Hope Is A Verb - Kris Tompkins - A Love Letter to Rewilding
Episode Date: August 8, 2024Meet Kris Tompkins, a rewilding legend who, alongside her late husband Doug, has helped protect over 14 million acres of biodiverse landscape across Chile and Argentina. This is a story of great love,... great loss and what it takes to create a living legacy, against the headwinds of great odds. To find out more about Tompkins Conservation: www.tompkinsconservation.org If you would like to contact us directly, send an email to: amy@fixthenews.com
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Hope is a reminder.
It's the fuel of your soul.
It's so much more infused with action.
Ability to see a much better future.
You really have to earn it to have it.
Hope is happiness.
Welcome to Hope is a Verb, a podcast about what it takes to change the world
through conversations with the people who are making it happen.
I'm Amy.
I'm Amy. I'm Gus. And in each episode, we shine a spotlight
on the ordinary heroes who are stitching our social fabric together,
mending our planet and creating solutions to some of today's biggest global challenges.
In this episode, conservation pioneer Chris Tompkins tells us what it takes to rewild a continent
and why we all need to rewild ourselves.
I can't even imagine not doing it.
I have been one of the luckiest people on earth.
You know, there's a lot of heartbreak in everybody's life,
but I love doing this. And whatever it takes, that's a lot of heartbreak in everybody's life, but I love doing this.
And whatever it takes, that's what I enjoy doing.
We're back for the third season of this podcast,
and, I mean, wow, recording these conversations
has been such a remedy for everything that's
been going on in the world.
We can't wait to share them with you over the coming weeks, starting with this one.
Earlier this year, I was at a conference in Vancouver where I met one of the great legends
of rewilding, Chris Tompkins, the former CEO of Patagonia.
She traded the corporate hamster wheel for the
wilds of Chile after falling in love with the late Doug Tompkins and his vision to protect
some of the world's great havens of biodiversity in Chile and Argentina. Over the past 30 years,
Chris and her team have upped the ante at every turn and kept on going despite headwinds of
government opposition, personal grief, and even Mother
Nature herself. To date, the Tompkins Foundation has driven the creation of 15 national parks,
protecting over 14 million acres of land and reintroducing more than two dozen species
across South America. This episode is a love letter to the millions of acres that Chris and Doug have
dedicated their lives to rewilding, but also to that question that lives in each and every one of
us. How can I make a difference? Now, before we get started, if you have small kids around,
you might want to grab some headphones. There are a couple of colorful words in this conversation that could add up in the swear jar.
Chris, welcome to the podcast. We have been looking forward to this conversation
for many weeks. So happy to be here, really. There aren't many people who are talking about
the subjects that you seem to be focusing on. And so it's a delight to be here, really. There aren't many people who are talking about the subjects that you seem to be focusing on.
And so it's a delight to be with you guys.
Well, let's dive straight into it.
Is there anything in the world that's giving you hope right now?
Well, there's some individual things like jaguars back in the wild
in the middle of the South American continent, things like that. But mostly I find my sense of hope by realizing that we have to earn hope.
You really have to earn it to have it.
And we have to deserve having hope rather than asking someone else,
do you have hope?
And I think at least when they ask me this, I often feel like
they just want to know that somebody out there has hope and then that's good and they can go on
with whatever they're doing. And I look at it 180 degrees in the other direction that we need to work to deserve it. And I always think of that in terms of us abdicating our futures.
That's what I really think mostly about these days,
besides the conservation work and our rewilding work.
My personal challenge is to not hope that we have hope,
but go out and deserve it and work like hell toward it.
That's an interesting way of looking at it because you're kind of talking about hope as
an individual responsibility rather than as a collective reaction to something. You've been
doing this work for almost 30, I think more than 30 years, and you've been looking at the
big picture for a very long time.
How are we doing?
Are we doing enough to protect the planet?
Factually, no, we're not.
We met during my TED Talk in April up in Vancouver,
and the TED Talk I had wanted to give is circled around the hard truth that the very leadership, whether it's in large
corporations or the head of sovereign states, there isn't actually a willfulness to do what's
necessary to combat not only climate change, but the litany of things we know that are already
forcing more than a billion people to really be struggling on
this earth. Of course, we know on the non-human side, it's tragic the number of territories that
are being destroyed. But of course, on any street, there are beautiful things to witness.
