Douglas Tompkins who co-founded the North Face company and Esprit clothing used his fortune to buy roughly 2.2 million acres of land in Chile for conservation purposes, including 800,000 acres of rain forest that stretches from the Pacific Ocean to the Andes.
Adding more land in subsequent years, Mr. Tompkin's Fundación Pumalín ended up donating 1 million acres to the government of Chile to spark the creation of 11-million acre Pumalín Douglas Tomkins National Park -- the largest national park in South America.
Douglas Tompkins died in 2015 at the age of 72 in a kayaking accident in Chile, but his wife, Kristine McDivitt Tompkins, a former CEO of Patagonia, Inc., remains president and co-founder of Tompkins Conservation, which has since created or expanded 15 national parks, 2 marine sanctuaries, and 20 conservation and monitoring projects.
Kristine Tomkins is chair of the National Geographic Society’s Last Wild Places campaign and was the first conservationist awarded the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy. In 2018 she was named the United Nations’ Global Patron for Protected Areas.
In the history of the world, no private citizens have done more to directly and permanently protect wild lands than Douglas and Kristine Tomkins.
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