The man who bought a rainforest

And it gets worse. Over the last four years Tompkins has been accused in the Chilean press of an increasingly implausible litany of offenses, from throwing impoverished settlers off his land to planning a dumping ground for nuclear waste, from spying for the United States and Argentina to plotting to establish a new Jewish homeland (Tompkins is not Jewish). Anti-Tompkins graffiti have appeared in Puerto Montt, the closest city to the park, and there have been death threats against him and his second wife, Kristine McDivitt Tompkins, former chief executive of the clothing company Patagonia.

A Santiago-based American journalist I know, who did not wish to be named, had this to say about the whole business: “As a gringo myself, I have an understanding that there are very rich men who like to do eccentric things with their money. The average Chilean mentality, however, is such that it’s hard for them to grasp people like that. In Chile there’s no history of philanthropy, so they feel there’s got to be something behind Tompkins’s purchases.”

Tompkins does have some allies in Chile. They include a few politicians and a Catholic bishop, Bernardino Pinera, who has spoken out in his support. But even some of the local conservationists, who you might expect to be enthusiastic, are lukewarm about him.

Bernardo Reyes, the technical director of a Santiago-based ecological campaigning group, says, “We’ve invited him to make presentations to the environmental community, but he rarely accepts. We are generally in favor of what he is doing, because it is the case that Chileans themselves have no economic or political means to protect native forest lands. But we don’t want to see the whole country turned into a private park.”

Chilean environmentalists are also sensitive to the accusation that they are becoming dependent on Tompkins’s foundations for financial support. In April, a nationwide environmental conference was held in Santiago, but Chile’s most-discussed environmentalist did not attend.

Where there is no computer

Tompkins is not an easy person to pin down. He spends most of the year in Chile, and there is no telephone line to his house, no computer, no e-mail and no satellite phone. A two-way radio is his only link to the outside world. To get to his home, located on the isolated fjord called Reñihué Sound, you must hire a plane in Puerto Montt, a dank, untidy harbour town where mountains of sodden red wood chips—the fastest-growing sector of Chile’s forest industry—await export to Japan. The last American to make an impression here was a celebrated fugitive, Robert Leroy Parker, aka Butch Cassidy, who used to bring cattle for sale down from his ranch in the Cholila Valley, over the border in Argentina.

South of Puerto Montt, where Tompkins’ domain begins, the landscape changes; Chile’s long coastline starts to break up into high ridges, steep inlets, and rocky islands, landforms born of the uplift of the Andes 200 million years ago. This is nature’s own Jurassic Park. The forest that covers it, stretching east to the high peaks of the Andes and south to the ice fields of Patagonia, is a primeval ecosystem that combines the aspect of northern pine woods with the verdant gloom and impenetrable profusion of a tropical rainforest. Inland, toward the Argentine border, rises the 8,104-foot snow-capped cone of Michimahuida, one of Chile’s many active volcanoes. Tompkins owns it; and several others as well.

Tompkins’s dream of Pumalín Park has its roots in his youthful passion for mountains. A prep school dropout raised in New York City, he first visited Chile as a ski bum when he was 17. He moved to California in the early 1960s and worked there as a mountain guide. He borrowed $5,000 to start The North Face, one of the first companies to capitalize on the outdoor sports boom, then sold it a few years later for $50,000 and started Esprit de Corps with his first wife, Susie Russell.

By the mid-1980s, Esprit’s sales worldwide had topped $1 billion. It was a company that epitomized the Californian hip business ethos, the culture of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog. Employee perks at Esprit included ski weekends and rafting trips in Africa; while Tompkins himself took long breaks with his climbing partner and fellow fashion entrepreneur Yvon Chouinard, the founder of the Patagonia clothes company. But Esprit sales peaked in the late eighties, and Tompkins’ marriage ended soon after. In 1990, he sold his share of the company to a partnership that included his former wife. He walked away with something over $150 million.

When he left Esprit, Tompkins was already on the roster of the liberal Californian plutocracy. But as his business enterprises had grown he found himself questioning the very process of economic globalization on which his success was built. The critical point, he recalls in a 1993 essay, came in a flight by small plane over British Columbia. As he surveyed the hundreds of miles of clear-cut forest he was possessed by “green rage” against the destruction caused by industrial behemoths.

“This is not possible,” he describes himself thinking at that moment. “This has got to stop. This is a crime against nature, against life.”