And I believe that. I believe in the small streets. I believe in the local community
leaders who want to do something for their individual communities on a small scale and
a very meaningful scale. I do think there is that willfulness to not accept a future that is so heavily in question.
That's one of the things I talk about a lot is that this requires everybody to think about
what they're going to do when they realize that they no longer want to abdicate their
future just because it seems daunting or because they have this sense of hope that may or may not be
justified depending on where you are. I love this idea of the small streets,
because suddenly there's something that we can do. How do you reconcile the big picture
with the small streets? I think there is a collapse collapse taking place now and some of it's social.
If you live in Sudan or you live in some of the South Pacific islands, we know these things
socially, environmentally, of course. All of this would take place at even a more rapid velocity
if people, and I mean hundreds of millions of people around the world,
working to slow down these trends. You have to really admire them all because they're doing so
in the force of great headwinds. And they do it anyway, because not to do it is to roll over.
not to do it is to roll over. I think it's so important. A lot of when I'm speaking in public,
and really, I don't think I ever have when someone hasn't asked me later, well, what can I do?
Sometimes it's a young person. Sometimes it's somebody like me in their 70s. And I always say,
that's not the question. The question is, what do you have to offer?
That's the question.
I don't care if you can paint a fence or you're an accountant or you're a heart surgeon or you're a homemaker.
It does not matter.
What do you have to offer?
Because you have to understand that about yourself.
because you have to understand that about yourself.
And then when you understand that,
there are a million ways that you can join in this long, wide front of social movements,
environmental movements, and so on.
It's very interesting when you say,
tell me what you can do.
What are you good at?
Go take that, and that is your sword. Because there are
people out there, individuals and groups and local governments who need that. And that kind of jars
people to be asked, what are you good at? It shakes people. Oh, well, I am good at this. I do
have something to give because I can't, and I say this to people,
I can't tell you what you should do. Never met you before. I don't know where you live.
I don't know what you love. So let's start the other way around.
Chris, your work in South America began as a love story. Can you tell us about meeting Doug and how it changed the
direction of your life? My first husband was a climber and I worked for Yvon Chouinard who was
a climber and Doug was a climber. So we were certainly known to one another, but then we met
up in Southern Argentina and just fell in love like that. And I knew I wanted to do something else
besides work at Patagonia, but I had no idea what. And what Doug brought to my life was great love,
but he also had an idea that I kind of glommed onto and then decided to retire from Patagonia
and move to Chile. He was two years ahead of me in terms of leaving Esprit.
He had sold his half of the company back to his former wife, Susie.
And so he had cash in his pocket and created this foundation
that was going to be based on a deep ecological frame of mind and architecture.
And he had spent time in Chile and Argentina in
the 60s, and he never lost sight of how he felt on those trips down there. So once he was out of
the clothing business, he went around and looked at some different regions. But definitely when
he got back down to Chile and Argentina, it was clear to him that
clear as mud, that this would be a place to settle in. And then he began realizing that these
mostly foreign landowners in the southern section of the country were anxious to get out. And of
course, there were no buyers. This is way
South in the country, tough weather, tough to get to, very isolated. So he bought a couple
properties down there, which they weren't small, but they didn't reach what we were able to do
eventually. He wasn't thinking about donating them as national parks, but he did see them as conservation possibilities.
But it was really nascent. I arrived there in 93, and then it just kind of grew organically.
You try something, and if it didn't collapse and fail utterly, and it felt like something
you'd want to do again, and then you try it again and again and again but there was no great scheme
when we got started i mean this is the 90s there's no rewilding forums and associations and it's not
you know the sexiest thing on the internet in conservation so there's none of this you're
you're just down there doing this thing i mean the internet is still pretty early in its infancy.
We didn't have internet, electricity, phones.
Yeah.
And in and amongst all of it,
you've taken on this ridiculously ambitious idea.
You must have had so many speed bumps and roadblocks.
How do you kind of keep going through all of that?
Well, of course, the early 90s were a shit show for us in Chile.
The national government, the early 90s were a shit show for us in Chile.
The national government, the regional governments were very suspicious of what we were doing.
And, you know, the way I look at it now compared to when it was actually going on is very different. Today, I see absolutely.
Why were we shocked that people would be suspicious of the motives for our work?
I think it's shocking that we were so naive not to
expect it. And remember, it wasn't too long after Pinochet left the government. He left in 89. So a
lot of the military still had a kind of chokehold on a lot of the thinking. I mean, there were a lot of death threats,
lots of pretty wacky things said about us.
