The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Rewilding 15 Million Acres: Why True Wealth Means More Than Money with Kristine Tompkins

Episode Date: April 2, 2025

While the wealth of the world's richest individuals continues to accumulate year after year, funding billions into AI, technology, and innovation, our true wealth—the planet's natural ecosystems—receives only a fraction of the funding needed for restoration and protection. What can we learn from those rare individuals who have dedicated their lives to conserving and rewilding the Earth, choosing to invest in nature rather than the next market breakthrough? Today Nate is joined by conservationist Kristine Tompkins, to discuss her decades of work on conservation initiatives in South America, the value of personal responsibility, and how she has cultivated a way of living without fear in taking on unprecedented environmental challenges. Kristine also reflects on the limitations of money as a metric for success and fulfillment, advocating instead for using wealth towards bettering the ecological state of our planet and rediscovering the joy of connecting with humanity's place in nature.  How can we, as individuals, 'earn' hope for the future of our planet through engaging in conservation work? What can be learned from upending industrial norms to restore a personal relationship with the natural world? Finally, how can embracing individual responsibility lead us away from passive activism to usher in active and meaningful work in service of all life on Earth?  (Conversation recorded on January 29th, 2025)     About Kristine Tompkins: Kristine Tompkins is an American conservationist and the president and co-founder of Tompkins Conservation, as well as the former CEO of Patagonia. For nearly thirty years, alongside her late husband Doug Tompkins, she has committed her career to protecting and restoring wild beauty and biodiversity by creating national parks, restoring wildlife, inspiring activism, and fostering economic vitality as a result of conservation. As the president of Tompkins Conservation, Kristine Tompkins oversees a multitude of projects rewilding the Americas. Having protected approximately 15 million acres of parklands in Chile and Argentina through Tompkins Conservation and its partners, Kristine and Douglas Tompkins are considered some of the most successful national park-oriented philanthropists in history. Photography Credits for Kristine Tompkins Headshot: Adam Amengual   Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future Join our Substack newsletter Join our Discord channel and connect with other listeners  

If the accumulation of wealth is the game, it's pretty boring. It's not enough to be wealthy anymore. It is, what did you do with the assets you had? And I don't mean just financial. I mean your arms and legs and your mind and your love and your assets as a social mover and shaker. Then your life gets really interesting. You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Higgins.

On this show, we describe how every. energy, the economy, the environment and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification. Today I am pleased to be joined by Christine Tompkins, the president and co-founder of Tompkins Conservation and former CEO of the apparel company Patagonia. nearly 30 years, along with her late husband, Doug Tompkins, she has committed her career to protecting and restoring wild beauty and biodiversity in South America by creating parks, restoring

wildlife, inspiring activism, and fostering economic vitality as a result of her conservation efforts. Through this work, Tompkins' conservation and its partners have protected approximately 15 million acres of parklands in Chile and Argentina. This conversation with Christine about her years at Patagonia, her shift towards full-time conservation, and her mindset towards diving into these uncharted projects in her life exemplifies what it means to use power in service of life. When hearing about Christine's story,

I ask you to consider what power you hold in your own life, through your skills, your community, your network, and your voice, and what might you do with it? Additionally, if you are enjoying this podcast, I invite you to subscribe to our Substack newsletter where you can read more about the system science underpinning the human predicament, where my team and I post special announcements related to the Great Simplification, as well as some upcoming written content. You can find the link to subscribe. in the show description. With that, please welcome Christine Tompkins.

This was a fantastic, intimate, and hard-hitting conversation. Chris Tompkins, welcome to the program. Thank you. Very happy to be here. I have 20 prepared questions, and 30 seconds ago, I've just decided to throw them all out and just have a conversation with you as someone who cares about the same things that I do. and we'll see where it goes. I hold you in deep respect because you are someone who has in the battle between power and life.

You are squarely on the side of life. But even more impressive than that, you've been doing that for decades before it was cool and achieved status. So lots of areas to go here, but maybe we could start with you. were the CEO of Patagonia, the clothing company, what went through your mind and your heart when you decided to quit and formally with your late husband, Doug Tompkins, divert your life's energy towards conservation instead of business as usual? Like what was going through your mind back over 30 years ago? Well, Patagonia company that never really was business as usual. So the leap that I took wasn't nearly as wide as most people think. I started, I met Yvonne

Chonard when I was 15. He was 28. He's 86 now. And I started working for him full time when I got out of college and had no idea what I was going to do. And then shortly thereafter, he wanted to start making clothes and he wanted to call it Patagonia. And so, okay, sounds good. And over a bit of time, he asked if I would be willing to kind of take it on. And first we called me a general manager, and then I don't know what else. And then eventually, just for the times and how you communicate with people, we started calling my role, the CEO role. and we created and built that business.

