PUMALIN PARK, Chile — Both made their fortunes in trendy West Coast-based apparel: she as a longtime chief executive with the Patagonia label, he as co-founder of the Esprit line.
And both jettisoned the boardrooms and fashion shows to devote much of their accumulated millions to a singular, and contentious, cause: preserving the wild redoubts of this continent's southern cone, from the mist-shrouded rain forests and arid steppes of Patagonia to the wetlands and savannas of northeastern Argentina.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday June 13, 2006 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 40 words Type of Material: Correction
National park: An article in Monday's Section A about an American couple's efforts to preserve wild regions on the southern cone of South America incorrectly spelled the name of a park in Maine. It is Acadia National Park, not Arcadia.
"I come from California, where there is still great beauty, but California has been absolutely overrun," Kristine Tompkins said in the couple's cozy gray-shingled home on the spectacular Renihue fiord, along the wind-whipped Pacific Coast. It is about 700 miles south of Santiago, the Chilean capital.
"Maybe I have some of my great-grandfather's California genes. A lot of Patagonia is like California 150 years ago."
Kris is less renowned, and more diplomatic, than her outspoken husband, Douglas, a counterculture veteran who walked away from Esprit with a reported $150 million in 1990, split with his then-wife and longtime business partner and remade himself in South America as a patron of preservation. Here, in a region with no tradition of private citizens buying land for conservation, he has been alternately reviled and acclaimed.
Not known for his modesty, Tompkins sees himself in the tradition of the Rockefellers and other "eco-philanthropists" who faced down developers and bought lands that eventually were incorporated into U.S. national parks, including Wyoming's Grand Teton and Maine's Arcadia.
"Parks generate tremendous local opposition at first -- it's a given," said Tompkins, more compact and less bombastic in person than his outsized reputation would suggest. "Then, after a while, once the thing gets established, the locals are the most fierce defenders. Sometimes it takes 20 years. But go up to Yellowstone now, for example, and ask them if they want to [disestablish] that park? There would be revolution."
Many tycoons have been drawn to the mountains, plains and coasts of Patagonia, a region that straddles Chile and Argentina. CNN's Ted Turner, financier George Soros and Italy's wealthy Benetton Group have purchased expansive tracts.
But the Tompkinses live on their land, preaching ecology and serving as lightning rods for nationalistic ire and outright paranoia.
