I was complaining to Yvon that I had to go out and get a job like now.
So he hired me. I was cutting climbing ropes, I was polishing climbing equipment, I was doing whatever there was needed to be done. And then I graduated from college, no idea what I was going to do. So I went back and said, "Christ, now what am I going to do?" And he said, "No, just come on full time." I never thought about it. In our family, there was never a discussion. You were going to college but not a soul talk to you about the fact that in our family, the millisecond that you receive your degree, you go find a place to sleep that night. It's very abrupt.
So I started working for him for $2 an hour. And a year in, maybe 18 months in, he started thinking, "I'd like to start building some clothing for us." And so he had these ideas and we ran around. We hired a pattern maker, nothing about which we knew anything, and it started growing from there. And then he said, "Here, why don't you manage this stuff?" Because I was a shipper. I was a world-class shipper. That's what I did.
Shelby Stanger:
So you boxed out stuff and you shipped it out. You went to the post office a lot?
Kristine Tompkins:
Yeah, I went to the post office a lot. And then he decided to call it Patagonia, and then we started firing on what was possible, how to run a business. I had no idea. I would go out and call people who were supposedly the best at what they did and I would go to Los Angeles and beg them to tell me, "How can we be great? I don't want to be good, I want to be great." And it just grew and grew.
And then I think I'd been there 23 years or so, 24 years. And when I hit 40, I just thought, "Holy sh***, I could be doing this when I'm 60 or 70." And I had started so young. So I had this real conflict inside of me because I was completely happy, proud, but internally, in my own life, my interior life, I just thought, "I need to do something else. I got to do something. I don't know what it is, but I want to do something really big."
Shelby Stanger:
So when it was the very first time you went to Patagonia, the place?
Kristine Tompkins:
January of '90. Yvon and I wanted to change our jobs within Patagonia, and so we hired a new CEO, a new CFO, a new COO, and we took them down to Patagonia, the place, and took them all around so they could have this sense of wildness and what's the ethos of Patagonia, the company? Which was a really crazy idea, but that's the first time I went.
Shelby Stanger:
When Kris traveled to Patagonia in 1990, she fell in love with its waterfalls, lush forests and rocky vistas. On that trip, she also fell in love with Doug Tompkins, an adventurer and businessman who founded both the North Face and the apparel brand, Esprit. For Doug's next venture, he was focused on land preservation in South America. Doug lived in Chile and after a few years, Kris moved down there as well. The two married and pursued their wildest dream of preserving the nature they both loved.
You went to Patagonia in 1990s and you fell in love with a man and a place kind of at the same time.
Kristine Tompkins:
Yeah.
Shelby Stanger:
What was that like?
Kristine Tompkins:
It's the kind of thing that you would want to have happen to you over and over and over again.
Shelby Stanger:
Tell me more?
Kristine Tompkins:
No, it's an addiction that you would find somebody who you recognize so quickly that I never really wanted to be married. I was a little careless. And then when I went to visit him, I had this sense that, "Aha, this is it." So there was falling in love, which changed our lives and will always change my life, and it did Doug's, but the place itself, I thought, "Okay, this is wild enough. This is scary enough. This is difficult enough that I'm going to have my hands full." And that's what I needed to try to absorb this massive change I'd made. I retired on a Friday and moved to South Chile two days later on Sunday with two little bags.
I don't want to be overly dramatic, but in some ways, it saved my life. And it wasn't easy and it definitely wasn't glamorous and fabulous on many days. It was mostly hard. So we got married not so long after that. So a new marriage, living in a roadless area, no phones, no electricity, no internet at that point. And I think it created two strong people out of having to depend on one another so deeply, and it was a complete tectonic shift in our lives for both of us.
Shelby Stanger:
When you say it saved your life, you had this dream job. Were you a little restless, depressed maybe?
Kristine Tompkins:
No. No. Depressed, no. I think I've never been able to name what happened. I was so happy at Patagonia and I had not one reason to be otherwise. And so why did I start to feel like I was suffocating? And I cannot attribute any of this to Patagonia because that was the puzzle, this duality. I was happy. I was good at what I was doing. I've been there a long time. Love and respect the Chouinard family utterly. But if I gave advice to somebody, after my almost 74 years, I would say trust the capacity and the elasticity and the wonder of making changes in your life, that it's hard to imagine that it might all work out, but that assessing risk, of course, as athletes and business people, we got pretty good at assessing risk. So that's part of it. But mostly, it's really understanding. As far as we know, we're here once. And so at least in my case, I had to do something that was 180 degrees and very difficult to pull off.
Shelby Stanger:
I've never been to Patagonia, the place. For someone who's never been there, take us there to this land?
Kristine Tompkins:
A lot of it is very stark. Your experience, if you stay down long enough, will change every day.
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah, I have heard that it's really windy there at times, especially in the summer there. But also, it's like the land of guanacos and pink flamingos.
