Kris Tompkins: The record-breaking conservationist who has donated more land than anyone in history

Kris Tompkins: The record-breaking conservationist who has donated more land than anyone in history
Kris Tompkins lives in a house of just over 1,500 square feet in a California farming town. She spearheaded one of the largest private land donations in modern history, helping to protect a combined area larger than Portugal or Costa Rica. Amaro Gómez-Pablos sits down with her for an interview that challenges our very definitions of success, wealth, and legacy.
Little more than two hours out of Los Angeles, the capital of speculation and accumulation, there’s a city named Santa Paula. Here, in the same house in which she grew up as a child, Kristine Tompkins lives. Nothing in her surroundings suggests excess. No one speaks ostentatiously. And yet, from this discrete house, the plan to make one of the biggest donations of territory in modern history was hatched. A protected area of land greater than that of many a country.
The story begins with a name: Douglas Tompkins . Founder of The North Face and Esprit, a brilliant entrepreneur, intrepid adventurer and obsessive climber. A man who, after selling his shares, decided to dedicate the last third of his life (and fortune) to conserving nature. Not to finance it from afar, but to practise it in boots, with maps and no little conviction.
There was a fire raging within me, I wanted something radical. I wanted to begin at zero.
When Kris Tompkins (not known by this surname at the time) got to know Douglas in southern Argentina, she had reached an inflection point in her life. CEO of Patagonia, Inc. , influential, creative, admired she may have been, but at 40-years-old she began to ask herself an uncomfortable question: do I want to spend the next 40 years of my life doing the same?
“There was a fire raging within me,” she recalled later. “I wanted something radical. I wanted to begin at zero.” Douglas did not push her toward conservation. They met at a time when she was ready to take the leap. Together they became pioneers in environmental philanthropy.
— We had to buy land to save it from ourselves. It sounds absurd, doesn’t it — she remarked.
Kris doesn’t pull her punches.
— When the pressure between humans and nature reaches extremes, the response has to be the same. Sometimes, buying is the only way to protect.
She explains this using a domestic metaphor: if you see a dog mistreated and no one intervenes, the harm continues. If you can act, you act .
It all began like that. Douglas flew his Cessna to southern Chile and was shocked by the endangered temperate forests there. They bought their first parcel of land to save thousand-year-old larches . Then they bought another. parcel And another. There was no masterplan. There was intuition, risk and learning about what needed to be done.
When the pressure on nature is extreme, the response needs to be the same.
But soon they understood something more fundamental: money was not enough. And it’s from here that the political architecture of the project emerged. They started negotiating with governments. With more than a dozen Heads of State. From the left, right and center of the political spectrum. In Chile and in Argentina. The formula was simple and daring: to integrate the private land they acquired with public lands to create national parks on a large scale.
This wasn’t just philanthropy, it was an institutional alliance.
—“Neither left nor right,” repeated Douglas. “Forward.”
The result: 17 national parks created and expanded through donations and public agreements. A transverse model that achieved something unusual in Latin America: continuity beyond ideologies.
But the first stage, that of the parks, was not enough.
— What does this change?” —she asked herself.
— We know a park can be beautiful... but ecologically it’s incomplete
The message is direct: conservation without biodiversity is landscaping. An intact landscape with no ecological use is but a postcard.
We know a park can be beautiful… but ecologically it’s incomplete.
This is where Kris Tompkin’s leadership really began.
She promoted change toward rewilding : restoring food chains, returning species, recovering lost uses. Not only protecting perimeters, but reconstructing living systems.
The numbers speak for themselves: 34 species recovered or reintroduced into territories where they were locally extinct or on the verge of collapse. South Andean huemul deer. Ostriches. Otters. Pumas . And in Argentina, the emblematic case of the jaguar , absent for decades and of which today there are over 50 individuals recorded in processes of reintroduction and dispersion.
— Are you proud of this number?
—Yes  —She replies without false modesty—. Because they returned.
This word “returned” harbors decades of work.
National Parks can become islands. But islands don’t guarantee the future.
When the jaguars began to spread out beyond Iberá Park, Kris learned something that redefined the present stage of change.
— National Parks can become islands —she says—. But islands don’t guarantee the future.
Climate change is accelerating. Habitats are fragmenting. If species cannot move between territories, their genetic diversity is debilitated and eventually collapses.
—“We needed to stop observing the artificial limits of parks,”  she says . “That changed everything.”
Today her focus is on biological corridors: following rivers, mountain ranges and real routes for dispersion. Working with Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay and Colombia. With governments, communities and private landowners. Stitching together what is a continent of islands.
And it doesn’t consist only of creating parks. It consists of reconnecting ecosystems across South America.
After Douglas’ death 10 years ago, Kris took another strategic decision. Rewilding Chile and Rewilding Argentina had to be autonomous.
— If something happens to me, the work must go on —she says.
She didn’t want the project to depend on her name. She built teams that lead and independently manage themselves, and are deeply rooted in their territories. Her legacy should not be made up solely of tributes to her and Douglas. It is designed to be continued.
Kris has a belief that she repeats assiduously: without communities, there is no lasting conservation.
— If you want to protect a place, you first need to visit the community.
The parks generate pride, opportunities, a sense of belonging. But they are not just there for 100 years. On the contrary, Kris knows that the communities are the land’s main line of defense, because they succeed one another over generations. Theirs is always a collective… their values are common to all members.
When the conversation becomes intimate and we talk about Douglas, Kris surprises me. There’s no paralyzing nostalgia. She talks of grief as a teacher.
— You cannot love just the easy parts of your life —she says—.  You have to love everything. Including that which is lost. Because it is there where you learn about the profundity of love.
She feels closer to Douglas in discomfort than in beauty: when she’s cold, when she’s exhausted, when the road gets hard. “ Then I talk to him with all my heart,”  she says.
She defines herself as a “nomad who makes nests”. And when she imagines her final resting place, she won’t choose a country. She’ll choose a territory. Patagonia. Iberá. The places where the future is sewn. That’s where she’ll be.
You cannot love just the easy parts of your -You have to love everything. Including that which is lost. Because it is there where you learn about the profundity of love.
Just before saying goodbye, I say the obvious: you are the person who has taught humanity the most about territorial conservation. She smiles and corrects me.
— We are a very large team.
In times of accumulation, her legacy is restitution. Not by buying to possess, but acquiring to give back. And in demonstrating that power - when united with purpose and organized to survive its initiators - can change the destiny of a whole continent and maybe even his…

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