He found himself drawn to the work of the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, theorist of deep ecology, who maintains that environmental destruction can be halted only if mankind gives full recognition to the rights of other living beings, and abandons the aspiration to be master of the universe. In 1989 Tompkins established the Foundation for Deep Ecology in San Francisco—a heavily endowed enterprise now run by his daughter—then he spent a year criss-crossing the world. He toured British Columbia, Alaska, and Norway, on foot and by small plane, before turning his attention southward, to Chile. Eventually he landed his twin-engined Cessna at Reñihué to look at a run-down ranch that had been put up for sale. It was here that he found his new mission.

The view from Reñihué

At Reñihué the view from Tompkins’ boat as we cross the fjord is astounding. There are trees alight with frost, and beyond the trees, through the drifting clouds, glimpses of snowfields. It’s easy to see why this place would captivate someone like Tompkins, the former mountaineer, who at Esprit preferred the title “Image Director” to President or CEO.

As I study a map of Pumalín, though, I’m reminded of that gap in the park, the stretch of land that Tompkins does not own, separating the northern from the southern half. An agreement with the government has obliged him to call a temporary halt to his land purchases, but in conversation he does not hide the fact that he’s still hoping to get his hands on this key piece of real estate.

As he steers the boat, his wiry body upright in the cold wind, I ask Tompkins about the early days of the project. In particular, what were the first signs of local opposition?

The answer, it turns out, lies round the next headland. Here we come on a sea lion rookery, breeding place of the creatures Spanish-speakers call lobos del mar, sea wolves. As the boat hoves into view, groups of the great pug-faced creatures flop from the rocks into the water. But one sea lion does not move; a bloated corpse floating in the water, it has been shot, sometime in the last few days. Tompkins curses and stops the boat. We circle the dead creature, and he asks Ken Griffiths, our photographer, to take a picture.

“We need pictures as evidence,” he says, gesturing at the floating platforms that lurk across the fjord. “I know who did it. It’s the salmon farmers. They shoot the sea lions to stop them from stealing salmon from the cages.”

“It’s illegal, of course,” he says. “Sea lions are a protected species. When I realized this was happening, I offered a million-peso reward [about $2,500] to anyone with information about it. The salmon farmers hated that.”

Tompkins sued the salmon farmers over illegal trash dumping and won the case, but they have remained a constant source of annoyance to him. Although he owns the land, they operate on the water, so he has no control over what they do. Like other environmentalists, Tompkins abhors fish-farming. Caged salmon, he will tell you, are continually dosed with insecticide against lice; the poisons enter the food chain, affecting shellfish and other filter-feeders. But for him, one senses, it’s not just the environmental pollution. It’s the visual irritation. Rubbish from the floating platforms washes up on his foreshore. The dead sea lions we are looking at now are the last straw.

It was the quarrel with the salmon farmers that precipitated Tompkins’s current problems in Chile. Here in Region Ten, large-scale, state-subsidized fish-farming is a money-spinner: Every inlet and fjord is host to the floating cages of the fish farmers. Opposition to them is easily construed as opposition to development itself. The row that Tompkins sparked caught like a forest fire in Chile’s combustible political environment. The manager of the farm across the fjord turned out to have been a bodyguard of General Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s former dictator, and to have connections with Chile’s military establishment. Soon after Tompkins started his campaign to end the massacre of sea lions, a number of right-wing newspapers in Santiago started agitating for his land purchases to be curtailed. And he found that his application to the government for sanctuary status for the park had been put on hold.

There is puzzlement in Tompkins’s voice when he recounts these events. It’s as though he can’t quite understand why the world is not on his side. For him the park is without question a good thing, like nature itself. When he describes it his bearded face, usually somber, lights up with enthusiasm.

The Tompkins plan for Pumalín involves a system of trails and campsites reminiscent of the national park system in the United States, which was his first inspiration. But his park will be better, he says. These days, he maintains, the original ideals of the U.S. Park Service are being undermined.

“There’s a new fashion in national park administration in the U.S. Concessions, privatization, profit centers. Government economists are rejoicing, because they see that parks are starting to carry their own weight. And then they start thinking: why not auction off the scenery?  So you have more and more infrastructure–restaurants, grocery stores, video rentals. Like at Yosemite now. Eventually this turns the parks into something like Disneyland.”

A problem with the parks department

In Chile, though, the problem the parks department has is different. It has barely any financial resources at all. The entire annual budget for the country’s 40-odd national parks is not much more than Tompkins spends in a year developing Pumalín (about $750,000). Tompkins argues–and Chilean environmentalists such as Adrianna Hoffmann confirm this view–that the Chilean park system actually protects very little of the country’s remaining forest. It is the sale of timber, after all, that has helped Chile become the fastest-growing economic power in South America, a NAFTA partner in the making.

