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In 1973, Kristine Tompkins helped her long-time friends Yvon and Malinda Chouinard to launch Patagonia, soon serving as the outdoor clothing brand’s first CEO and introducing the pioneering environmental and charitable initiatives that have become its calling card. Two decades later, Tompkins—along with her husband, The North Face founder Doug Tompkins—would give up their careers and dedicate their life and their fortune to confront the global crises of climate chaos and biodiversity loss across swathes of the Southern Cone with their organization Tompkins Conservation, making them some of the most successful national park-oriented philanthropists in history.
Following a tragic kayaking accident in 2015, Doug died of hypothermia in a hospital in southern Chile. Over the years that followed, Kris carried forward and accelerated their mission with Tompkins Conservation. As of today, the organization has driven the creation or expansion of 15 national parks, including two marine national parks, protecting 14.8 million acres of land and 30 million acres of ocean in Argentina and Chile in collaboration with public and private partners. Furthermore, they are leading the most ambitious rewilding initiative in the Americas actively restoring habitats and reintroducing over two dozen species.
As a new documentary produced by National Geographic and directed by Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, Wild Life, charts Tompkins’s path from rural California to the remotest corners of South America—as well as Tompkins and her late husband’s dynamic love story—Tompkins shares her reflections on this journey in her own words with Vogue for Earth Day. Here’s why, as Tompkins sees it, we should all be looking to the wilder corners of the natural world to inspire us in addressing the climate crisis.
I grew up on my great-grandfather’s ranch in Santa Clara, California, but I don’t think I ever thought about it as a place that was “wild” in those days, even if I essentially lived outside for so much of my childhood. But really, my sense of wildness came from meeting Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, and falling from a rancher's life into a climber's life. It was the 1960s and ’70s, so conventions were being blown to bits, we were rejecting almost everything from our parent’s generation. I think I was born into a moment that really allowed unbelievable freedom—moving from the confines of a more conservative, strict family into this movement for free love, feminism, peace, civil rights. It was a profound moment to grow up in.
A certain type of person will see injustices that are going on—in our case, what was happening to the natural world—and just go for it. We knew we would have a take-no-prisoners approach. Some of our personality traits, for better or for worse, come baked in the cake. And it might be in my Scottish-Irish roots, but I'm a fighter at will, which was a perfect fit for conservation work and activism.
We started Patagonia when I was 21 or 22, and so by the time I was 40, I just panicked. I thought: Is this the sum total of my life? When I’m 50 or 60 or 70, will I be doing the same thing? So I became motivated to figure out what I wanted to do next. To be really honest, I didn’t know what that was, as I had never done anything else other than Patagonia. And then when Doug and I ran into each other in southern Argentina, it crystallized the attraction to one another, but also to that place—it was like multiple light bulbs going off at once, saying, that’s it. I want to do that. It was immediate.
I think when it comes to love, the first 50 percent is chemistry, which is impossible to describe or explain. Doug was extreme in taking things on and just being unafraid, whether it was his climbing or conservation work. I think we recognized that in one another. Most people who knew both of us said, ‘Oh god, this is a disaster. This is like throwing gas on a fire.’ And in some ways—certainly in the love that we had for each other—it’s absolutely true. But when it came to moving from our business lives into this new chapter working for wild nature, I don’t think we would have made it as a couple unless we were really madly in love with each other, and desiring a life that was so isolated and wild and difficult. But it was also in service to a bigger idea. We were on a trajectory taking us away from the source of all things, and we needed to restore our connection with nature, and restore nature itself. In Chile and later Argentina we found many like-minded people to help achieve that vision.
When I left Patagonia, it truly was just a Friday, and I packed up two small bags out of my beach house, locked the house, and left. Then I came to the southern Chilean coastline that is roadless and has 240 inches of rain in this temperate rainforest. We started our life there with no phones, just HF radios. I spoke some Spanish, but not the kind of Spanish where you can sit at a dining room table and debate politics. There was no electricity here, so we used an old-style ice box. It was so extreme in some ways, but I think that helped—because it was a real shift, and I couldn’t sit around thinking, Oh my god, what have I done? I had to remind myself that these extraordinary circumstances were exactly what I needed to kind of shake myself out of the doldrums of the previous life I had, that I no longer wanted anymore.
