Douglas Tompkins
Douglas Tompkins changed the way America dressed--twice. As a 20-something ski bum, he founded outdoor retailer the North Face. After selling that in 1968, he helped his then wife Susie start a dressmaking business, which soon became the hot fashion line Esprit. Their array of comfortable, boldly colored mix-and-match clothes struck just the right chord with Americans during the 1970s and early 1980s. By the mid-1980s, Esprit was annually selling hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of shirts, dresses, slacks, and accessories. But then America's clothing tastes turned conservative, sending the company into a tailspin. And the pair divorced. So in 1990, Douglas sold his share of the company to his ex-wife and moved to a vast ranch he'd bought in Chile. He no longer has any connection to Esprit.
Now, Tompkins, 61, splits his time between ranches in Chile and Argentina. He has almost completed a 12-year project of preserving the bulk of his vast Chilean holdings--approximately 1,000 square miles of fiords and Patagonian virgin forest--by turning the tract into a government-protected nature sanctuary. It hasn't been easy. Many Chileans opposed the terms of his donation, noting that his Pumalin Park was so huge it completely bisected the narrow country from the Pacific to the border with Argentina. In addition, big salmon concerns, timber companies, and other business people tried to block conservation of land they had hoped to develop. The controversy became so fierce that at one point Tompkins claimed that he was getting death threats and that his phone had been bugged.
But late last year, Chilean President Ricardo Lagos agreed to protect the land. Tompkins is now waiting for a last few details to be ironed out but expects the park to receive final approval within a few months. Tompkins and his wife of 10 years, Kris, former CEO of the Patagonia retail chain, are now attempting to buy up and preserve big patches of Argentina. The government there has already accepted and turned into a park a 155,000-acre donation of coastal Patagonia that protects a major penguin rookery. Foundations launched by Tompkins are now trying to raise funds to buy up 1.2 million acres of marshes and wetlands in the northeastern corner of the country. Reached over a scratchy telephone line at his Argentine ranch, Tompkins says he's trying to undo a little of the damage he did to the environment when he was busy "producing consumer items nobody needed." -Kim Clark
This story appears in the December 6, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.