It grew very fast. It was, you know, in those days in the early 70s, there weren't tons of outdoor clothing manufacturers and those circumstances evolve into a couple different things. One, we could kind of make it up as we went along. and Yvonne and his wife, Melinda, always understood that business was a thing, but business was not always the thing. And so we were charged with by our own convictions to be really good at creating not a good company, but a great company. And what's the criteria for that? What makes something great? of just good. And in our case, again, with the Channard's really understanding the unwinding of the natural world and human societies pretty early on, they knew that the company should be used as an

asset toward changing the world. So those things were woven together at a very early time. By the late 70s, there was no question about this. And so it's very difficult to see what I eventually decided to do 24, 25 years later, to retire as a 43-year-old and go with my soon-to-be husband, Doug Tompkins, to a roadless area in South Chile and start working in conservation and rewilding full-time. So it wasn't a leap that most people imagine it must have been. It was a leap, that's for sure. But all the things I've done in my life have been strung together by a piece of thread

that is probably since birth still tugging at me. All those things are connected. And what is that thread? Good question. I get asked that an awful lot. And I asked our mother, who I think she was probably 96 at the time, what I was like as a child. And a few times I asked her that before she died. She always said something like, A, you were a handful, B, nothing was ever enough.

And C, you had no breaking system. There was no, you never, the thought of throwing the brakes on something, regardless Was it one of the horses or whatever it was? So I was probably whatever I, whatever personality traits I have now, they'd been there a long time and they propel me forward. When you were five years old, do you have any memory of your love for the natural world? No, not really, because we grew up on our great-grandfather's ranch, and so we were outside all the time, usually forced to be outside because having, us indoors was just too much. And so we were outside all the time, but the concept of nature, the concept of human dependence on this, quote unquote, outdoors was completely foreign to me

until, gosh, I was probably in my late teens, early 20s, when I began to understand that that milieu is we are as teeny part of it rather than the other way around. There's no way I would have understood that as a young kid. So you mentioned you and Doug Tompkins moved to a roadless area. You were pretty remote. What were the feelings that came up on that first adventure relative to being the CEO of a large multinational clothing company at the time. It was so extreme. The shift was so extreme. I retired on a Friday, packed up two little bags, and got on a plane for Santiago, and then for much further south. And, you know,

this is truly a roadless area in the extreme southern portion of a very rough country, where the Andes fall into the Pacific. no electricity. We just had wood for heat, wood for cooking. So it was, and though I lived in Venezuela as a kid for a while and growing up in agricultural California, of course you know some Spanish, but we went from English full-time to Spanish full-time. We just had the planes to get in and out with. So the weather, we learned how to judge not only what the weather is by looking out the window, but really understanding how barometers work. I mean, there's no nothing. We had no phones. We were using HF and VHF radios. So it was extreme on two sides. One, you're going from a little

hot shot female CEO. and offices in Paris and around. And then you're right there in this temperate rainforest. It was a deep shock, cultural shock. And then I really began to understand our role, our place in nature. Then I really began to understand it because it was so extreme. and living next to swollen rivers, what does that actually mean? How tenuous are those things?

Then I really began to see, I am so tiny, and that's when I began to understand nature in the sense that as a nearly 75-year-old now, I understand it very clearly. Sometimes I go fishing in Canada with a bunch of my male relatives and we rent a houseboat on Lake of the Woods or Rainy Lake or Lexul and then we'll find some island and just park there and have a shore lunch or something. And just walking around, I get the sense that I'm the first human that ever walked in this particular area. And it's this really eerie, profound feeling. and you probably felt that every day in Chile. Do you know of what I speak? Yes, of course, I know that I felt it every day,

not only being observant, more observant, but also just trying to get from early morning to the end of the day in one piece and the dependence on yourself was a whole other revelation. to us, I think, that was profound. And this is what you're talking about a little bit as you, as you land down in an isolated area.

We're not used to having to depend on ourselves. I wasn't. I always had packed in with family around me and then all the years with Patagonia, which I never actually quit. my 52nd year anniversary is this year. But you realize what it meant to be human right up to the last 200 years for most people. And it also reminds you that of 8.2 billion people on the planet today, I don't know.

What is it? Is it a billion people are moderns and industrial? people like the two of us. Billions of people today live around this earth in the way that I'm describing now. And it was so shocking to me because I am a modern. I am an industrial person who decided to purposely go forward. I almost said go back. I have to change that.

go forward into a way of life that most people on earth are very accustomed to. Since you just said that, I'm going to read a quote that's on TompkinsConservation.org, your website by your late husband, we conceive of progress as going in a certain direction forward. But what is forward? If we were walking towards an abyss and reach the edge, well, we stop. If we take another step forward, we'll fall into the abyss and die. But if we turn 180 degrees and take another step forward, where are we going? We're not going back to the past.

