Douglas Rainsford Tompkins (March 20, 1943 – December 8, 2015) was an American businessman, conservationist, outdoorsman, philanthropist, filmmaker, and agriculturalist.
He founded the North Face Inc, co-founded Esprit and various environmental groups, including the Foundation for Deep Ecology and Tompkins Conservation.
[11] In 1964, Tompkins borrowed $5,000 from a bank to found The North Face, Inc., in San Francisco,[12] as a mail order and retail company, selling rock climbing and camping equipment.
[13] Two years later, Tompkins sold out his stake to Kenneth "Hap" Klopp for $50,000, using the profit to join his wife in co-founding Esprit, a fashion house.
[17] In 1968, Tompkins, his wife Susie, and her friend Jane Tise began selling girls dresses, which they had planned on the kitchen table, out of the back of a VW bus.
[18] Growing increasingly concerned about the ecological impacts of the fashion industry, Tompkins decided to leave the business world in the late 1980s.
After selling his interest in Esprit, Tompkins turned his efforts toward southern Chile, where he had spent much time climbing, kayaking, and skiing, to focus on land conservation and environmental activism.
[17][20] In November 1994, he married Kristine L. McDivitt, a former chief executive of Patagonia[citation needed] Tompkins's first major conservation project was Pumalín Park in the Palena Province of Chile, an 800,000-acre (320,000 ha) area of Valdivian temperate rain forest, high peaks, lakes, and rivers.
In 2005, then-president Ricardo Lagos declared this area a Nature Sanctuary, a special designation of the Chilean state, granting it additional environmental and non-developmental protection.
At a ceremony for signing of the accord between government and the foundation, Tompkins' long-term friend Yvon Chouinard claimed that “No other human has ever created this many acres of protected wildlands".
[17] The Iberá project was a private conservation enterprise that was spearheaded by Tompkins, working with George Soros, Harvard University,[22] and Rewilding Argentina.
Iberá Provincial Reserve, established in 1983, encompasses 1,300,000 ha of wetlands, grasslands, forest, and rangelands, including both publicly-owned lands and private cattle ranches.
Giant anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla), collared peccary (Peccary tajacu), South American tapir (Tapirus terrestris), pampas deer (Ozotoceros bezoarticus), and red-and-green macaw (Ara chloropterus) have been reintroduced to the wild, and a captive breeding program for jaguars (Panthera onca) was created to support reintroduction of jaguars to the parks.
[29] In the area around Pumalin, the Hornopiren, Vodudahue, Ventisquero, Pillan, and Reñihué farms serve as exemplars of small-scale ecological agriculture and as informal park ranger stations.
[36] Eco Barons, Edward Humes' 2009 account of the "dreamers, schemers, and millionaires who are saving our planet," uses Tompkins as the first example of this new group of philanthropists.
[37] In Brazil, the environmentalist Douglas Tompkins was specially honored during the celebrations of 30 years of the Society for the Protection of Wildlife with the video “A Natureza do Brasil” with images of Haroldo Pallo Júnior and the Brazilian pianist Salete Chiamulera.