And what were these big landscapes?
Would they be a new Jewish state?
An Air Force base for Argentina to finish off Chile once and for all.
Definitely Doug had the thicker skin than I did.
I mean, he wasn't immune to it, but he did understand that if we just kept working
and be completely transparent about every step we took,
that eventually once they could see what we were doing,
building these parks and all would be welcome.
But it took a long time.
It took a while, I would say.
In 2015, you lost Doug in a kayaking accident.
What did you learn about grief?
And has it changed your relationship to the work?
I will say one thing for sure.
It just left me fearless.
And working without him, you take on a lot more direct responsibility
in terms of how things go.
Not that I have been afraid of too many things in my life, but I have no fear about taking
something on or participating in things that are difficult and risky.
And I mean, you don't want to be stupid about it.
You still have to build strategies and make sure that you're on the right track.
But that said, right after he died, I mean, it was weeks after he died,
I asked the head of the Chilean team and the head of the Argentine team
to realize that they have to become independent
and that I want to do it as fast as possible.
have to become independent and that I want to do it as fast as possible.
Because I knew that Doug's dead, and if something happened to me, they needed to be as independent and strong and fierce on their own.
And that was really painful for all of us to do.
But to your question, that's been a big part of it.
I still work with them every day,
but they are absolutely independent,
and they are capable of any and everything
that I could ever put on the table.
Because it's not just the work that we did during our lives.
We want the second generation,
which is the one I'm just referring to, and then their responsibility to build a third generation and a fourth generation,
because you want this style of conservation and rewilding to continue. It doesn't
have anything to do with us. It's how do you drive that forward?
You know what I think is amazing about Chris's story is that in the wake of losing the love of her life, she didn't deal with her grief as many people might have by pouring
herself into her work. Instead, she focused on empowering the people around her and future-proofing
the project that she and Doug were so committed to. And that eventually became the golden thread
holding it all together. You know, it reminds me of a line from Chris's TED Talk that I loved,
that if you can achieve your vision within a lifetime,
you're just not thinking big enough. And this is the thing, right? If you want to create a lasting
impact, you have to get other people involved and at some point hand over the reins and allow the
work to expand beyond you. And that's the real gift and the real challenge of creating a legacy.
What I find so extraordinary about your and Doug's story, Chris, is that you both came
to this work with such a long view.
It has been the long view. I'm interested in what this idea of legacy
means to you and how this longer view changes your approach to the work. Firstly, when we got
started, we didn't have all of this completely clear. We were putting a team together in a circumstance where we're
probably the two most unpopular people in the entire Southern Cone of the continent.
I know that a lot is said about Chris and Doug, and that is 15% of the story.
Most of the people whom I work with in the leadership of both countries,
Most of the people whom I work with in the leadership of both countries,
with Carolina and Chile, I've worked with them for 31 years and with Sophia, 25 years. So we would not have done what we've done so far or what we're doing right now in the absence of these people.
There's no question.
So we weren't thinking about how long this trajectory might be.
We were in terms of what happens to the land,
but we weren't thinking about it for the first few years in terms of,
well, we're onto something here.
And how are we going to see this in 50 years or 100 years?
But I think Doug's death really brought that into focus for me.
And once I saw it, I couldn't get it out of my mind. I had to get these guys to be independent
and completely geared up and enthusiastic. You know, we went through spells where we all thought
we'd been put up for adoption. You know, I'm pushing them, fledging them, go jump out of the nest from 50,000 feet.
And I'm thinking, oh God, they're not going to need me anymore. It was hard. I mean, it's a
family. You work as a team in these areas that are so isolated and you have to depend on one
another in a way that you would never have to do in even a village. It was so clear to me that we
just have been really blessed with people who have come along and really a lot of them came to us.
I'm terrible at hiring people. I'm famous for blowing it no matter what.
And now we have what we would call the third generation. They're in their 30s,
and they're screaming. I mean, they're fantastic. It's amazing, the young people who want to work
on these projects. So in a way, the best people come because you're a magnet, not because you're
out looking for them. They're coming to you and saying,
this is what I want to do.
The work itself attracts extraordinary people.
In recent years, your focus, as you mentioned earlier,
has been the return of keystone species
to a lot of the areas that you have protected.
