This special edition blog post celebrates the life and work of Douglas Tompkins, who left us ten years ago today, much too soon. Of the countless seeds he planted in rewilding, conservation, agriculture and activism, many have taken root and continue to bloom.
Doug didn’t really appreciate incremental anything. It was most often all or nothing. In many ways he was decades ahead of his time.
When he decided to engage in a movement, he always met with the leading thinkers, activists and practitioners: David Brower, Dave Foreman, Reed Noss, Michael Soulé, Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson. This is the short list. He read stacks of books and hosted watershed discussions. Yet he was also driven by the principle to “commit then figure it out.” That first decade laid the foundation for where the work would go. He was off and running.
At one momentous meeting about the concept of habitat fragmentation and connectivity it became clear that the conservation and sustainable agriculture communities were not always on the same side. Doug bridged both worlds. He supported Wes Jackson’s efforts to create perennial grain systems and the North American wilderness recovery efforts to link isolated protected areas. Few conservationists were working on agriculture, forestry, wilderness protection and species reintroduction all at the same time and at a landscape scale.
The powerful books produced by the Foundation for Deep Ecology are still prescient today. Clearcut exposed the wounds of industrial forestry. Book after book followed, reporting on the impacts of agriculture, recreation, ranching and overdevelopment. Doug made sure that Arne Naess’s work was published with the attention it deserved. You wonder when he slept or what he was thinking about when he was sleeping.
Among his many talents, perhaps Doug’s greatest asset as a conservationist, was his ability to fly small aircraft. This bird’s eye view gave him a unique perspective of what was happening on the ground and at a landscape level. His daily flights greatly informed the restoration efforts in Chile and Argentina. He would take his plane anywhere. A landscape-level understanding is truly what is often missing in current agriculture reform movements.
Doug’s rewilding initiatives in Argentina have contributed extremely important lessons to global conservationists. Astrid Vargas, who worked on Iberian lynx recovery in Spain, said that Doug told her how important it was to gain the support of farmers. This came out of his experience in the wetlands of Iberá. Astrid found this advice invaluable. Rewilding is often as much about politics as it is about conservation biology.
Doug carried the torch of North American conservation and environmental philanthropy to South America. In doing so, he inspired the world. A seeker who was unafraid, he never looked back. The standards he set were impossibly high. The work is deep, not superficial. It’s for the long term.
-Dan Imhoff, conservationist and author
To read the Deep Ecology books mentioned, and more, click here
3 DECADES WITH DOUG
“Not a day goes by…”
-Kris Tompkins, co-founder and president of Tompkins Conservation
CAROLINA MORGADO, executive director of Rewilding Chile, on Doug
Doug was a visionary like few others. Ahead of his time, he spoke to us 30 years ago about all the problems we are experiencing today. He changed the paradigm we had in Chile about conservation, teaching us to look at nature in a different way, not merely through the eyes of exploitation.
He also taught us about environmental philanthropy, something we still have a long way to go as a country, but thanks to his inspiration, we have seen exponential growth in private protected areas in Chile. Doug was a very ethical man, not only with the land but also with people, forming deep bonds with those around him. That is why he had tremendously committed teams, who to this day are inspired by his way of doing things.
From him, I learned to take a big-picture view, to think big, to be tenacious and determined, because when a visionary with the resources he had set his mind to something, the impact was unimaginable, even changing the destiny of a territory.
Doug fue un visionario como pocos. Adelantado a su tiempo, nos hablaba hace 30 años de todos los problemas que estamos viviendo hoy. Cambió el paradigma que teníamos en Chile sobre la conservación, nos enseñó a mirar la naturaleza de otro modo, no con ojos meramente extractivistas. Nos enseñó también sobre filantropía ambiental, algo que todavía tenemos mucho por avanzar como país, pero que gracias a su inspiración hemos visto un crecimiento exponencial de áreas protegidas privadas en Chile. Doug fue un hombre muy ético no solo con la tierra, también con la gente, generando lazos muy profundos con quienes lo rodeaban, por eso tenía equipos tremendamente comprometidos, que hasta el día de hoy trabajamos inspirados por su manera de hacer las cosas. De él aprendí a tener una mirada a gran escala, a pensar en grande, a ser tenaz, decidida, porque cuando un visionario con los recursos que tenía él se proponía algo, el impacto era impensado, logrando incluso cambiar el destino de un territorio.
SOFIA HEINONEN, executive director of Rewilding Argentina, on Doug
Doug was my great role model at work and in everyday life. I admired his ability to dream big —thousands of years ahead and on a planetary scale—as well as his boundless energy when committing to goals perceived as “impossible” by most.
When acting as a leader, he was the first to face challenges without fear and conveyed contagious conviction. He always encouraged persistence and not being swayed by offensive comments, as the facts would eventually speak for themselves, proving the need for the proposed change.
He taught that it was the right values that had to set the course (values linked to being one with nature). And that strategy would come later, that it was not essential to know the solution to problems in advance, nor to be a professional in the field.
He was very ingenious, managing to think outside the box, with the logic of nature.
I was always dazzled by his freedom to express what he aspired to achieve, without worrying about who he was talking to (whether it was the President, his friend Omar Rojas—the manager of the San Alonso farm with whom he used to drink mate—or the capitalist leader he was trying to convince to change his anthropocentric values for ecocentric ones). Doug enjoyed intellectual debate, anti-globalization arguments, and activist campaigns to stop dams, protect rivers, and halt the use of agrochemicals.
Doug enjoyed intellectual debate, anti-globalization arguments, and activist campaigns to stop dams, protect rivers, and halt the use of agrochemicals! It was easy to work with him if you got into that game of creativity and intellectual mischief. It was easy to admire him for the conviction and energy he put into all his battles. And he was undoubtedly a gladiator applauded by his own people and his enemies alike!
To this we must add his enormous curiosity and obsession with understanding the roots of problems. He was very inspiring to his own teams and to all the leaders who came to him in search of profound answers. For me, he became a constant source of well-structured arguments, bibliographic references, and concrete data on complex topics.
A DOCUMENTARY VIEW
Oscar-winning directors Jimmy Chin and Chai Vasarhelyi follow Doug and Kris Tompkins on an epic, decades-spanning love story as wild as the species and places that Doug dedicated his life to protecting. The full documentary is streaming on Disney+. Watch it here.
“IF ANYTHING CAN SAVE THE WORLD, I’D PUT MY MONEY ON BEAUTY”
-Douglas R. Tompkins
