What Next Generation Leaders Can Learn From The Tompkins’ Legacy

When I think about some of the most impactful conservation wins of our time, the global ivory bans, the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act, or Canada’s phaseout of open-net salmon farms immediately surfaces. But there’s one that seems to present front-and-center for me, especially since I identify as both a capitalist and a conservationist, as being particularly timely. The large-scale rewilding efforts across Chile and Argentina stand out as compelling case studies of what’s possible when bold vision, private capital, and ecological urgency collide. For anyone in business today, it challenges us to rethink what meaningful contribution looks like in a world that can no longer afford business as usual.

The pair behind this effort are Kris Tompkins and the late Doug Tompkins. Doug co-founded The North Face and later Esprit, two powerhouse brands that redefined outdoor and fashion industries. Kris was Patagonia’s inaugural CEO, shaping it into a globally recognized ethical apparel company. Together, they drew a direct line between wealth and responsibility to establish Tompkins Conservation. The organization’s objective was to place focus on and highlight geographical regions or areas that they held personal ties to. Doug stated he would use his fortune to “pay rent to planet Earth.”

Over two decades, Doug and Kris donated more than 3 million acres in Chile and Argentina, creating over a dozen national parks. Before his untimely death exactly 10 years ago from a kayaking accident, Doug’s final vision was the Route of Parks of Patagonia—a 2,800-kilometer corridor linking 17 parks and 60 communities across Chile. It was a radical undertaking aiming to restore entire ecosystems that reconnected wildlife, all while creating livelihoods that didn’t rely on extractive industries like mining or industrial fishing.

Born from Tompkins Conservation, both Rewilding Chile and Rewilding Argentina were created to carry out Doug and Kris’s mission, but more so to ensure these efforts evolved beyond the individuals themselves. They made a deliberate choice to hand the work to local leaders who understand these ecosystems as home. Today, those leaders and their counterparts are both honoring Doug’s legacy and expanding Kris’s vision in ways only they can. That has even meant taking their work beyond the two country borders.

This year at Climate Week in New York, Kris inspired the launch of the Jaguar River Initiative, which is a continental-scale rewilding effort stretching across Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay. It’s one of the most ambitious ecological restoration projects in the Global South, led by on-ground conservationists who understand these landscapes as more than boundaries, but as a single, continuous living system.

Directed by Deli Saavedra, the vision is to rewild the river corridors that function as the connective tissue of a million square mile ecosystem. In doing so, this will restore the movement of jaguars, giant river otters, anteaters, and other keystone species, while addressing the cascading pressures of climate change and habitat loss. Drought, wildfires, industrial encroachment, agriculture, and deforestation have fragmented this region for decades. However, the success of Argentina’s Iberá Wetlands—where jaguars have returned after more than 70 years and local communities built an economy around restoration—proved that recovery at scale is not only possible, but replicable.

The concept is to take what worked in Iberá and apply the concept elsewhere. It’s the essence of “positive deviance,” or identifying what’s working against the odds, understanding why, and helping others replicate and adapt it in their own contexts. This initiative is the genesis of my work with Edges of Earth, where we seek out ready-made solutions already succeeding locally, and help these organizational stories reach the world so there’s opportunities to scale both locally and globally.

Over nearly eight weeks, Adam Moore—our expedition operations lead—and I, immersed into the worlds of Rewilding Chile and Rewilding Argentina to see their impact firsthand. In Patagonia National Park, we saw why rewilding matters. As we crossed sweeping valleys filled with guanaco herds and climbed ridgelines where Darwin’s rhea now roam after teetering on the edge of extinction, the vision that Doug and Kris championed felt like a promise made, and kept, to Chile.

The park’s rewilding story continues: Running Wild: The Return of Patagonia National Park’s Rheas

A place Doug loved so deeply it now carries his name, Pumalín Douglas Tompkins National Park, showed us a completely different face of Patagonia. At Caleta Gonzalo Lodge, designed by Doug and Kris themselves, the scenery shifts from the iconic windblown steppe to a world of fjords, waterfalls, glaciers, ancient alerce trees, and volcanoes that rival the Pacific Ring of Fire. This was Doug’s living laboratory, where he tested the radical idea that conservation could be run with the same rigor and ambition as a business empire. By 2018, that experiment became history. When 1,063,000 acres were protected in the largest private land donation ever made to any government, Kris proved that when vision meets capital, an entire nation’s map can be redrawn.