We're walking towards the future. How does that land with you today? Well, I think it's very true. It's kind of a confusing quote. But if you really think about phrases like progress is moving forward, progress, a decision for a government or a family or an individual to reject a kind of technology or decide to do things that fall outside of the norm of contemporary cultures, that's considered going backwards. But what forward should mean is the well-being and dignified lives of the human community and the

non-human community. But from an industrial point of view, the shrapnel coming out of doesn't matter, pick anything over the last 200, 150 years, is considered very clearly and unemotionally the price of progress. When you think about everybody who wants to go to Mars and in this pain, and suffering of having limited bodies, individual bodies, and a planet that is very limited, which everybody understands is now. So to get out of that and get things out of the way so you can find territory out in the front of the human experience where people can live to be 200 years old or 250 years old and burning forests and everything else we know to, today won't take place because they're unnecessary.

That there is an enormous price of that progress. So you've been in high echelons of meetings with famous people and all the conservation environmental movement and the CEOs because of your business for a long time. how have you seen people learn or not learn an experience that the feeling you have about deep ecology and that progress may mean something different than our culture means? Are people pretty much the same in those echelons as they were in the 90s and 80s or is there a big shift? In my opinion, in the 80s and 90s, there was an understanding of threats. sort of way out there on the horizon, be it climate chaos or the extinction crisis, things like that. But there was a lot of speculation. It was still climate science. Of course, a lot of people make the

argument probably, I mean logically, that people have understood the climate crisis since the 40s or so. but let's just take it in a more contemporary framework. There was an ignorance, and the ignorance brought a certain amount of bliss because it was hard to understand. And then you could question it because the physics of it, the mathematics of it, are complex, and maybe I got that wrong. But today, that does not exist. So you're looking at an audience when you think about leadership. of a globalized economy. Now it's willful because we do understand what the root cause of climate chaos is. We understand where the bulk of that impact comes from and everything else that we

know to be true now. But nothing has changed. There's been a lot of development and alternative energy, whether it's solar or otherwise, that's absolutely true. But it doesn't, it doesn't impact the petroleum industry, the gas industry. Those industries are piling forward as they always have because there's a lack of will. This is the great moral dilemma for me. I'm not so sure it's a lack of will. I think there are certain people that are certainly have narrower boundaries of how they view the world than you or I do. But let's just assume that everyone agrees that biodiversity loss pending six mass extinction, fish are swimming poleward because they can't get as much oxygen and warmer waters, all the wildfires,

droughts, higher standard deviation of heat, all the things are true. If someone assimilates that and they're a person that has some economic or social power, there's something like a collective action problem or a prisoner's dilemma that we would all be better off and especially people in the future would be better off if we did something and constrained the metabolism of the human enterprise. But unless everyone does it, It's still in that person's best interest for his or her life and his or her children to maximize power and profits while the whole system is running. So is it willful ignorance and dismissal of the problem or is it I'm caught in this social trap that I can't do, I can't wear my hat of being a proper wise. ancestor to future humans and other species because I'm getting these social signals.

What do you think about all that? My opinion is pretty firm, and I've tried to knock it sideways many times, but I do not see when I look at petroleum futures, when I look at policies, people being horrified that the U.S. is dropping out of the Paris Accord and all of these things that have never been actually true in the first place, there's never been a Paris Accord signed by China or the United States. There, if you look at futures of most industry, there is no palpable nor obvious. decisions from a boardroom to their leadership to throttle back their production of really pick an industry.

So we just met a couple weeks ago. And on that conversation, we wished we had met over a decade ago. So I don't know how familiar you are with my work, but those board members you're referring to, it doesn't matter. who is CEO because the structure, the corporate structure is such that if a CEO and a board said, you need to throttle back what you're doing on behalf of the future and the forests, they would be kicked out because the objective of the entity is to maximize monetary profits, tethered to energy, tethered to carbon, tethered to ecosystem impact. So the, the core problem is the

structure and the incentives and the prices, which is a self-organizing thing. And this harkens back to Yvonne Channard and your work at Patagonia. I have discovered recently, I'm going to have a guy named Wes Carter on the podcast in April, and he is the CEO of a company called Atlantic Packaging, and I expect he's probably a billionaire, but it's a private company. And he's doing things in service of the sacredness of life. And he's making decisions that are not monetarily the best decisions, but he's doing it for people and for the planet. And so my realization recently is that private companies are outside the purvey of what I refer to as the economic superorganism.

Because they don't have the same structure and incentives that everyone else does. I'm veering off here a little bit. but what are your thoughts on that? Well, yeah, I don't really much care one way or the other about CEOs because they go in and out on roller skates. And really, it's the board who really drives the outcome of whatever activity the company is involved in. So I agree with you there. I think that very little is asked of real leaders in the world today.

I don't care if you're Pope Francis or you're, or any of the Big Ten, doesn't matter what area of human activity they come from. If I, right now, everything we do trying to combat climate extinction, all these things, is voluntary. And we've really lost the opportunity for that to change because the power of sovereign states is quite reduced. Of course, we're seeing a wildly interesting example of that here in the United States in the last two weeks.