Even while Tompkins was putting together his park, a Canadian forestry company called Trillium bought a similar-sized stretch of forest in the Chilean part of Tierra del Fuego, intending it for clear-cutting. But in April came a surprising victory for conservationists: following international pressure from environmental groups, Trillium’s felling operation was put on hold.

Although he is against commercialization of the park, Tompkins knows that he has to offer something to the inhabitants of the area as an alternative to work with the logging crews or on the salmon farms. The 150 people living on the coastal fringes of his park are colonos, mostly second or third-generation settlers who work variously as fishermen and woodcutters. They cultivate the patchy soils of the region, fell its trees–often illegally–and fish its depleted waters. One of the accusations leveled against Tompkins has been that he is driving such people off his land. He denies this emphatically. On the contrary, he says, he believes it is possible to make local agriculture and husbandry more viable. To this end he is establishing demonstration farms on the edge of the park, with beehives, puma-proof fencing, and more efficient use of animal waste. He is also employing several hundred local people to build trails and campsites in the nascent park and renovate abandoned farms on its fringes. Tompkins sees this as a benefit to the community; but his critics see it as a utopian project, an unsustainable fantasy imposed on the hapless colonos who live on his land.

It is true that there is a paternalist streak in Tompkins. At Esprit employees weren’t allowed to chew gum, smoke, or drink coffee on the job. (One saleswoman was reportedly fired on the spot for saying “damn” in front of a customer.) And Tompkins could be ruthless in pursuit of control over his workforce. In the 1970s Esprit opened a garment factory in San Francisco’s Chinatown, employing a hundred-odd workers. When the workers tried to organize a union, he closed the factory down. A report from the National Labor Relations Board noted Tompkins’s “thread of paternalism,” citing his insistence that the factory was a distinctive experiment, a social model, and that it was closed down as a response to what the report termed “perceived ingratitude.” Esprit challenged the judgment, but it was upheld; the company paid more than $1 million in back wages.

Like Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana

For Tompkins, though, all this was long ago, in another life. An hour from Reñihué along the fjord is where his office is now. Past the sea lion rookery, past the fishing boats taking refuge from the stormy weather, he has built a headquarters for the southern sector of the park, the first part to be opened. Here he has installed a café, a campsite, and a row of elegant shingled cabins for visitors to stay in, each designed by him down to the last detail.

Up the road is one of the first trails to be opened, a steep, muddy track that leads to a grove of ancient alerce trees, the Patagonian cypress, Fitzroya cupressoides (named after Captain Fitzroy of the Beagle, which passed by here in the course of Charles Darwin’s famous voyage). The trees, some more than 2,000 years old, are the dinosaurs in this ancient grove. Their timber, light in weight but resistant to rot, is as precious as ivory. They are the talismanic trees of the southern forest, as the elusive puma is the talismanic animal.

“This place is one of the jewels of the park,” says Tompkins, pointing to the woods below, a dense tangle that is the haunt of parakeets and hummingbirds and the giant Araucanian wood pigeon.

“In the summer it’s all red down there. It’s a flowering forest.”

His enthusiasm is combined with an air of puzzlement that this feeling is not shared by everyone. Later that day, over supper, he says with a note of wistfulness. “To me, it always seemed so obvious, the importance of wild places.”

Tompkins’ compound on the site of the old ranch, in the shadow of the Michimahuida volcano, is a neat cluster of wooden buildings near the banks of a river that flows into the fjord. As we return from the park in the evening, smoke is rising from the chimney of the house, merging with the mist. Children from the school that the Tompkinses have established near the house are on their way to the shore to catch the boat home, their yellow oilskins billowing as they struggle against the violent gusts of wind. Kris Tompkins is in the seed house in her kitchen garden. Rain hisses on the woodstove as she checks on the germination of spinach and arugula for the spring planting. The garden is elegantly laid out with radiating wooden walkways and raised beds of earth to prevent plants from becoming waterlogged. The garden surrounds the house; and the house is built around the kitchen. This is an establishment where the production of food takes center stage: the good life, with tractable locals and more or less limitless funds.

The buildings at Reñihué, built of native stone and recycled wood, with no brick or concrete to disfigure them, have the air of a nineteenth-century frontier homestead. But this is homesteading at its most understatedly chic. The Tompkinses’ house is a hymn to timber: reclaimed alerce beams with the lichen still on them, polished floors of blond podocarpus, and, high on the wall, a pair of Mapuche carvings, sculpted by the indigenous inhabitants of south-central Chile. The paintwork is a symphony of earth colors, as are the folded woollen ponchos and tight-woven rain-proof Andean hats arranged on benches in the hall. The clothes the Tompkinses wear, khakis, cable-knit sweaters, and locally made woollen scarves, echo these colours–California style translated into the idiom of the Southern Hemisphere.