Can you tell us about some of these projects
and the difference
between conservation and rewilding? It's a very good question and I don't help this issue because
the way I talk about it. So for us, rewilding is the acquisition of sufficient territory so that we support the restoration of species, be it mammals,
top predators, all the way through to hundreds and hundreds of thousands of really damaged
Patagonia steppe grasslands. The first step in rewilding in our case is the aggregate,
putting together enough territory that you can rewild on
it. I mean, especially when we're talking about top predators a lot of the time, but not always.
We work with 24 species with rewilding Chile and rewilding Argentina. If you take the ñandús,
the lesser reyes in Patagonia, think of a small ostrich. If you have 10,000 acres,
you can find the strategies to make sure that those numbers, low and fragile, can be blown up
into numbers that are healthy and you can imagine them moving forward again. If you take a jaguar, they've been extirpated in northern Argentina
since the 1930s. When we decided to take that on, the Ibera wetlands, which is the location in
northeastern Argentina, that's just under two million acres. And they need every bit of it
because they're going to disperse. When it comes to jaguars, ocelots, pumas,
two million acres isn't enough. That's why we're expanding the concept of rewilding,
not just to the territories where we've saved a bunch of land, but now we are looking at how do
you reconnect the southern cone of Latin America to the rest of the continent biologically?
When it comes to top predators and many species, it's never enough.
You can't really buy your way out of that dispersing necessity.
So as we've expanded these projects, 15 national parks, roughly 15 million acres inside these parks, we know
that it's not enough.
I mean, it's almost laughable.
It's so much not enough.
And we have really blown up our concept of what is rewilding because of the lessons we've
learned with all the variation of species we've been working with for the last 18 years, every one of them needs a different kind of territory.
And some of them have to go to hell and gone to be healthy.
I don't know if that answers your question.
No, it's a great answer.
And it's actually really nice to hear about the mechanics.
My inner conservation geek really enjoys those answers. 10 years ago, I don't
think I'd ever come across the term rewilding. And now it's impossible to not see it.
Oh, yeah. No, it's like we have a friend, Yvonne, who owned Patagonia Company, founded it and owned
it. He always says the words like adventure, gourmet. Well, rewilding is coming up on that. And it's really
important that people understand that rewilding is only rewilding when you leave behind fully
functioning ecosystems. That's what it actually is. You have to be really careful with these words,
what it is and what it isn't.
This is now something you can find on every continent except Antarctica. And who knows,
maybe it's on Antarctica as well. But do you feel like you were the pioneers in that respect? And
now it's kind of exploded as an idea? No, I don't think that we were the
grandfather and grandmother of Rwilding. No.
I mean, we were going to South Africa.
What they were so good at, or they still are so good at,
is the translocation of individual species.
Unbelievable.
We learned so much because they have the different species and they are bought and sold and moved into territories,
maybe a Northern Kenyan, but they came out of South Africa.
And so we've spent a lot of time in Africa trying to figure out how do you do
that? How do you move around these top predators?
I think if we've contributed something to rewilding, I would say our message that just owning land, that's the first step rather than the last one.
It's for others to judge if we've made a difference there, but I do hope that we have contributed to the realization that rewilding is bringing something to its full expression or as close as you can get.
I think maybe we've contributed to kind of hammering away that just buying land, holding on to it.
It's better than it being logged.
No question.
it being logged, no question. But go that next step of understanding who lives there or who used to live there, but they're not there anymore. And is there anything with a local government or
national government or your neighbors that you can help to try to make what you own a kind of
petri dish that over time expands? This kind of brings me to the next question I had, which is,
there's also been a shift from the old school fortress style conservation to conservation
that's a lot more collaborative with local communities. I'd love to hear a little bit
more about the work that you do with local communities in some of the places that you've
worked. Well, first of all, we've never bought
any land that had anybody living on it. In fact, in the early days of Pumalini, there were small
farmers out on the coast where Pumalini is, who just couldn't get their titles because Chile was
developing the extreme south of the country. And it took them decades to kind of get everybody their titles over time.
So when we started buying land in Pumalien, Doug, this wasn't my idea. He said, there's no way we
can buy land near these neighbors if they don't have their titles. Because what could give you
more fear than somebody buying up a lot of land and you're sitting there
and have no means to get your titles because you can't afford a lawyer. You're living in a roadless
area, no communication. And so we had a team of people, three people, and all they did for
seven years was work on getting all these people their titles. That's how long it took. But we were
always very communicative. And a lot of the people working on these different park projects, they're
local people. And that was the number one thing that helped save our necks, that's for sure.