It's not that it's new that you have, you call them the billionaires sitting in the west wing of the White House. But it is the first time it's so obvious. I think if there was some way to make business outcomes. involuntary, then people start to get really smart, because when am I at my best when I'm trying to weasel around something to get my business into a great place? If you can continually allow me to voluntarily make decisions that will very slowly move the needle, I can be dumb as a hatch, and I can still survive, I can make money, but if you put the pressure on me

to be a great business, but also an importantly ethical business, then finally it gets interesting and that's where there are so few people who want to make that combination of goals. Would there be more people, even orders of magnitude more people if oil was $500 a barrel and there were prices and penalties for ecosystem destruction? And there were three simultaneous goals in a corporation.

One is the well-being of its own employees and its customers. two is protection of the ecosystem, leave no trace, and third economic profits. If those sorts of things existed in our culture, would the involuntary response and creativity emerge, as you're saying? Maybe, but it wouldn't be insistent. What I'm suggesting is that a lot of the behavior,

and I'm talking about the top 500 companies in the world, It's not just a few. A lot of what they, the decisions they make, the outcomes of the decisions they make are criminal. And the only thing that capitalism can respond to are the things where they can't get, they can't escape. I mean, eventually, and I'm not an alarmist. I'm not. But eventually a lot of this behavior that is causing direct human catastrophe, putting aside Mother Earth for the moment,

they will be eventually criminalized, and there'll be some sort of the hague-like courts where things will become so heinous that some of these things will be. begin to be looked at differently than they are today. They won't be absorbed. Right now, they're being absorbed around the world because that's the price of progress, in my opinion.

I think it's happening faster than you might be aware. My friend Pellateel is working with many others on ecocide law and rights of nature, but to make the really egregious environmental catastrophes be punishable by jail time, by CEOs and such. I mean, those conversations are happening. I just don't know. You've been at this a long time. I imagine that you still have that fire that drove you since you were five years old, but you can't help but look at at the horror of what has happened this entire time

you've been devoting your life to conservation. You know, if you were sitting there in 1993 with Doug looking at pictures of what 2025 was like, I don't think you would have believed it. I think it's true that the facts themselves are not shocking. What is surprising to me, which we've finally shaken this sleep off, is the velocity at which it's unfolding. And that I didn't really see so well as I do now. Two years ago, maybe three years ago.

I knew it was bad and I knew it was growing, but the velocity has changed the way we're looking at our own work. We have changed on a dime because even for us, and we're considered to be aggressive and out in front in terms of large landscapes and marine conservation and rewilding. But, you know, we've been kind of a sleep in a way that if you want to try to get out and at least race the front end of the train, maybe you can't get around and stand in front of the train, but you can definitely try to keep up with its pace. We've changed the scale and realize we have to work on a continental basis. And we're used to working in millions. and millions of acres at a time.

But you have to change the way, not the what you think you're headed toward, the sort of the bullseye, what are you aiming for? But you have to get there so much faster and much more audaciously and put nothing in your way. Let me ask a difficult question. At least it's difficult for me. So you're very active and have conserved tens of millions of acres with your work for wildlife conservation.

And I do want to get into some of the particular species that are involved there. So you're noticing the important of the biodiversity hotspots and where the best ecosystems are in the world that need protection. And you're working on that. But simultaneous with that, the whole world is got like adding blankets to our biosphere. And it's changing the future trajectory for everywhere. So there's like a micro and a macro. And you could be Uber successful on the micro. But if the macro fails, you know, you're not as successful as you thought.

So how do you think about that climate and the broader global situation with, respect to the local and regional and continent conservation that you're working on. Personally, I'm not really optimistic about the next few decades in this century. I believe that it's already breaking down. You'd have to be deaf and blind not to understand that. If you live in the Sudan, you live in the southern Polynesian islands and really, Florida, you name it. So a form

of collapse of in terms of weather, all sorts of things is they're definitely on the rise. I don't have a lot of hope

for this century. We are in a correction already. It's just nobody wants to call it that from the Western Hemisphere because it doesn't affect us as much as An ecological correction. No, I think it's ecological and I think it's social.

Because as people become more afraid and they are asking leadership to be more dogmatic, clearer, stronger, if you're from the United States, go get the things you need to fatten the larder downstairs in the bomb shelter. So, no, I absolutely think it's both. It's impossible to disconnect them. But, you know, there's like black swans in the financial world, there are a lot of things. We don't know how this is going to turn out. We didn't know three weeks before the Berlin Wall came down. Nobody understood that it was coming down.

So are there possible white swans in the ecological trajectory that you could imagine, even if they're somewhat fanciful? No, not really. But I do believe in the black swans that we actually have no idea what tipping point. So am I pessimistic about this century? Yeah. But I also, we don't know how it's going to turn out. And so all we can do with the things that we're focused on is go faster, be smarter,

and have absolutely no fear. That's our motto. Because we don't know what's going to happen, but who cares if you don't know? Implied in a couple of your previous statements, you said the next few decades and this century, do you have hope for future centuries? I don't really think about hope very much.

