North Face Co-Founder Bought 2.2m Acres Just to Protect It
What if the most radical thing you could do with a fortune was give it away not to people, but to the Earth itself?
Most billionaires build skyscrapers with their names on them. Doug Tompkins built national parks. While many chase more land to develop, he bought 2.2 million acres for the sole purpose of keeping it wild. That’s an area bigger than Delaware forests older than the Roman Empire, grasslands where pumas still prowl, glaciers that have never heard the hum of machinery.
It’s a story that begins in the high-octane world of fashion and outdoor gear, where Tompkins made his millions selling jackets and jeans to a consumer culture he would later turn his back on. And it ends if you can call it an ending in the far reaches of Patagonia, where he and his wife Kris fought to protect some of the last truly untamed places on Earth.
But this is not just the tale of one man’s transformation. It’s a reminder uncomfortable, even that saving the planet isn’t an abstract idea. It’s a choice. And sometimes, it’s a choice that costs everything.
Patagonia: The Land That Changed Him
The first time Doug Tompkins saw Patagonia, it wasn’t on a glossy travel brochure or a high-definition nature documentary. It was through the cracked windshield of a Ford Econoline van in 1968, with surfboards strapped to the roof, climbing gear rattling in the back, and his friend Yvon Chouinard riding shotgun. They had driven for months down the Pan-American Highway, chasing peaks and waves, and somewhere near the jagged silhouette of Mount Fitz Roy, the world shifted for Doug.
Patagonia is not the kind of place you simply “visit.” It gets under your skin. It is a country of edges where the Andes crumble into the sea, where the wind sculpts the earth into new shapes, and where light itself feels wilder, shifting from golden calm to storm-tossed grey in minutes. Here, 1,000-year-old Alerce trees rise like green cathedrals, condors circle above valleys so vast they seem to swallow sound, and glacial lakes shimmer in impossible shades of turquoise. It’s a landscape that humbles you, then dares you to protect it.
But by the time Doug returned decades later, the edges were fraying. Logging threatened the old-growth forests. Industrial salmon farms were turning pristine fjords into oxygen-starved dead zones. Hydroelectric companies had mapped out rivers for dams that would flood valleys and carve scars through wilderness with high-voltage transmission lines. The grasslands were overgrazed to exhaustion, and native species pumas, huemul deer, even giant anteaters in the north were vanishing from the places they had roamed for millennia.
For Tompkins, Patagonia was more than beautiful; it was irreplaceable. Its vastness was one of the last places on Earth where ecosystems still functioned much as they had before the industrial age. Losing it would mean not just the death of landscapes, but the collapse of a living system that had taken millions of years to shape. Standing in those windswept valleys, he decided that preserving Patagonia wasn’t just a good cause it was a moral obligation.
That sense of urgency would become the compass for the rest of his life. It was here, on the southern tip of the world, that Doug Tompkins turned his back on corporate success and began the most ambitious private conservation effort in history.
Buying Wilderness to Give It Away
Doug Tompkins didn’t just talk about saving Patagonia he wrote the deed. Literally.
The plan was as audacious as it was simple: identify ecologically critical land, buy it, restore it, and then hand it back to the public as national parks. Not for profit. Not for legacy naming rights. Simply to ensure that these wild places stayed wild forever. Over two decades, he and his wife, Kristine McDivitt Tompkins, would spend hundreds of millions of dollars quietly assembling a mosaic of forests, grasslands, wetlands, and fjords that added up to 2.2 million acres the largest private land donation for conservation in history.
Some of their early acquisitions became the backbone of Pumalín Park in Chile, nearly 800,000 acres of temperate rainforest that shelters one of the last great stands of Alerce trees, some more than a thousand years old. In Argentina, they purchased the degraded sheep ranches that would become Patagonia National Park, painstakingly removing more than 300 miles of fencing to re-open ancient wildlife corridors. Where cattle had stripped the land bare, native grasses began to return. Where silence had replaced the calls of wildlife, pumas, rheas, and huemul deer slowly reappeared.
The work was not just about scenery it was about restoring function to broken ecosystems. They rewilded landscapes by reintroducing species long absent, from giant anteaters to pampas deer. They built visitor centres, trails, and campgrounds to encourage eco-tourism, seeing it as both an economic lifeline for local communities and a way to cultivate public stewardship. Hundreds of local jobs were created from park rangers and wildlife biologists to trail builders and organic farmers supplying the parks.
It was a scale of intervention few individuals had ever attempted. While some philanthropists wrote cheques from afar, Doug and Kris were in the field debating the placement of a trail, sourcing rare native seeds for reforestation, or flying over a potential acquisition in one of Doug’s small planes. He had the instincts of an entrepreneur but the patience of a gardener, willing to wait years to see the results.
By the time governments in Chile and Argentina began partnering with them, the vision had grown even bigger. The couple’s donations, combined with additional land set aside by the two countries, would ultimately protect more than 10 million acres from logging, mining, industrial farming, and hydroelectric dams.
Doug Tompkins called it “paying the rent” for living on Earth. To him, buying wilderness to give it away wasn’t charity it was settling a debt.
