Co-founder, The North Face & Esprit · Tompkins Conservation
1943–2015 · Tompkins Conservation founded 1990
“Beauty is the salve that allows us to keep working for what we love.”
Doug Tompkins, Tompkins Conservation public statements.
Doug Tompkins co-founded The North Face (1966) and Esprit (1970), then in 1989 sold both and moved to Patagonia to spend the rest of his life buying wild land and turning it into national parks. Over twenty-five years he and Kristine McDivitt Tompkins (former CEO of Patagonia, the clothing company) acquired more than 2.2 million acres across Chilean and Argentine Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego — the largest private land donation in conservation history. The land was returned to the Chilean and Argentine governments as national parkland between 2017 and 2019, in two ceremonies attended by both presidents. Doug died in a kayaking accident on Lago General Carrera in December 2015.
Tompkins Conservation — now run by Kris Tompkins — continues to operate as the most consequential private land-and-wildlife conservation programme in the Americas. Their rewilding work has reintroduced jaguars, giant anteaters, pampas deer and Andean condors to ranges they had been absent from for a century. The Patagonia Park, Pumalín Park, and Iberá Park systems are now protected forever as a direct result of Doug Tompkins' decision in 1989.
Tompkins was not a yacht owner. He travelled the Patagonian fjords by light aircraft and small boat. He is included in this collection because the coast that the Wind Voyage 110 will sail along on its Cape Horn → South Georgia voyage is, in the most literal sense, the coast Doug Tompkins protected.
When a Wind Voyage 110 owner looks east from her deck off the Patagonian coast, the land she sees is national park because of Doug Tompkins. There is no more direct connection between a yacht voyage and a single act of stewardship anywhere on earth.
If ocean voyaging is something you’d like to pursue, we have developed a way to do it using wind and solar power out of our respect for the oceans.
Discover the FlagshipThe North Face was co-founded in 1966 by Doug Tompkins and Susie Tompkins Buell. Doug later co-founded Esprit (1970) with Susie before stepping away from both businesses in 1989 to devote his life to conservation in Patagonia.
Between 1989 and 2015, Doug and Kristine Tompkins acquired more than 2.2 million acres of wild land in Chilean and Argentine Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. The land was returned to the Chilean and Argentine governments as national parkland between 2017 and 2019 — the largest private land donation in conservation history.
Doug Tompkins died on 8 December 2015 from hypothermia after his kayak capsized on Lago General Carrera (Lake Buenos Aires) on the Chile–Argentina border. He was 72. His wife Kristine Tompkins continues to run Tompkins Conservation.