Kristine Tompkins:
A lot of cougars, foxes, a very strange mammal called a mara, looks like a giant rabbit. Nandus that look like smaller ostriches. So it's fantastical in a certain kind of way, but the thing that moves people the most, and certainly moved Doug and me and Yvon, is that it's so vast. What we think of when I first got down there, I felt like it's so empty, which is what I love. I love feeling really tiny. And so that's the place to feel tiny, is in these massive landscapes that are harsh, but they have a kind of serenity and a kind of freedom attached to them that obviously all of us took to.
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah. We talk a lot about the power of awe on this podcast and how it can make you feel small and yet connected at the same time, but you said a word that I think is really interesting. You said it's stark, but there's this beauty in this starkness, and I'd love for you to tell me a little bit about what this starkness is?
Kristine Tompkins:
Yeah. I would say for me personally, the starker and harsher and more isolated the territory, the happier I am. We humans, especially Westerners, are so detached from the power of nature. We've spent a few 1,000 years trying to protect ourselves from nature and gotten better and better and better at it until we were essentially disconnected from it. This is Westerners. There are billions of people who live very close to the ground and haven't forgotten that.
So starkness for me is if something happens, you're very cognizant of where you are, but if something goes sideways, you lose your tent, the flat tires and all those kinds of things. All those tiny events have consequences, and I like that.
Shelby Stanger:
After several months on the ground, Kris and Doug decided to buy private land in Patagonia and give it back to the people by building national parks. When we come back, Kris talks about how they came up with his wild idea and how it became a full-blown organization called Tompkins Conservation.
In 1990, Kris Tompkins traveled to Patagonia. When she was there, she fell in love with the majestic landscapes of the region. Patagonia's territory encompasses parts of both Argentina and Chile, and it's divided down the middle by the Andes mountains. On the Argentinian side, there are prairies and deserts. On the Chilean side, there are glaciers and temperate rainforests. Kris's husband, Doug, was a diehard conservationist, and together, the couple used their money, as well as contributions from like-minded philanthropists to preserve millions of acres of private land in Chile and Argentina. They called this project Tompkins Conservation.
So talk to me really quickly about how you and Doug knew you wanted to preserve this land, and then how you founded and when you founded the Tompkins Conservation?
Kristine Tompkins:
Well, it wasn't my idea. It was Doug's, because he retired, oh gosh, two years before I did. And so he was looking around, where would he go and how did he want to articulate this need to be part of the army who protects wild nature? Then he was a bush pilot, so he flew down from the United States to Chile and flew all around looking at ideas, and with really not something so clear in mind, just trying to figure out where he might light himself.
Anyway, he was turned on to this place, which eventually came Pumalin Douglas Tompkins National Park, 1,000,000 acres of pristine rainforest. And he bought a little farm, started updating it, and somebody in the area had some land to sell, and Doug thought, "Well, maybe I'll buy some more land." And then another one went up to sell and he bought the second one. And by then, I'm coming down there and decided to retire. And then I moved down there at the end of '93. And in the meantime, Doug began to realize that he could protect some, by our standards, pretty large territories. And this was all in rainforest, temperate rainforest at that time.
And then some really massive properties came up for sale. Again, private owners wanting to sell. And that is what really turned the corner on things, that not only were we able to imagine buying large tracks of land, large scale conservation, but also began to think about, "Oh, could you really just donate it back to the country and create national parks out of them?" And so that was probably by '94, '95. And then we took off and it grew to 15 national parks and over 15,000,000 acres.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay, so let's talk about the nitty-gritty. What actually went into making a national park? Because you're in Latin America. I had done some business in Latin America in the early 2000s, and whenever we tried to attach work to charities, if it wasn't attached directly to the church, it was met with a lot of resistance. People were like, "It's not a charity, it's a scam."
Kristine Tompkins:
Oh yeah, the first four or five years, it was extremely tough and dangerous, I would say actually. We had a lot of death threats. Our phones were tapped for years and years.
Shelby Stanger:
Because why? Because they thought that you were taking the land and then doing something else with it?
Kristine Tompkins:
First of all, two Americans. We had purchased enough land at this point that it went from the border of Argentina up on the top of the Andes to the Pacific Ocean. So we became known as the couple who cut Chile in half. And then the scale that buying up specifically in that moment, hundreds of thousands of acres of timber or forests and not cutting it. And when I look at it now, I think of course, this happened because Chile was on its way to becoming a first-world country, and productivity was up and growing. The economy was key. It had come out of a 12-year dictatorship and it was raring to go, and here are these people who are buying assets, if you want to call the forest that, and not, "Doing anything with them."
And the not doing anything with it was attached to the fact that Chile was really... The ethos at the time was really creating jobs, creating a market and an economic driver for the country. So some of the backlash, which was fierce, and as I said, dangerous, we were housed in the US Embassy sometimes when it got really rough.
Now I understand it, and I think we thought we were being very open about what we were doing, and I think that was always true and continues to be true, but we were naive to think that society, the culture would just accept, and these are large scale territories. So I understand it looking back, but at the time, it was serious, it was dangerous, and it was just indicative of how we needed to adjust. And the country needed time for us to get some of the park like Pumalin opened up, all were welcome, and there are trails and campgrounds and a restaurant and little cabanas. And so once that began to show everybody that this was what we'd been saying was true all along and people could come, they were welcome. And then little by little, things began to ease off.
