North Face founder bought up paradise to save it
In 1985, Douglas Tompkins was the millionaire co-founder of two successful clothing companies, the North Face and Esprit. He was courted by magazine editors and politicians, revered by the San Francisco hippie elite. Girls’ fashion — incredibly, for a man who dressed every day in the same old polo and blue jeans — turned on his company’s marketing campaigns.
By 1990, he gave it all up and moved to the end of the world.
Tompkins died Tuesday after a kayaking accident in Chile sent him to the hospital with fatal hypothermia. He was 72. Tompkins will be better remembered in the U.S. as the guy who brought domed tents to hippie hikers and brightly patterned “casual wear” to the Reagan-era teenage masses.
But in Chile’s Patagonia, where he spent the last two decades of his life, he is the man who tried to buy paradise, not to exploit it, as so many millionaires like him had done throughout history, but to preserve it.
That “eco baron” position, as writer Edward Humes termed it, brought Tompkins from a boardroom in San Francisco to the front lines of the battle between conservation and development in Chile’s most remote region.
Tompkins grew up in New York in the 1940s and ’50s, the son of a decorator and an antiques dealer living in a tony village outside the city. But he struggled to hew to his parents’ aristocratic ideals. At 17, he was expelled from his prestigious Connecticut boarding school for one-toomany infractions. He never got a high school degree.
Instead, he took off for the mountains out West, where he became a climber, ski bum and all-around adventurer. He met his first wife, Susie, while chopping trees in California’s Tahoe City, and in 1963 they moved to San Francisco, where they opened a small shop peddling high-end climbing and camping equipment from Europe. They called it the North Face.
Tompkins only owned the company now known for outdoor equipment and ubiquitous fleece jackets for five years — in 1969 he sold it to focus on film making (his movie about a 1968 trip to Patagonia, “Mountain of Storms,” won an international adventure film award and is now a climbing cult classic).
Meanwhile, he and his wife were starting another clothing business selling women’s dresses out of the back of a Volkswagen bus.
The clothing line would become Esprit de Corps and then just, Esprit.
By the mid ’80s it was a multibillion dollar business with factories all over the world.
But then he had an epiphany after reading “Deep Ecology: Living As If Nature Mattered” by George Sessions and Bill Devall, a primer on a philosophy that calls for a radical restructuring of society to bring it into harmony with nature.
Tompkins divorced his wife, and sold his shares of Esprit for a reported $150 million US.
He created the Foundation for Deep Ecology to issue grants and publish writing on his radical environmental philosophy. And then he moved to Patagonia, the southernmost region of South America known as “the end of the world.”
For $600,000, according to Humes, Tompkins purchased more than 16,000 hectares of forest and fiords that would become his home and first preservation project, Parque Pumalin.
The park is now more than 283,000 hectares and a nature sanctuary.
Shortly after, Tompkins married Kristine McDivitt, the former chief executive of the Patagonia outdoor wear firm.
Since the 1990s, the couple and their foundation has bought up hundreds of thousands of acres in Chile and Argentina to be maintained as wilderness. Some of this land has been given to local governments to be turned into national parks, some remains privately held.
According to the New York Times, Tompkins is survived by his wife, Kristine, his daughters Quincey Tompkins Imhoff and Summer Tompkins Walker, his mother, Faith, and his brother, John.
He hoped people would remember him, he told the Chilean magazine Paula last month, by the pristine landscapes he never left a mark on.
“Don’t you think that’s more beautiful than a tomb?”