It was tough, but I found I really liked being cut off. And I think that our marriage probably succeeded and surpassed anything we could have imagined, because we had no choice but to turn to one another: for entertainment, for intellectual conversation, for everything. It was just the two of us. And I think for our personalities, that was a very, very good thing. I wanted to kill him once in a while, and vice versa. But in hindsight, I think it forced us to really understand what it is to actually love someone and be completely inside the circle—not one foot outside all the time, which is kind of how I had loved in my previous life. So for the two of us, the intensity was a bomb. It was the medicine that we were seeking.
When I dedicated myself to wild nature, the biggest impact of those landscapes was that it was the first time in my life when I realized how tiny I was. A lot of how I perceive beauty comes out of that. When you grow up in Western cultures, you see yourself as the center of the universe, in a way. But I really began to understand how small we are, despite being as reckless and damaging as we are. Even though it’s not all 8 billion of us doing that—most of the people on the earth don’t do much harm, but there’s a percentage of us who do. And so I came to understand what I see as a profound sense of beauty, the antithesis of superficial beauty. Certainly in the landscapes and the creatures who rightfully belong there. When someone sees the film, the mountains, the grasslands, the jaguars now running free, all those things are an intense visual escapade. But I think beauty is found when you’re in the center of it, and you’re being blown to bits by wind and rain, and you’re miserable, and no one cares that you’re miserable. You realize how empty photographs are, because they lack sound, they lack joy, they lack misery—I really learned that there. The sheer scale of it, this almost religious sense of beauty, and how far most of us are from experiencing that.
After Doug died suddenly, I would go on long walkabouts. I felt like sometimes I might come back, or I might not: I just thought, I’ll lie down under a tree and quietly go to sleep. And I think that had to do with seeing the raw grief in nature. There was nothing. There were no arms that I could fall into, there was no therapist. But I needed to be in that state where I wasn’t on the top of the food chain. I needed to be in something that was slightly precarious. If I couldn’t go with Doug, then I just needed to be inside this. I had to find this realm of intensity to match this tomahawk to my forehead that was losing Doug. We’d had this intense life together for 26 years, so the dependency on one another was so intense. When he died, I had to match that—I had to go find myself in something that was just as powerful.
I don’t want to make too much out of it, but there is no question in my mind that watching the painful and difficult side of wildlife made Doug’s leaving feel more like a cyclical event than the end of something. Of course, when you’re brokenhearted, you read a lot into things that may not be there. But a couple of years ago, the head of our rewilding program in Chile, Cristian Saucedo, was walking by the little cemetery at Patagonia National Park where Doug is buried. He saw seven pumas sitting around Doug’s grave, one up on a little pillar, three or four a few meters behind and lying in the grass, another one on a different pillar. And Cristian’s a guy who’s done many scientific studies on pumas in the Southern Cone, and he’s never seen anything like it in his life. We’ve been working on trying to get the pumas back after they’ve been systematically killed and displaced by livestock for the last century. So that’s when our conservation teams thought: Holy mackerel. We know nothing about how the world communicates. What do you make of something like that? Maybe nothing. But to me, it was very powerful. And again, it reminded me that somebody’s gone, but they still go along with you. They’re still here. And our marriage has just metamorphosed into another stage. It might sound wacky, but that was always really helpful to me.
I don’t care who someone is, where they come from, or how much money they have—I don't think you can have a really satisfactory life today without joining in the fight to save our planet. Or working towards changing the things that throw the future into question. People imagine this kind of work is onerous or that it's a drag, or it’s depressing, and it’s absolutely the contrary.
What I hope people get out of the film is a reminder that we’re actually very tiny. There are billions of people around the Earth who get up every day and work towards a more beautiful, more dignified, and healthier future for all life. I’m not a sweet person, so when I say that, it's because I really mean it. I don’t understand people who are not becoming involved in some way. The manner in which you do is up to you: What are your strengths? What are you interested in? People shouldn’t be afraid of changing their lives dramatically, and I think we should challenge ourselves more often, even if it’s just in what we do each day. I mean, what are we waiting for? What's the worst thing that can happen? As far as we know, we only live once, and boy, you better make something out of it for yourself and for others. Otherwise, I’m not sure what we’re all doing here.