Douglas Tompkins, clothing businessman and conservationist, dies at 72
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Version 0 of 1. Douglas Tompkins, the co-founder of the North Face and Esprit clothing companies who bought up large swaths of land in South America’s Patagonia region to keep them pristine, died Dec. 8 of severe hypothermia after a kayaking accident in Chile. He was 72. The Aysen health service said the businessman, conservationist and outdoorsman was boating with five other foreigners when their kayaks capsized in near freezing lake waters in the Patagonia region of southern Chile. Mr. Tompkins died at a hospital in Coyhaique, a town more than 1,000 miles south of Santiago. Chile’s army said strong waves on General Carrera Lake caused the group’s kayaks to capsize. A military patrol boat rescued three of the boaters, and a helicopter lifted out the other three. Douglas Rainsford Tompkins was born in Ohio on March 20, 1943. The son of an antiques dealer and a decorator, he lived the first years of life in New York City before his family moved to Millbrook, N.Y., in the Hudson Valley. He began rock climbing before his teen years and later became an active skier and kayaker. “Tompkins had been an outdoorsman all his life: a daring white-water kayaker; a skier with aspirations to compete in the Olympics; a serious mountain climber who once spent four weeks holed up in an ice cave with four buddies, waiting out an epic storm until they could finally blaze a new trail to the summit,” Edward Humes wrote in “Eco Barons: The Dreamers, Schemers, and Millionaires Who Are Saving Our Planet.” Mr. Tompkins attended the private Pomfret School in Connecticut, but he didn’t graduate from high school and didn’t attend college. Instead, he spent several years working, rock climbing and ski racing in Colorado, Europe and South America. In the mid-1960s, he became one of the founders of the North Face, a small ski and backpacking retail operation in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood under the mantra to “Never Stop Exploring.” The brand has been ubiquitous in recent years in the United States, as likely to be seen on subway platforms as it was on ski slopes or in office building elevators. North Face made outdoor gear cool for teenagers, hipsters, suburbanites and celebrities. The activewear company is owned by VF Corp. of Greensboro, N.C. He also founded the Esprit clothing company with his first wife, Susie. Their marriage ended in divorce. After retiring in 1989, Mr. Tompkins was active in conservation and environmentalism. He used much of his fortune to buy hundreds of thousands of acres in Patagonia, a sparsely populated region of untamed rivers and other natural beauty that straddles southern Chile and Argentina. On his Chilean land, he created Pumalin Park, 716,606 acres of forest, lakes and fjords stretching from the Andes to the Pacific. Besides becoming one of the world’s largest private owners of land for preservation, Mr. Tompkins also sometimes became involved in local environmental issues in Chile and Argentina. Although at first his purchase of land to preserve swaths of wilderness in both counties stirred suspicion and opposition by local politicians, he shrugged off the protests insisting that he would eventually return the land to both governments to be preserved as nature reserves or parks. “If you had to go to bed every night thinking about every accusation that would come up the next day, you’d be consumed,” he told the Associated Press in a 2007 interview. “Some of that stuff is laughable. . . . You’ve just got to live with that and focus on the things you’re doing.” Mr. Tompkins is credited with helping to raise consciousness about the toll that large man-made projects can have on ecosystems. Last year, Chile’s government rejected an $8 billion project to dam two of the world’s wildest rivers for electricity, in Aysen, a mostly roadless region of remote southern Patagonia where rainfall is nearly constant and rivers plunge from Andean glaciers to the Pacific Ocean through green valleys and fjords. The HidroAysen plan would have built more than 100 miles of power lines to supply energy to central Chile. Mr. Tompkins and his wife, Kristine McDivitt, the former chief executive of the Patagonia outdoor wear firm, had objected to letting the lines cut through the park for years. The decision was seen as a victory for the couple and other environmentalists who praised the ruling as a landmark moment. Besides his wife, survivors include two daughters, his mother and a brother. Mr. Tompkins had started to prepare for his retirement in recent months by selling some farms and even the first house that he bought in Chile and where he had been living since 1990. In one of his final interviews, he was asked about his legacy and how he would want to be remembered. “By this,” he said referring to the preserved lands in an interview with Chile’s Paula magazine, published last month. “I prefer it to a statue. People are going to walk over these lands; don’t you think it’s nicer than a grave?” — Associated Press |