And I firmly believe if you take a place like Ibarra, it has 10 small communities around this 2 million acre wetlands.
And they were forgotten towns, incredibly poor.
Some of them Guarani people from Misiones and just in terrible, terrible straits.
And now they're a part of Ibarra tourism.
And now they're a part of Iwara tourism. And we know that if the national government ever tries to unwind Iwara as a national park, they would be in a world of shit, not by us. We'll probably be gone. the local communities who are protecting their place, their scene, their futures,
and what they've developed. Because this jewel of biodiversity and beauty was always there. We didn't bring it. We just saw it. If you don't have that relationship between local communities and conservation projects, you can kiss them goodbye
because eventually they will be the last line of defense of protecting their territories.
This is such big work and listening to you speak, it's the more you do, the more there is to do.
I mean, you have spent the last, you know, over 30 years in the full force of that headwind
that you spoke about at the beginning of this conversation. What drives you to keep doing this
work? I can't even imagine not doing it. I love being in the field. I love the people I work with,
all the leaders and all the hundreds of people we've
worked with, you know, this normal evolution of team members. I mean, I still am involved in
Patagonia Company after 50 years. I have been one of the luckiest people on earth. You know,
there's a lot of heartbreak in everybody's life, but I love doing this. And my
role, of course, will change over time. That's fine by me. But I'll spend, you know, four months a year
down there. Whatever it takes, that's what I enjoy doing. I mean, success is not the right fit for this kind of work,
but has there been a moment that you can share with us where a project really did work and what that felt like?
One of the most, there are a lot of these moments
in rewilding in Chile and Argentina,
but I do can say that after 10 years of working with jaguars
and having the first female scuttle out with her two cubs, it just showed us that this is possible.
Once we knew it was possible, then it propelled us to do so many more things. And that's what
each one of these little steps signifies. It's like getting a green light when you get up in
the morning and just go for broke. If you could go back to yourself at the beginning of this journey,
what advice would you give? I don't know that there are so many things I would change because
it was so shocking to go from, you know, Patagonia company to a roadless disconnected place.
me to a roadless, disconnected place. I know, I do know. I don't know that it's advice,
but this is the number one thing I learned. Never be afraid to change your life 180 degrees because worst, worst case, if it didn't work or in fact for you personally, it was a mistake,
it was a bad decision, you can always turn around. All of us
feel like making big changes in your life is too risky. And I have learned that the risky thing
is not being confident or bold enough. Chris, it's been over 30 years since the
Tompkins Foundation started. What would you like to see happen for the next 30 years?
You know, I just really think that it's happening.
I think if I died this afternoon,
we've accomplished what we set out to as two individuals.
I would die smiling today.
You heard me say this in Vancouver.
I love this quote,
that sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.
And I really, when I heard that, it's Edward Abbey, I thought, yeah, I don't want to die
wishing I'd done more.
So Tompkins conservation itself is the least important thing to me. How can we use even my own name? How can
we use these assets to drive what Rewilding Argentina and Rewilding Chile are doing?
That's the only thing that matters to me about my own legacy, about anything.
It's really not important. I don't look at myself that way doug certainly wouldn't have
we've got one last question we've spoken about rewilding a lot in this conversation is there a
way that people could maybe rewild themselves it's not just about rewilding landscapes oh yeah
i think all of these things start with rewilding our own minds get out of your freaking phones and computers and remember that your lifeline is something
much greater than that.
It's not that you give all those things up, of course, but it would be a beautiful and
earth-changing thing if we humans could remember that we're a part of something that is so
extraordinary, so necessary for our own
survival. If you don't know where you came from, you don't possibly know where you're going. I'm
talking about where do we come from? Where does the heartbeat stem? We have to know that about
ourselves and honor that lineage. We only, as far as we know anyway,
we think we have one life.
We have this life.
If you have dreams or desires tucked
into the back part of your head,
bring them to the forefront
because you don't have anything to lose.
Conversations like this tend to plant a seed
It's a reminder of what we can do
rather than sitting on the sidelines of a problem
feeling like it's just all too big
So if you've been waiting for permission to change the world
or even a small corner of it
consider this your personal invitation from Chris to step
up and show up in whatever capacity you can. If you want to find out more about Chris and
follow the work of the Tompkins Foundation, check out our podcast notes for more details.
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