(Faced with such a rigorous exercise of taste, I find myself wishing I had scanned my wardrobe a bit more carefully before I came—that I had left behind that old but durable Patagonia rainjacket in lurid spot-you-from-the-rescue-plane turquoise, which was the dernier cri in mountaineering gear circa 1985.)

As she moves about the garden, I ask Kris Tompkins if she thinks the people they employ are in sympathy with her and Doug Tompkins’ conservationist philosophy.

“Many of them are,” she says, “but it’s a new thing for them. Their first concern is what goes on the table. And they want education for their children, so they’re forced to move out of the rural areas like this into Puerto Montt. And they don’t return. There are no schools in rural areas beyond the sixth grade. That’s the sort of thing people here worry about.”

The Tompkinses’ sojourn in this place, it seems to me, as I watch Kris Tompkins at work, resembles an Enlightenment project, something that a progressive landlord might have instituted in a remote part of eighteenth-century England or nineteenth-century Russia. It must have been something like this to visit Tolstoy at his estate at Yasnaya Polyana in the 1860s: agricultural innovation, rational resource management, and social improvement are the order of the day.

The undeveloped, sparsely populated character of the land has made it possible for Doug Tompkins to do more or less what he wants here. But there are not many countries like Chile, with the same combination of political stability, unexploited natural resources, and an open economy. This is something Tompkins is well aware of.

“Yes,” he says. “The country was just coming out of a dictatorship at the time I came here. It didn’t seem likely there’d be any land appropriation. And the government was encouraging foreign investment—though not the kind that I had in mind.”

The transformation of an ecocrat

While Tompkins has been trying to transform Chilean ideas about the environment, he has also transformed himself. He has turned his back on many of the indulgences of the rich. This shows in the house he has built. The stern aesthetic at work in the Tompkins home dictates that there should be almost no artwork on display–just wood carvings and two or three framed black-and-white photographs. The bookcases in the living room, however, are filled with art books. Their polychromatic illustrations are a shock in this carefully colour-controlled environment. But Tompkins was formerly a prominent art collector, and many of these books–on Bacon, Balthus, Léger and Hopper–reproduce paintings he once owned. Now he has sold them all, or given them to his Californian Foundation for Deep Ecology to dispose of for cash.

Among the books I notice a catalogue raisonnée of Tompkins’s collection of nineteenth-century Amish quilts, with an essay by the critic Robert Hughes. The quilts were made in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, by members of the famously technophobic Amish sect—radical Protestants who to this day reject all modern devices, including electricity and zippers. Tompkins started the collection when he was running Esprit. Only later, he says, did he realize that the Amish rejection of the modern—and their elevation of everyday objects to a high aesthetic level—presaged his own growing sense of the dangers of globalization and the importance of the genius of place. The quilts are virtually the only pieces Tompkins has kept from his original art collection.

The other books in the Tompkins house reflect this love of austerity. There is a long shelf dealing with the critique of industrial society and the works of the theorists of deep ecology. There are surprisingly few books on natural history: it is as though Tompkins thinks it is more important to understand the enemy–the consumerism he has left behind—than the mountains and forests he’s protecting. Here, in Tompkins’s study, above an unadorned wooden table, are works by Oswald Spengler, the German theorist of cultural decline; by Lewis Mumford, chronicler of urbanization; by Clifford Stoll, a critic of computer culture; by Tompkins’s friend and adviser Jerry Mander, Californian author of Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television; and by Edward Goldsmith, founding editor of The Ecologist and brother of the late Sir James Goldsmith. There is also everything available in English by Tompkins’s guru, the recondite Norwegian theorist of deep ecology, Arne Naess.

Tompkins has had a hand in funding the publication of many of these books. When he talks about their authors he sounds uncharacteristically humble. His only regret living down here, he says, is that he has fewer occasions to talk with such people. He speaks fondly of a drinking session in London with Francis Bacon. There is a quotation from Lewis Mumford pinned on the wall: “This is one of those times,” it reads, “when only the dreamers will turn out to be practical men.”

These days, Tompkins’s particular concern is the synergy among new technologies. When computers, satellite communication, television, and global trade work together, he argues, they form a new and dangerous cluster, speeding up the destructive processes in the industrial world. He himself doesn’t use computers at all, preferring pencil and paper.

