Kristine McDivitt Tompkins was one of the first six employees of world-renowned outdoor gear company Patagonia.
Under the leadership of Yvon Chouinard, she helped build an iconic, ethical brand which she later ran as CEO — and met her late husband, Doug Tompkins, who co-founded The North Face and Esprit.
But after decades in outdoor entrepreneurship, Kristine and Doug decided to pivot to outdoor preservation, or what Doug called “paying his rent for living on the planet.”
Once she retired from Patagonia the company, Kristine joined Doug in Patagonia the place, prepared to dedicate the rest of their lives to conservation.
Watching the “decimation of nature” unfold as a result of what Kristine called “the dark side of industrial growth,” she and Doug became part of the resistance.
Using their family foundation — Tompkins Conservation — the couple began buying land and donating it to create national parks in South America, acquiring wildlife habitats across Chile and Argentina.
Kristine said, despite initial hostility from locals, the organization’s can-do spirit won over local leaders (namely, a total of 12 presidential administrations in two countries).
This led to the largest private land donation in history, and over the last 27 years, the permanent protection of over 15 million acres of land.
Those lands, protected by Tompkins Conservation, include temperate rainforest, Patagonian steppe grasslands, coastal areas, freshwater wetlands, and importantly, 13 national parks.
A major part of this conservation work, Kristine said, has been getting people in these regions to care about these uninterrupted wild lands — similarly to how Americans feel about their own national parks.
“I need you to fall in love with your national parks. You walk through the gates of Yellowstone, you’re pulling your suspenders. That is your park, and it’s mine, and it’s [theirs],” Kristine told Good Good Good.
“Somebody tries to monkey around with Yellowstone Park today, they’re not going to be able to because you have tens of millions of people in the United States who are saying ‘These are our parks.’ In a country like Chile, for example, that’s what needs to happen.”
Planting seeds
It’s all possible through the strategic and years-long partnerships she has with government leaders and other like-minded conservation organizations. It also takes the instillation of responsibility among everyday individuals — the people who care but likely can’t purchase millions of acres of land.
“The first thing people have to do is to decide that they don’t want to abdicate their future,” Kristine told us. “We have to decide that it’s a lot more fun and imperative to stand up and fight for your future. If you're doing nothing, you have handed over your future to people whom you don't know, maybe not even like.”
Kristine is not angling to build an army of people like her, but rather, an army of people who can do any small thing to protect their planet. From putting postage stamps on educational mailers, to counting the birds in their neighborhoods, she said, “it can be anything, but it’s got to be something.”
Her thing? Rewilding, or “allowing ancient nature the space and the freedom to heal itself,” she defined in her 2024 TED Talk. “And when that’s not possible, actively restoring territories and bringing back species [that] have gone missing.”
Purchasing, protecting, and finally, rewilding these South American lands has led to the successful reintroduction of a total of 24 nearly-extinct native species, such as giant anteaters, pampas deer, peccaries, and green-winged macaws.
In Chile, the critically endangered huemul deer is no longer losing ground, and even apex carnivores like jaguars, which were missing from the region since the 1930s, are rebounding.
“One of the [jaguar] babies just took off out of this 1.8 million acre protected area and swam across the second largest river in South America, the Pardana, and hit the other side into Paraguay,” Kristine shared with Good Good Good, in awe of a baby jaguar’s resilience in its native habitat.
“Here’s the offspring of a situation that hadn’t seen jaguars in 90 years, and now they’re dispersing,” she added, signaling an indication that the species is thriving enough to migrate to new areas. “The little sucker swam all the way across this river, got to the other side, and became a national hero in Paraguay.”
A continent-scale change
It’s this little jaguar’s journey that symbolizes the next audacious step in Kristine’s work: the development of border-free wildlife corridors across South America. The goal of this continent-scale approach is to reconnect fragmented ecosystems across the La Plata basin, which spans four countries and numerous ecosystems.
The creation of these corridors would populate new protected areas for key species to disperse and strengthen their populations — beyond human-imposed borders.
“The speed and power of the climate crisis and the extinction crisis demand that we change our tactics again, and this time it's got to be on a massive scale,” Kristine said in her TED Talk.
While she is heartened by the fact that national parks offer refuge to animals and that ecosystems can indeed be restored, even massive parks like this are disconnected “islands” that keep species from reaching their full freedom.
“In order to survive and become resilient, ecosystems need to be connected,” she added. “One way or the other, flora and fauna have to be able to expand over territories as they once did.”
Tompkins Conservation has created two new offshoot organizations — Rewilding Chile and Rewilding Argentina — to carry out a 20-year plan to make these wildlife corridors a reality. It includes protecting the spine of the Andes Mountains, as well as bodies of water like rivers, to create “wild highways.”
Creating something that will outlive us
It is a project that Kristine herself likely will never see to the end.
“I’m 73, and for the first time in my business and conservation life, I know I’m not going to see the end of this new story. But that’s OK with me,” she said, quoting a friend, Wes Jackson, as she added, “If your life’s work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough.”
But just as she holds tight to the legacy Doug leaves behind, Kristine’s prerogative is to stay focused on the future, empowering a new generation to care for the wild world in bold and unprecedented ways.
“People just want to be invited in, in a way,” she told Good Good Good. “People want to be needed. They want to be part of something.”
Those people, she said, the ones who “refuse to accept a future without wildness,” — and the countless species they will save — “are the legacy long after our story is told.”
Besides, making the world a more wild, beautiful, and equitable place might just be the greatest adventure of all. At least, it was for Doug and Kristine.
“Participate in your future and the future of all life,” Kristine told Good Good Good. “It's a gas.”
A version of this article was originally published in The 2024 Animals Edition of the Goodnewspaper.
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