Hot Property | Outside Online

Outside Magazine November 2001

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Wilderness
Hot Property
For a bargain price of $1.7 million, Doug Tompkins and his wife Kristine have sewn up a vast Patagonian wonderland. Who says cranky visionaries can't close a deal?
By Joshua Goodman


	Patagonia's big acre: the coastline of Monte León

MONTE LEÓN, a 243-square-mile former sheep ranch on the southern coast of Argentina, is Patagonia at its most barren, exotic, and mythically sublime. The click and roll of its beach pebbles greeted Ferdinand Magellan in 1520, when he first hit South America during his voyage around the world. The irresistible emptiness of the plains beyond haunted Charles Darwin more fiercely than anything else he saw on his 1830s cruise aboard the Beagle. And it was here in 1905 that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid rode into the town of Río Gallegos and stole all the loot in the bank.

Today, the region is playing host to another pair of barnstorming gringos. Last May, Doug Tompkins, the reclusive founder of both The North Face and Esprit de Corps, and his wife Kristine McDivitt Tompkins, former CEO of Patagonia Inc., negotiated to purchase this oceanfront parcel, roughly the size of Utah's Zion National Park, for $1.7 million—all with an eye toward locking it down forever as a nature preserve that will be managed by the Argentine government. Though it may take three years before Estancia Monte León is inaugurated as the nation's first coastal national park, the area begins welcoming visitors this month. Backpackers, bird watchers, and wilderness fans will gain access to some of the most pristine terrain in South America, home to herds of rheas and guanacos, migrating orcas, imperial cormorants, and rookeries of Magellanic penguins.

Among excitable environmentalists, this is a moment that calls for hyperventilating into an acid-free, recycled paper bag. "It's the foundation for what could be one of the most important conservation efforts in Argentina since the park system was created in 1922," says Guillermo Harris, a South American coordinator for the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society. "As a philanthropic gesture, the only comparison is to what the Rockefellers did in the Tetons almost 80 years ago." Monte León, however, is only part of the pair's grandiose scheme. Through the newly minted Patagonia Land Trust, a nonprofit group based in Ojai, California, Tompkins, 58, and McDivitt Tompkins, 51, hope to raise an additional $10 million to pay for another three parks in Santa Cruz, the southernmost province on the Argentine mainland. In the end, they intend to set aside 300,000 acres of steppe land and coast—an area twice the size of Singapore. (According to the PLT, less than 5 percent of Patagonia is now protected against development.)

For Doug Tompkins, a Deep Ecology devotee whose ideological paternalism has backfired in the past, Monte León has come to symbolize something more than conservation. Tompkins is famous for his big pockets and sometimes overbearing style—his 1992 Christmas card included a manifesto for saving the natural world from annihilation—but the Argentine venture is a real-world metaphor for coming to grips with the notion that if you want to be a titan of preservation, savvy politics and smart PR sometimes count more than cold cash.

Tompkins's tutorial began not in Argentina, but across the Andes in Chile, where he and his wife have invested more than $55 million in nearly a dozen separate land deals, mostly with absentee European owners, to create the world's largest private nature reserve, a giant enclave called Pumalín Park that's pocked with fjords and carpeted in 3,000-year-old forests (see "Lord of All He Surveys," June 1998). But Pumalín has been a bumpy project. Within a few years of arriving, Tompkins was essentially at war with the locals, suing salmon farmers for dumping trash and raising the hackles of loggers who feared he would destroy their livelihood. His mission wasn't helped by the Chilean military's concern over the fact that the final piece of land needed to unite the two halves of Pumalín would effectively cut the country in two.

Confounded by the Chileans' refusal to embrace him as an environmental messiah, Tompkins blamed his problems on xenophobic politicians and developers, who, he gripes today, sought to derail his plans through "a lot of political harassment and antagonism." He's mostly right—but he also must shoulder some blame. Having initially isolated himself at his lodge in Pumalín without phone or fax lines, he inadvertently cut himself off from local greens, and ignored increasingly absurd rumors that painted him as a CIA spy and head of a sylvan homeland for Jews. "At first, he didn't really consult the local NGO community, so a lot of us didn't know what to believe," says Manuel Baquedano, president of Santiago's Institute for Political Ecology.

This lack of outreach seems especially ironic for a former executive who understands how important image and perception can be. And in the end, it may have cost him. In 1997, his purchase of Pumalín's final parcel was blocked by the Chilean government; several months later, it was secretly sold to ENDESA, the nation's biggest energy company. End result: Tompkins still has not achieved his dream of an unbroken preserve stretching from the Pacific to the Andes.

With Monte León, Tompkins and his wife have altered their MO. Instead of covertly jigsawing together their holdings, they openly selected land already targeted for preservation. (For years, Argentine park officials had been trying to purchase the sheep ranch, but were unable to meet the asking price.) While closing the deal, the couple invited the Fundación Vida Silvestre Argentina, a local affiliate of the World Wildlife Fund, to manage Monte León and oversee its transfer to the park service. They also began buttering up Argentine movers and shakers, such as President Fernando de la Rua, who could serve as key allies—making overtures that were well received in a nation that is more cosmopolitan than Chile and, thanks to a crippling recession, is desperate for cash. "Certainly Doug and Kristine learned a lot of lessons in Chile—they'd be idiots not to have done so," says a source close to the PLT. "But they were also helped by the fact that Argentina offers a much different climate in which to do this kind of work."

Finally, Tompkins officially turned over the reins to his wife, who has played a crucial role by encouraging her firebrand husband to soften his style, and who appears to possess a flair for diplomacy that he may still lack. These skills will be essential as McDivitt Tompkins, in her job as chairman of the PLT, spearheads fundraising for future land purchases and parks development. To assist in the effort, her former employer is kicking in $100,000 worth of support, the first direct philanthropic gesture that Patagonia-the-company has made to Patagonia-the-place. "The truth is, we never got around to saying thanks," says owner Yvon Chouinard, a longtime friend of the Tompkinses. "We just used the name and that was it."

As for Doug Tompkins, despite his new, gentler style of dealmaking, he left several participants in the negotiations leading up to the Monte León deal with vivid memories of a man with an unshakable sense of mission—and a man reluctant to cede control to others. "We had heated conversations that lasted hours," says one Argentine environmental official. "I told him we weren't a banana republic and that he wouldn't earn trust if he didn't compromise." In the end, by all accounts, he did. And as a result, the Patagonian enterprise is already evoking a response that Tompkins must surely find refreshing—gratitude. "Doug's a gringo loco, and he's giving us a real kick in the ass," laughs Daniel Somma, conservation director at Argentina's National Parks Administration. "But the truth is, we needed one."

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