When I think about hope, I think about it right now, because I get asked by so many people, what do you have hope? And I've gotten sick of it. And I just say what it's come to mean to me is that if somebody asks me, do you have hope? What they're really asking me is, if you have hope, I'm going to relax a little bit, as long as you're out there and you have hope and you're going to hustle. that's one thing. And the second thing is, one doesn't deserve to have hope unless they're doing something. I don't, I find most of us are so lazy. And the heaviest shovel we raise is to ask someone else if they have hope. You have to earn hope. You don't get, You don't get to say or ask somebody, do they have hope?

You have to get out there every goddamn day and earn it because nobody else is going to do it for you. And this is a great misunderstanding. That and people asking me, well, what can I do? Well, how do I know what you can do? I'm just meeting you among thousand people sitting in this theater. Answer me this. What are you really good at? What are you really good at?

I don't care if you're 12 or 112. Tell me what you're good at. Stand out of your chair and tell me. Because whatever that is, you can march out your door this afternoon and go help people who are trying to save something or create something. So I'm sick of talking about hope unless there's a big fat tail attached to it. It is kind of emergent from our... actual fossil fuel abundance and the economic surplus that we have has kind of resulted in

this social appropriation at the end of a conversation, like all the environmental movies about climate change and nature is disaster, disaster, look what we're doing to the elephants of the rainforest. But at the end, if we have solar and wind, there's still hope. And they finish every movie like that. Like it's some formula. that matches the human psyche when it's really just a social filter on what is acceptable to be said these days. And what you just said in the last couple minutes makes complete sense to me. But most people don't have the status and the gravitas that you do to be able to say it. But I think you're absolutely right.

I think that if the great sickness is to imagine that help is on, on its way. And that if I sit in my house or I mow the grass on my front lawn every day, and I'm a good citizen, being a good citizen does not mean what it used to mean 25 years ago, even 10 years ago. People are inherently lazy, including me on some day, you know, all of us, that I don't want to be on another, I don't want to be on another, I don't want to be on an other team. I want to be on this one. I want to be with Greta in the streets. So long with deep ecology comes deep responsibility, which we are mostly abdicating. Yeah, you know, I talk about abdication a lot now, and people go, whoa, what are you talking about?

I said, well, you know, you get a tight about talking about King Edward abdicating 60 years ago. You are abdicating your own future, but park your own future aside. That's a very intimate decision that you can make on your own. But by God, if you choose to abdicate life, dignified lives, into the future, then who the hell are you? What do you see when you look in the mirror? What, honest to God, who are we looking at here? And there are no saints. It's such a slog. It's so simple. Just get out of bed tomorrow morning and do something. Start small if you have to. But to abdicate your own heart, lungs, mind,

And I do not care where you come from. That is the most crushing, fatal lack of a decision you will ever make, hands down. Because it doesn't matter if you lose. There are a lot of movements and wars that are won and lost. the real deep loss in our chest is doing nothing. I feel that. I really feel that.

I think there is some truth, though, and I know of some research on people doing altruistic acts are 300% more likely to do an act if they see someone else doing something altruistic. And in the same way that people's, bodies just receive that arrow with your words that you spoke, they don't know what to do. And yes, you're right. You don't know them.

So how can you recommend what to do? But maybe there are some just broad categories of how to get started because I think I sense, of course, this is a, you know, a self-selected group of 100,000 followers that watch this podcast. Many of them deeply care about the natural world and want to play. role and don't want to do nothing, but I don't think they know what to do. So do you have any general advice along those lines in your experience and what you've learned and seen? Yeah, I suppose I would say because it is the question. It is. You know, I can be a hard

ass about it and really, you know, come down on people through the microphone. But then I remember my own experience. If somebody just changes how they view their language, if you say, I want to get up tomorrow morning and I want to know my neighbors. We're not talking about the Jones on one side and the smiths on the other. Walk out the door and who else is there? There are birds, there. I don't know. Some people have a lot of neighbors, others fewer. But Every breath of every being deserves a future. So the smallest towns have, you know, land trust trying to save a pond or some tall grass prairie. There are groups there. Maybe there are four members. But then take pride in being the fifth. Just if you take pride in being the fifth. Just if you take, Take one step out of your house and say, okay, I have to work, I have to help take care of my family, I have a dog, all these things are true. But one part of every day, I'm going to do something

that has nothing to do with me and everything to do with life, with capital L. I really don't care what town or village you might be in, certainly cities. You want to volunteer? Go volunteer. I have a friend who's been taking young kids out of a lot of the public schools in Harlem into Central Park for the last 30 years. Kids who've never, they're close by, but they've never been in the park. They don't know what the birds are. They don't even recognize so much that that neighborhood is there. You can't believe what's transpired out of that. hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands of kids. Because we all have something to give.