“I used to be very keen on computers,” he says, frowning at mine. “I was so keen on them I was on the cover of PC World one time. But we have to confront the fact that they are accelerating the worst aspects of industrial civilization, the steamrollering of nature and culture. These things require massive enterprises, military-sized budgets for research and development. Just to get one lousy laptop. And everyone is dazzled by them–by these baubles.

“I’m sure if you asked Bill Gates whether or not he believed that the extinction of species was a good thing he’d say no. But as the captain of the industry most responsible for the current acceleration of technological change and the expansion of human enterprise, it’s him up there at the controls. And he’s driving us over the cliff. But he doesn’t see this.”

The strategic embrace of technology

There is a limit, though, to the renunciation that Tompkins is willing to make in the name of deep ecology. There may be no phone or fax or computer at Reñihué, but there are three planes, two of them lined up in the shingled hangar on the airstrip near the house. Without them Tompkins wouldn’t be able to see the land he owns. And in his office in Puerto Montt there is both a phone and a fax.

“You can call it the strategic embrace of technology,” he says, “as opposed to the substantive embrace.”

You could also, however, call it keeping technology at arm’s length, a privilege available mostly to the rich. And a further criticism, a more fundamental one from the point of view of radical environmentalism, is that Tompkins lives on the fruits of capital, on interest from investments in the global economy. Even as he decries the dark synergy of communications technology, his money is busy moving and multiplying somewhere in the lucrosphere. The park project, the Foundation for Deep Ecology (whose investment portfolio has included Microsoft, McDonald’s and Disney stocks), and Tompkins’ life in Reñihué, all depend on this, on the power of the free market.

So, I ask him, during a final conversation before we leave Pumalín, should this also be considered part of the strategic embrace of modernity? Or could it be an indication of a fatal ambivalence?

“When I was in the fashion business,” says Tompkins in answer to this question, “I was certainly part of the problem. Less so today.”

“There’s a phenomenon I call Eco Lite,” he says. “This is when you are in business and worried about the environment and you try to write another message on top of the advertising budget. We did it at Esprit to an extent. The Body Shop in England does it. Bennetton does it.”

“But what I say now is that if Luciano Bennetton sold his company tomorrow and put all his assets into a foundation that was dedicated one hundred per cent to what is supposed to be his viewpoint on environmental issues, he’d make more of an impact, one hell of an impact more than doing what he does now.”

“The same thing with the Patagonia company,” Tompkins adds. “I keep telling Yvon Chouinard that if they want to put a real dent in things they should just sell up and take all the proceeds and work 100 per cent on what they believe in. Instead they have to spend 90 per cent of their effort just to keep the wheels going.

“When I was at Esprit,” he concludes, “I spent 20 hours a day on the business and only a few hours thinking about bigger issues. Now I have 24 hours a day to concentrate on what really matters.”

The setback

The time comes to leave Reñihué. I’m reluctant to go. Who would not be? It is, without a doubt, one of the most beautiful places in the world. The astounding landscape—and Tompkins’ compelling vision of the park—remain a vivid presence in my mind. Then, some months after my visit, I learn that the project has suffered a sharp setback. The stretch of land that separates the two parts of the park, the missing piece of the jigsaw, which Tompkins was barred by the government from purchasing, is sold secretly, with government approval, to Chile’s biggest energy company, Endesa. The president of Endesa has been one of Tompkins’s leading critics.

Now, rather than Pumalín dividing Chile in half, as the military feared, it is the park that is split in two. It’s as though this was meant as a lesson to Tompkins, to show him, finally, who has the say in his adoptive country. In Chile Tompkins tells journalists that he is dolido—sad—about the sale. Time will tell, he says, what will happen to the native forest on his new neighbour’s property.

From his point of view, though, there isn’t much more time. And irritating though it is, a park with a gap is better than no park at all. Convinced of the catastrophic acceleration of global environmental destruction, Tompkins says he remains set on doing everything he can to try and stop it. And the park he has created at Pumalín is something that could only be achieved by someone with his out-of-the-ordinary combination of wealth, idealism and stubbornness. It is a rare convergence of means and ends, a project that both Chileans and non-Chileans, in the long run, may find reason to applaud.

Afterword

On 8 December 2015, Doug Tompkins’ kayak capsized during an expedition on the General Carrera Lake in southern Chile. He died of hypothermia in hospital hours later. He was 72 years old. He is survived by his wife Kris and two daughters by his first marriage.