North Face co-founder, environmentalist dies
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.
“We only have one shot at this,” Tompkins told the Guardian in 2009. “We need to pay our dues to live on this earth; we need to pay the rent and I’m doing that with the work we are carrying out here in Patagonia.”
Tompkins grew up in New York, 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 boarding school for one-too-many 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 for five years — in 1969 he sold it to focus on film making.
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. And it would make Tompkins a millionaire.
But then he read 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.
“Within the few hours that it took to read the book, I experienced a powerful epiphany. Everything suddenly made sense,” Tompkins would later write, according to the Guardian. He was done, he added, “selling people countless things that they didn’t need.”
Tompkins divorced his wife, and sold his shares of Esprit for a reported US$150 million. He created the Foundation for Deep Ecology to issue grants and publish writing on his radical environmental philosophy. And then he got on a plane to Patagonia, the southernmost region of South America known as “the end of the world.”
For US$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.
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?”