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Kris Tompkins
Kristine Tompkins (born June 1950) is an American conservationist. Tompkins is the president and co-founder of Tompkins Conservation and former CEO of Patagonia, Inc..[1] Early lifeBorn in southern California, Kristine McDivitt spent most of her childhood on her great-grandfather’s ranch. She spent some early years in Venezuela, where her father worked for an oil company.[2] She attended college at the College of Idaho in Caldwell,[3] where she competed in ski-racing. At Patagonia, Inc.In 1973, she returned to California and began working for Yvon Chouinard. She played a key role in transforming his small piton business into Patagonia, Inc.[4], eventually becoming the company's first CEO. Conservation workIn 1993, she retired from Patagonia, Inc, married Doug Tompkins (founder of The North Face and co-founder of Esprit). The Tompkins focused their efforts on the preservation of national parks and established several nonprofit organizations, including, Conservation Land Trust and Conservacion Patagonica, all of which have now consolidated under Tompkins Conservation.[citation needed] In 1991, Doug Tompkins began acquiring private land for conservation in Chile’s Los Lagos Region, managing it as a public-access park within the threatened Valdivian temperate rainforest. Pumalín Park was granted official nature sanctuary status in 2005 and became a national park in 2018. This designation followed Tompkins Conservation's donation of nearly 725,000 acres to help establish the new park, Pumalin Douglas Tompkins National Park, which covers approximately 1 million acres. It is named in honor of its founder.[5][6][7] The Tompkins' conservation efforts expanded to Argentina, starting with the Iberá Wetlands of the Corrientes province. In the wetland ecosystem, they have launched projects to reintroduce extirpated species, such as the giant anteater, jaguar, red-and-green macaw, and giant river otter.[8][9] The rewilding work in Ibera, as well as many other projects in the country, is now carried out by Rewilding Argentina, the team assembled by Kris and Doug, led by Sofia Heinonen. After years of collaborating with governments, local organizations, scientists, philanthropists, and communities, in January 2018 Kris, on behalf of Tompkins Conservation, and Chilean President Michelle Bachelet signed decrees to create five new national parks in Chile and expand three others, adding a total of more than 10 million acres of new national parklands to Chile. For scale, that is more than three times the size of Yosemite and Yellowstone combined, or approximately the size of Switzerland. With one million acres of land from Tompkins Conservation and an additional 9 million acres of federal land from Chile, this has been billed as the largest donation of land from a private entity to a country in history.[10][11] RecognitionAwards
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