Maybe that's the parting shot. I don't know. The mutual friend that introduced us, Randy Hayes of Rainforest Action Network, asked me to ask you this question, but he said be prepared for a one-hour answer. Oh, God. But building on what you just said, could you briefly define rewilder?

and tell us what rewilding means to you? Rewilding is pretty simple. It means leaving behind territories that are fully functioning, and I'll explain what that means. In the 2 million acres of Ibarra wetlands that we protected, and now it's a national park, it's one thing to protect the land. it's another thing to make

sure that all the species that have gone missing over really since, in this case, since the 1400s, 1500s. So rewilding is acquire or aggregate large territories and in our case we work in big ones. And then don't stop there.

A lot of U.S. National Parks kind of stop there. Yellowstone hasn't. Wolves were gone. They brought them back famously and bison are there. So we acquire large tracks of land over time. We make them national parks by donating them all back to either the Chilean government or the Argentine government. And then we look from the top predator down, who's missing? And that list, taking Ibera as an example, from jaguars, pumas, osolots, giant anteders, pompous deer, marsh deer, and the 27 species we've had to work on. And today, these top predators are back roaming free and dispersing out into Brazil and Paraguay. In Chile, the same thing. Nobody, no species had really gone truly extinct in Chile, but we've had to bring a lot of species back that have been on the brink and nearly so.

How do you bring a species back? Every species is different. Finally, with jaguars to get jaguars back into northern Argentina, we had to create the first in the world that jaguar breeding center. It's a lot of time. It's a lot of money. But in that time, which was 15 years ago, almost 20 years ago now, that was the only way to do it. We couldn't, there were no individuals to work with. Naive question. What is the importance of the full spectrum of predator prey all the way down to the, in the trophic pyramid in a forest or a national park? Why is that area better with

a viable populations of Jaguars then without. Yeah, let me see if I can do this as fast as possible, but basically it's this. If you take any place in the world, put a tack on a map, that place exists because of millions and millions of years of evolution. And from the tiniest microbes up to, in this case, the top predator of Jaguar and northern Argentina, all of those things have to fit together. If you take the top predator out, everything else about the ecosystem starts to collapse.

So as an example, capybadas, they're the world's largest rodent. So they were just part of an ecosystem. they were being predated by jaguars, cougars, Osloat, everybody. But in the absence of those top predators, their numbers exploded over the last, say, 400 years. And so that changes the grassland, that changes the forest, it changes everything. But this is happening thousands of times over. Some species are exploding. their numbers are exploding. Other ones are being predated too heavily, even by their little neighbor,

so that collapses. And an ecosystem, they're resilient. It's not like everything has to be firing always on the same notes. But if you want ecosystems, and if you go back to Yellowstone, Yellowstone isn't perfect. It should be 20 times the size that it is. But as an ecosystem, when they brought wolves back to Yellowstone, it changed how the moose eat inside the forest. It pushed the elk back out into the grasslands. That cleaned up the river systems that were getting clogged. And all of these things begin to unfold, albeit very slowly, that, Another hundred years in Yellowstone is going to be functioning in the way that it was evolutionarily designed to function. As a former college teacher, I would give you an A for that explanation. But it made me think of in the Pleistocene, there were multiple top predators, humans, and others. And now we don't have that balance.

and maybe that is on a macro scale part of the problem that we face. Yeah, you know, the Clovis people knocking out the megaphone and all these, for us it looks like, how did those people do that in such a short period of time? And I can't answer that. But I do know that I'm a deep ecologist, an idea that Arnie Ness, the Norwegian philosopher, or came up with decades ago. And the central piece of this thinking is that all life has intrinsic value. And if we believe that, if you really believe it, then that influences the decisions

you make about what your work is every day or how you go about almost anything. I truly believe it, Chris. And I've loved wildlife my entire life, but just in the last few years, in parallel with me recognizing the horror and the tragedy that is unfolding, there's been a shift in me. Just a silly example, two silly examples. The 15 minutes before this podcast, I had some coffee and I sat down and I looked at my bird feeder and all the different winter woodpeckers and things just as my kind of new, like, connecting with watching. the who lives with me here. And then the silly example is in the shower, uh, in the basement. I take a cold shower after a sauna and there are three spiders that are living in the shower

and I take a shower with them and I try not to disrupt them. 10 years ago, I would have been like, oh, there's a spider in the shower. And now I, I, I just totally like, okay, I'm living with them. They're in my basement. They're forming some, performing some sort of role. and I am kind of afraid of spiders, but I'm not afraid anymore. So maybe there are more humans. Maybe it takes time and awareness and recognition and some special sauce.

I don't know what to have this recognition that we're all connected and that everything on this blue green earth is sacred, how many millions of species we don't even know. but it's so profoundly beautiful and tragic at the same time. You know, it goes the other way too, because I think for several years, I was just focused on we humans kicking the bejesus out of the non-human world. And in the last several years, I have developed a rekindling of my relationship to humankind. I look at what's taking place, you know, whether it's the Sudan or any number of places on any given day.

