#20: Rewilding the World – with Kristine Tompkins

She was a successful CEO of the clothing manufacturer Patagonia
and played a decisive role in building the company. And then left
everything behind to move to the wilderness of the actual
Patagonia in Chile. For nature conservation – and for love.


Our guest in this episode is Kristine Tompkins, an
environmentalist and the president of Tompkins Conservation. She
has been working tirelessly for three decades to protect the
environment. And what she and her late husband Doug Tompkins have
achieved is truly amazing.


Like Kristine, Doug himself was very successful in the outdoor
clothing market in his first life, co-founding the brands "The
North Face" and "Esprit".


When Kristine and him eventually sold their shares, they began to
buy up private land in Chile and Argentina, to restore it at
great effort, to combine it into protected areas, and to finally
hand it over to the government as national parks to protect this
land forever.


Thanks to the work of Kristine and Doug, new national parks with
an area larger than that of the whole of Switzerland have been
established in Chile alone. The couple is considered as some of
the most successful national park-oriented philanthropists in
history.


Currently, Kristine – as President of Tompkins Conservation – is
overseeing a number of projects in Chile and Argentina aimed at
creating even more national parks and reserves and halting the
extinction of species by reintroducing native species that are
threatened or locally extinct – such as the jaguar.


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