Kristine Tompkins

Kristine McDivitt was born in 1950 in southern California, growing up in an era when the American conservation movement was gaining momentum but before the environmental crises of climate change and biodiversity loss reached their current urgency. She developed an early love for the outdoors, though her path to conservation would take an unexpected route through the business world. After studying at the College of Idaho, she moved into the burgeoning outdoor retail industry during the 1970s, a period when recreation and environmentalism were becoming intertwined in American culture.

Her career began at Patagonia, Inc., the Ventura-based outdoor clothing company founded by climber and entrepreneur Yvon Chouinard. Starting in operations, McDivitt rose rapidly through the ranks due to her management acumen, keen understanding of brand identity, and alignment with the company's environmental ethos. By the early 1990s, she had become CEO, leading Patagonia during a critical period of growth and helping cement its reputation as a company that balanced profit with environmental responsibility. Yet even as she succeeded in the corporate world, Kristine felt the pull of something deeper—a desire to move from supporting conservation to doing it directly and at scale.

In 1993, Kristine married Douglas Tompkins, the founder of The North Face and Esprit clothing companies, who had already embarked on an ambitious conservation project in southern Chile. Doug had purchased large tracts of temperate rainforest in an effort to protect them from logging and development, a vision that was initially met with suspicion and controversy in Chile. Kristine joined him in this mission, leaving her CEO position at Patagonia to commit fully to conservation work. The couple moved to Patagonia—the geographic region, not the company—and began what would become a three-decade effort to protect and restore wild lands across Chile and Argentina.

The Tompkins's approach was radical in its simplicity: buy degraded or threatened land, restore it ecologically through rewilding, then donate it to national governments to establish or expand national parks. This model required not only immense financial resources but also patience, diplomatic skill, and ecological knowledge. They founded Tompkins Conservation (originally Conservation Land Trust in Argentina and Conservación Patagónica in Chile) to coordinate land acquisition, ecological restoration, and community engagement. Their work was often controversial; critics questioned the motives of wealthy Americans buying huge estates in South America, while supporters recognized the unprecedented scale of their generosity and vision.

Central to Kristine Tompkins's philosophy is rewilding—the restoration of ecosystems to their natural, self-regulating state, including the reintroduction of apex predators and keystone species that have been locally extirpated. In Patagonia National Park in Chile, she oversaw the removal of hundreds of kilometers of fencing, the restoration of native grasslands damaged by overgrazing, and the reintroduction of species such as the huemul deer and the Andean condor. The park, created from former sheep ranches, became a model for how degraded lands could be returned to ecological health.

Perhaps even more ambitious was the work in Iberá National Park in northeastern Argentina. Once a vast wetland ecosystem, Iberá had lost much of its megafauna over the past century. Beginning in the early 2000s, Tompkins Conservation began acquiring land and launching rewilding projects on an extraordinary scale. Jaguars, which had been extinct in the region for decades, were reintroduced through a careful breeding and release program. Giant anteaters, pampas deer, giant otters, and collared peccaries were also brought back. By 2018, the project had grown to encompass more than 700,000 acres donated to create Iberá National Park, with jaguars successfully breeding in the wild for the first time in seventy years.

These rewilding efforts were never simply ecological; they were deeply social and economic. Tompkins Conservation invested in community infrastructure, ecotourism development, and education, aiming to create a conservation economy that would benefit local people. Former cattle ranchers became park rangers and wildlife monitors; new lodges and tourism businesses emerged. The Tompkins model demonstrated that conservation could be a driver of rural development rather than an impediment to it.

The culmination of Kristine and Doug Tompkins's work came in 2017 and 2018 with a series of historic agreements with the governments of Chile and Argentina. In March 2017, Kristine—by then a widow following Doug's death in a kayaking accident in 2015—signed an agreement with Chilean President Michelle Bachelet to donate approximately one million acres of land to the Chilean state. Combined with government contributions of additional land, this gift resulted in the creation or expansion of five new national parks and the enlargement of three existing ones, protecting more than 10 million acres of temperate rainforest, fjords, wetlands, and mountains. It was the largest private land donation from a private entity to a country ever recorded.

A similar agreement followed in Argentina in 2018, when President Mauricio Macri accepted the donation of more than 450,000 acres to create and expand Iberá National Park and El Impenetrable National Park in the Gran Chaco. These donations added critical habitat for endangered species and connected fragmented ecosystems. Across both countries, Tompkins Conservation's gifts and the resulting national park expansions totaled more than 15 million acres protected—an area larger than the country of Costa Rica.

These donations were structured carefully to ensure long-term stewardship. Agreements included commitments from governments to invest in park infrastructure, ranger training, and community development. Tompkins Conservation continues to operate in both countries, supporting park management, rewilding projects, and environmental education, even as the lands have formally transferred to public ownership.

Since Doug Tompkins's death, Kristine has become the public face and driving force of Tompkins Conservation, maintaining the organization's ambitious vision while deepening relationships with governments, scientists, and local communities. Her leadership style blends pragmatism with idealism—she is both a hard-nosed negotiator capable of navigating complex political landscapes and a passionate advocate for the intrinsic value of wild nature. She has spoken widely about the need for beauty and wildness in conservation, arguing that parks should inspire awe and wonder, not merely serve utilitarian ecological functions.

Tompkins has also been a vocal advocate for protecting large, intact ecosystems rather than isolated fragments. She argues that conservation must operate at landscape scale to be effective in the face of climate change and biodiversity loss, and that governments and private actors must work in partnership to achieve this. Her willingness to spend hundreds of millions of dollars and then give away the results is nearly unique in the history of conservation philanthropy, and it has inspired a new generation of conservationists to think bigger and bolder.

Kristine Tompkins has received numerous international honors for her conservation work. In 2019, she was awarded the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy alongside Yvon Chouinard. She has been recognized by organizations such as the National Geographic Society, which named her an Explorer, and has received conservation awards from governments and NGOs across the Americas. Her work has been featured in major documentaries and publications, bringing global attention to the Patagonia rewilding projects and inspiring similar efforts elsewhere.

Beyond awards, her influence can be seen in a shift in how conservation is conceived and financed. The Tompkins model—private acquisition, ecological restoration, and public donation—has been studied and in some cases replicated by other philanthropists and conservation organizations. It represents a new paradigm in which private wealth is deployed not to create private legacies but to build public goods that will endure for generations.

Today, Kristine Tompkins continues to lead Tompkins Conservation from its bases in Chile and Argentina, overseeing ongoing rewilding projects, supporting the management of donated parks, and advocating for further expansion of protected areas. Recent projects include the reintroduction of the endangered Darwin's rhea in Patagonia and efforts to restore peatlands and native forests degraded by invasive species and livestock. The organization also works on marine conservation, having supported the creation of marine protected areas off the Chilean coast.

Her legacy is visible across millions of acres of southern South America. Landscapes that were headed toward ecological collapse have been restored to vibrant, functioning ecosystems where jaguars hunt, condors soar, and rivers run clean. Communities that once depended on extractive industries are building new economies around ecotourism and stewardship. And governments that were once wary of foreign conservationists have become active partners in protecting their own natural heritage.

Kristine Tompkins has demonstrated that individuals can still make a profound difference in an age of overwhelming environmental challenges. Her work is a reminder that conservation is not merely a technical or scientific endeavor, but a moral and aesthetic one—a commitment to preserving beauty, wildness, and life in all its diversity for those who will come after us.