And I have moved back to all life has intrinsic value. And that is not just the non-human world. So I look also after my conversation with Pope Francis at the Vatican, I was lucky to spend an hour with him before COVID hit. And it was a conversation that really ralphed my, humans were never absent in my thinking and heart. But now I articulate things differently. and I feel things differently after rethinking a lot of these things. Well, here's the thing.

Jaguars and capybiras and tapiras and green macaws and ant eaters, they can't regenerate jaguars in Chile. So there are things that humans are uniquely capable of doing in service of life if more of us stop asking what do you have hope and do things. So let me ask you this. A colleague of mine, a dear friend of mine, DJ White, who I think you would quite like,

him and his wife, decided instead of having children, that they would reproduce other species as the goal of their marriage and their life. So today's massive availability. ability of online information and interconnectivity and social connection, is it feasible for the people listening to our conversation to become a champion for another species? And how would someone even begin to think about that and go about that? First of all, 100%. It's possible to decide, okay, I'm going to work in my area, this species is famously absent or nearly so. And if you, anywhere you are, you can find out who's working on that species.

If it's a particular one, you can find out who some of the rewilders are in the United States. You can find us, you can find if you're in Europe, there are a lot of rewilding projects. going on over there. And every one of them needs, whomever happens to be listening today, every one of you is needed at a local, regional, national, international level. That's just simple. It's an invitation to join other like-minded people who are just like you guys. We have families, we have headaches, we have all these things that all of us are responsible for in our own personal lives. But I tell you, if Doug were alive, he would agree with me that shifting the central focus of our life toward conservation and rewilding changed it utterly.

And it's a gas. Besides hard work, successes, failures, blah, blah, blah, it is the best. Let me ask you another difficult question. I think for the average person, these are difficult questions, but given who you've been since you were five, these are probably like easy pitches for you, maybe. So you've just talked about the listeners of this program and how they might, you know, directionally get a start in rewilding or champing on other species. What about the elites in our world, circles that you still probably swim in?

What about, I mean, you know, you were very successful financially in your work at Patagonia and have been, you know, spending your financial wealth in service of redistributing and allocating and protection of the natural world. What message do you have for other people that have amassed large digital and electronic claims on biophysical reality and their offshore accounts that are looking at the world and trying to grow the amount of financial claims on reality. At the same time, ecological reality is dwindling both for their children, their grandchildren, the unborn of ours and other species, but maybe even in their own lives.

What is your elevator pitch or scream to those type of individuals that might happen to watch this conversation. All life needs you guys. People who come out of business have a different way of looking at being driven. We don't mind being driven. We think it's a good thing. We like discipline in a way of getting someplace that you want to get to. Obviously, financial assets that you have are, it goes without saying, I don't care what someone's personal wealth is. If we don't use that wealth for something that falls outside of our personal gain, our family, and so on, then, you know, as the saying goes, your last shirt has no pocket. And I tell you, the partners that we have in Chile and Argentina through rewilding Chile and rewilding Argentina, who are of our legacy groups, they've worked, we've worked together for 30 years.

Some of our best partnerships are people who, do they want to be on the ground every day and, you know, do live the way we live often? No, but do they want to be part of something big that's changing the end of the world? this story, absolutely, and they like being involved. They like hearing the things that failed, and they, they, that, that you don't have to give up your business life, but you're like a gold mine for conservation and rewilding to be participative to the degree that you want to be, but those characteristics are essential, and don't worry about dying with nothing in your pocket, everybody does. So that, it's so much more interesting than business, I tell you, and it's not just coming from me. I know a lot of great individuals, European, from the states, from Asia, who have said,

if I'd understood the power of this, I would have started decades ago. I just didn't understand. understand it. Do you know Jeremy Grantham by any chance because he said something very eloquent, very similar to what you just said, and he is also trying to wake up deep, pocketed individuals to this crisis and stated, there's nothing more exciting and relevant and important to your life than playing a role in this and not just your money, but your creativity, your network, your enthusiasm, your discipline, everything. There's no question. I could open up our friendship partner list, and you'd find a lot of very well-known people in there, but they are smoking when it comes to these things. They're engaged. They want to understand the hardships with these top predators, all these things, and they're gaining. They're not losing anything. It's just, just like Doug and I have felt since 1993. We have only gained through this. Let me ask you this. My view is that everyone is wearing three hats. Well, the one hat is their job and their boss or the bills they have to pay. Another hat is they want to be a good family member and in their community. And another hat is they want to be a good ancestor to future generations on the planet. But it's that first hat that drives most of our behaviors and decisions. With the demographic you just described, is it possible that at least at that echelon,

and maybe then changing in society at a later point that we can think of our return on our investment in non-monetary ways? Like you get an ROI because you invest in this company and it throws off. 15% annually and you get those dollars back on top of your investment. But what if that ROI is denominated in species or ecosystem health or stability of the biome or the well-being of the indigenous communities and local villages that are on the land? You don't get a monetary return per se, but there is a return and it's measurable.

