Kristine Tompkins

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.