Shelby Stanger:
Kris and Doug were met with a lot of skepticism, but they were able to navigate through the bureaucracy. Over time, they gained the trust of the government, community members and animal rights activists. Since the organization's inception, it has preserved more than 15,000,000 acres of land in South America. When Doug passed away in 2015, Kris took over the conservation work and kept turning more land into national parks. Tompkins Conservation then handed these parks back to the people, and they're now run by two different local organizations, Rewilding Argentina and Rewilding Chile. The process of creating these parks and rewilding this land is long and complex.
Do you have any other stories about what it takes to buy land and make it a park, and then the features that you included? It sounds so daunting. Can you just break it up like a cake, like how you did it?
Kristine Tompkins:
Okay. Let me see if I can do that. For one thing, we have to decide where we're going to commit ourselves because once we're committed, we stay to the end. And the end for us is that these very large territories are fully functioning, and that means not only that there are big landscapes and where there were forests that were burned or cut, those are coming back. If Patagonia grasslands have been stripped over the last 150 years, and who are the neighbors? Is there federal land next to it? Because we know we can't buy enough land to make it as powerful a project as it needs to be.
So out of the 15,000,000 acres that we have put into national parks, we have purchased only about 2,000,000 acres. The rest is federal land that when we make a donation, our one ask is that they flip that federal land with the gift to form a much larger national park.
Shelby Stanger:
That's a huge investment. That's really cool. So you're putting your money and then they're matching it, but more.
Kristine Tompkins:
But many times over, and not in cash, but in territory, which is all that matters. And then we ask ourselves in each project, "Who's missing?" In Patagonia National Park, there were very few species missing, but there were a lot of species whose numbers were low and fragile, and so that became a big project for us.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay, so this is one aspect of this park. You call that rewilding. Okay, and rewilding is bringing back species that had existed before?
Kristine Tompkins:
Rewilding is the big word. If you buy 1,000,000 acres of something, you have at that moment when the ink is dry, started rewilding because you are trying to heal the land. So in terms of territory, the biggest one, Ibera National Park, Northeastern Argentina, that's just under 2,000,000 acres. And when we got there, which was in 2000, everybody was missing, all the keystone species, jaguars, cougars, ocelots, giant anteaters, giant river otters. The list is quite long. And so we had to bring all of them back, starting at zero. No jaguars in this part of the world since the 1930s. The red shouldered macaw, gone for 130 years, and now they're flying free in Ibera and reproducing in the wild and so on.
Shelby Stanger:
How do you bring them back?
Kristine Tompkins:
Let's take the jaguar, because that was quite complex. We decided to bring jaguars back really early on. But Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, nobody wanted to give us jaguars. So we decided, "Well, we're going to have to breed jaguars." Nobody had ever had a jaguar breeding program before. So we were getting individuals from zoos, usually the older ones, nobody wanted them, or private collections, which they had to unwind anyway, and then find males. Those were all females. We have this huge breeding. It cost us a couple of million dollars just to build this place with huge areas for each individual. We had the females, we got the males. You never know if they're going to kill one another or actually mate.
So when that female had kittens, the minute that happens, that female and her kittens never sees a human again because it is the cubs who will be free someday. So that was a long process, and the nut of it is, known, we have 25 jaguars in the wild, reproducing, new kids all the time, and they're starting to disperse.
Shelby Stanger:
That's really cool.
Kristine Tompkins:
So we work with 24 different species, but that's an example, and they all take a very specific kind of approach. None of them, of course, are the same.
Shelby Stanger:
There are so many aspects of land preservation and rewilding that are fraught, complex, even intimidating. But Kris has learned a lot over the years. She's fiercely protective, stands her ground, and trusts her instincts to do the right thing.
Kristine Tompkins:
The number one thing you have to do is to decide that you're going to do something with your life that has nothing to do with you. It has to do with nature. It has to do with the common good and dignity of all communities, and also fight. We need to build an army of people who've fallen in love with beauty, wildness, one another. That's going to take many more people than we have today. I always tell people, I get sick of hearing about hope. Everybody asks me about hope. I don't want to be asked about hope because I know when they're asking me, they're saying, "Oh, Kris, do you think things are going to be okay?" Because if I say, "Yes," then, "Oh, good. I don't have to do anything," but you have to work for it.
Shelby Stanger:
Kris will continue to fight for the planet for as long as she lives. If you want to learn more about her and Doug's story, check out the National Geographic Film, Wildlife, on Hulu and Disney+. Rewilding Chile recently came out with a book called Patagonia National Park, Chile, with contributions from Kris, Yvon Chouinard, and former Chilean President, Michelle Bachelet. It features stunning photos of Patagonia's wildlife and landforms. We'll link to it in our show notes. If you liked this episode with Kris, you'll also like our episode with Alvaro Silbserstein, who hiked Patagonia in a wheelchair. We'll also link to that episode in our show notes.
Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas and Sam Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producers are Jenny Barber and Hannah Boyd. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. As always, we love it when you follow the show, take time to rate it and write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.