What are your thoughts on that? Yeah. I mean, let's face it, a lot of people are really successful in business or knuckleheads. It doesn't take, you know, to have a good company, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to be a good company. What it really takes a lot of work and guts is to be great. And I say the same thing about our lives. I can be a good person. I can do everything I can for all the concentric circles around my life, my family, my friends, colleagues at Patagonia, teams in Argentina and Chile.

All that's true. I can do that with my eyes closed. But if I want to leave something great behind, and I never do this by myself, I am only one of hundreds of people I work with, then the game gets interesting. If the accumulation of wealth is the game, it's pretty boring. And I think the guys who are in that milieu realize that there are a lot of knuckleheads out there who are extraordinarily wealthy. But what if you can change something that adds to beauty, adds to, wholeness on this planet. And all those things that feel nebulous,

they're not very sexy, they're not fabulous the way money is. But you watch, making money is not that interesting. I promise you eventually, um, there will be a time when doing something, it's not enough to be wealthy anymore.

It is, what did you do? with the assets you had, and I don't mean just financial. I mean your arms and legs and your mind and your love and your assets as a social mover and shaker. Then it becomes interesting. Carnegie was a wealthy guy. What is he thought of today? He's a wealthy guy. People think about that. but by and large he is considered the libraries in every town in America, all these things that he left behind. Then your life gets really interesting.

Thank you for that. That really landed for me. You mentioned earlier the Capybiras and the Acelots and the Jaguars, and I know your organization also protects and is involved with Andy and condors and otters and macaws. I imagine you have some amazing personal stories working with these species. Is there anything you can share a particular memory that is still inside you that you can recall? Yes, I do have one. Let's see, I'm 75 now. It's probably on my 65th birthday or so. This jaguar center I was mentioning earlier is quite complex.

It was the first of its kind in the world. It was a lot of pressure to get it right. And our first female jaguar, it's very hard to describe what it's like to be really right up next to a jaguar. I mean, there's a fence between you. But for my birthday, I went out, and I lied down in the grass just 18 inches from her. And luckily enough, she lied down on her side.

And for an hour, maybe more. I just, I lied there and I told her her life story as I knew it, and I told her mine. And she's the godmother of, oh gosh, we have almost, 40 jaguars now in the wild dispersing into Brazil, in Paraguay and around. And yeah, I mean, every so often,

you stop long enough to tell another species their life story and they'll tell you yours. So, yeah, I suppose that's one of them. Thank you so much for all your work and courage.

I don't think you've probably listen to too many of my episodes, but I do, if any, but I ask questions at the end of the same of every guest. I'm not going to ask you what you care about most because I think that's pretty apparent by your words and your deeds. But what advice do you have for young humans who are coming of age learning about all the things that you and I have been discussing? Do you have any advice to a 12 to 25-year-old current generation, Chris Tompkins, who's becoming aware of the stakes of our times? It's a tall order right now, to be young right now.

I would say, don't turn your back on the facts and shed the fear that you've got and turn whatever that fear is into action. try to step back from your own personal fear and go for broke, whatever that looks like to you at the time that you're asking yourself that. I wish people would remind young people of the Vietnam War, just the 60s and 70s. And I don't romanticize them, but I do go back in my mind, and I realize...

Don't stand at the back. Go up to the front. Be smart about it, but go up to the front. That's probably good advice for whatever age you are at the moment. If you had a magic wand and there was no personal recourse to your status or situation, not that I expect you would care, what is one thing you would do to change human and planetary futures? In some ways, this century is going to play itself out. I don't pretend that it's not.

And then how do you stomach that? And again, I'm almost 75, so I'm not going to see a lot more. But I come back to having no fear, and that is a luxury of age. I realize that. but I also have been around activists who have reminded me that yes, age can influence our understanding of fear, but it is not foreign to young people, and they pick it up and they use it.

And may all the gods bless them because I learn from them still. the sense of having no fear. You seem pretty young to me, certainly in spirit. And my deep feeling is you still have a very important role to play in the conversation of humans and the biosphere and the future. Thank you for your lifetime of work and for your time today. Do you have any closing words for our viewers? Yeah, no, I think a lot of the subjects we talked about today are pretty serious. and dire. And I would just like to tell you guys who are listening that we also dance like

mad and we go into the field and have these trips we swear we'll never do again and then we do. And we have a lot of fun in our lives. And a lot of us have been working together for decades. And I don't know, I think I'm probably the luckiest person on the planet, frankly. Chris Tompkins, thank you so much. You were an inspiration. I wish we would have met 20 years ago. We're going to make up for it. Don't worry.

If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please follow us on your favorite podcast platform. You can also visit thegreat simplification.com for references and show notes from today's conversation. And to connect with fellow listeners of this podcast, check out our Discord. channel. This show is hosted by me, Nate Hagen's, edited by No Troublemakers Media, and produced by Misty Stinnett, Leslie Batlutz, Brady Hyann and Lizzie Siriani.