Politics, Suspicion, and Cultural Barriers
In the beginning, Doug and Kris Tompkins’s dream of protecting Patagonia didn’t look noble to everyone. To some Chileans and Argentines, it looked dangerous.
From the outside, the idea of two wealthy foreigners buying huge swaths of land in remote, strategic regions raised more questions than admiration. Was this a land grab in disguise? A geopolitical scheme? Whispers spread like wildfire: they were CIA operatives, they were plotting to split Chile in half, they were creating a Zionist enclave, they were cornering the world’s supply of fresh water. Even the Catholic Church voiced concerns, and Chilean politicians warned of threats to national security. One provincial superintendent kept a thick file on Tompkins in his office, while the army stationed a base near Pumalín Park to “monitor” the situation.
The fact that Doug’s holdings spanned from the Andes to the coast across a 44-mile border with Argentina only fuelled fears. And in a country where resource extraction is a major pillar of the economy, the idea of locking away fertile valleys, rich forests, and powerful rivers for the sake of “nature” clashed with the ambitions of industrialists and politicians alike.
Doug understood that land use in Patagonia was as much about politics and identity as it was about conservation. He and Kris didn’t back down. Instead, they opened the parks to the public, invited sceptical officials to visit, and hired locally. Former ranch hands became park rangers. Farmers sold produce to park restaurants. Villages near restored areas saw an influx of eco-tourists, bringing new income and reasons for young people to stay.
Over time, suspicion began to erode. The same voices that had once called them imperialists began to acknowledge the tangible benefits: healthier ecosystems, thriving wildlife, and sustainable jobs. When the Chilean government announced in 2017 that Pumalín Park would officially become a national park, it was a symbolic turning point. The “foreign billionaire” narrative had given way at least in part to one of stewardship.
Still, Doug knew mistrust would never vanish completely. “First of all, you never know if you’re doing the right thing,” he once said. “But the risk of something negative coming from this seems rather small compared with taking an exploitive approach.”
He had no interest in making it easy for himself. The battles political, cultural, and environmental were part of the work. And in Patagonia, the work was never finished.
A Life Lived at Full Tilt and a Sudden End
Doug Tompkins didn’t know how to do anything halfway. Whether it was building billion-dollar brands, flying his own plane over Patagonian peaks, or planting thousands of trees to reforest a valley, he moved through life with a mix of precision, urgency, and daring. He was a mountaineer with multiple first ascents, a whitewater kayaker who tackled some of the world’s most dangerous rivers, and a pilot who treated mountain thermals like a personal playground. Even in his seventies, he wasn’t slowing down.
In December 2015, he joined old friends including Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard and climber Rick Ridgeway for what was supposed to be a relatively easy five-day kayaking trip on Chile’s Lake General Carrera. The vast, turquoise lake is breathtaking, but it is also a place where the weather can turn in minutes. On the fourth day, gale-force winds whipped up 2.5-meter swells, and Doug’s kayak capsized in the near-freezing water.
For over an hour, his friends fought to keep him afloat until a rescue helicopter arrived. By the time they reached shore, the cold had done its work. Doug Tompkins died of hypothermia at the age of 72.
The news stunned the conservation world. It seemed almost unthinkable that a man who had survived so many risks in such wild places would be lost on what was meant to be a nostalgic outing with friends. Yvon Chouinard called him “a more worried incarnation” of himself someone who could never stop thinking about the end of society and the suffering of the natural world, and who felt compelled to act.
For Kris McDivitt Tompkins, the loss was personal and shattering. “I was, I am, madly in love with him until the day he died,” she said. But she also knew their work was unfinished. Within a year of Doug’s passing, she had finalised agreements with the governments of Chile and Argentina to create and expand national parks protecting more than 10 million acres.
Doug’s life ended in the waters of Patagonia, but his vision did not. If anything, his death hardened the resolve of those closest to him to carry his mission forward to keep buying time and space for the wild to breathe.
The Real Measure of Wealth
Doug Tompkins used to say we all have a debt to pay for living on this planet a “rent” that can’t be settled with good intentions alone. He paid his in the most literal way possible, transforming wealth earned from selling things into the permanent protection of places that could never be replaced.
His story is not without paradox. The fortune that funded his conservation work came from industries rooted in consumerism, the very culture he later opposed. Yet that paradox is part of what makes his legacy so compelling: it’s proof that our past does not disqualify us from doing immense good in the future.
The parks he and Kris created are living legacies places where forests regenerate, wildlife returns, and people can experience nature in ways that might awaken their own sense of responsibility. But perhaps the deeper legacy is the challenge his life poses to the rest of us: What will you fight to protect?
Kris put it bluntly after his death: “Abdication is not a possibility. Whoever you are, wherever your interest lies, whatever you’ve fallen in love with you get out of bed every morning and you do something.”
Not everyone can buy a million acres. But everyone can defend something they love, whether that’s a neighbourhood park, a stretch of coastline, or the air above our cities. The work starts where you stand.
Because if Doug Tompkins taught us anything, it’s this: the wild will not save itself. It takes hands, hearts, and, sometimes, everything you have.