On the other side, Rewilding Argentina has created and/or expanded 10 national and provincial parks through the donation of 464,098 hectares of land. Altogether, their work now protects an extraordinary 1,611,413 hectares—an area so vast it’s almost hard to comprehend. And at the heart of it sits the Iberá Wetlands, one of the world’s largest freshwater ecosystems. Argentina’s most powerful rewilding success story.

Traveling with Marisi López, who has been part of this movement since the earliest days, we learned just how improbable this transformation once seemed. Iberá was not always a wildlife stronghold. For decades, much of the region was hunted out, fragmented by agriculture, heavily deforested for industrial purposes, and degraded by invasive species. The land once felt empty, without critical keystone species keeping the balance in check. Today, we moved through landscapes that had once been silent, only to be met with an explosion of life featuring jaguars relaxing in dense underbrush; giant river otters carving patterns through the water and; capibaras rolling around on the dirt road blocking our car from moving much more than an inch at times.

Yes, the return of wildlife makes this story impressive. But perhaps even more critical has been the return of identity. Communities that once relied on extractive industries or had no work opportunity at all, now have alternate livelihoods. The success of Iberá is what sparked a continental ripple after decades of working towards it. Today, it serves as the blueprint for rewilding across the Americas, and perhaps beyond.

It’s important to recognize that the Tompkins legacy has inspired a new generation of conservationists to launch their own initiatives and chart their own paths. Edges of Earth partnered with Por el Mar, a grassroots marine conservation group working to protect the region’s cold-water ecosystems, especially its pristine giant kelp forests.

For three weeks, we traveled with their team from Tierra del Fuego to Santa Cruz, living aboard a small sailing vessel and diving into some of the last intact underwater forests like this on the planet. These ecosystems, towering and ancient, are now threatened by warming seas, industrial fishing, and invasive species all over the world. But here, this team has been instrumental in protecting giant kelp up and down the coast, mitigating the crisis the best they can before it’s too late.

Co-Founder & CEO Martina Sasso, along with some of her founding team, emerged from the Rewilding Argentina network. People once touched by the Tompkins philosophy but determined to create their own impact. Their work blends science and community outreach, building stewardship for ecosystems that have long been overlooked. In many ways, Por el Mar represents the natural evolution of the Tompkins vision, by helping those who have turned their back on natural resources to see their value once again.

I also must acknowledge that the Tompkins’ work wasn’t without criticism. They were accused of land grabs or of not involving local communities early enough, for example. And when you speak with the people who lived through those early years of building the Rewilding teams, they don’t sugarcoat the struggle. Trust had to be earned and deep, emotional tension showed up everywhere. But standing inside these restored ecosystems today, the outcome is simply undeniable.

Pride is a word we’ve heard a lot of over the course of those 8 weeks. It’s returned to places once written off and places that were hardly on a global map. And the closer we’ve gotten to the teams on the ground, the more we’ve come to learn that the number one driver of success has been local ownership. Rewilding only works when communities see themselves in the future of these landscapes and must never feel displaced by it.

After traveling through 45+ countries, 250 locations, and speaking with nearly 3,000 people working towards a more sustainable future, I’ve come to realize growth means nothing if it harms the communities and ecosystems that make it possible in the first place. The people doing the hardest work—fishers, farmers, Indigenous leaders, grassroots conservationists—have shown me that true progress is defined by how that scale shapes the world around it.

So what can the next generation of business leaders learn from this?

Use capital as a lever: The Tompkins treated wealth as a tool. Money, in their world, was something to deploy with intention. They redirected their financial success outward, not inward. Imagine how differently our world might look if more business leaders viewed their balance sheets as a means to shape healthier futures?

Stretch your timeline: While most companies obsess over shareholder value, the Tompkins were thinking in generations. They invested in ecosystems knowing they might not live to see the impact. And yet, that long-range mindset is exactly why the work is still expanding. The businesses that will endure the next century are going to be the ones building with an eye on what a sustainable horizon looks like.

Lead by releasing: Their greatest measure of success was what Doug and Kris gave back. Donating millions of acres to the public did not show up as a loss or a tax write off. It was actually the whole point. Sometimes the most powerful form of leadership is knowing when to hand over the keys.

Don’t wait for perfection: The Tompkins and their teams were criticized, and rather harshly for that matter, early days. They made mistakes and were categorically misunderstood. But that fueled the fire. Progress was the most used word when talking to the on-ground teams about what Doug stood for. If you’re waiting for a flawless plan or unanimous approval, you’ll never do anything meaningful.

I’m currently writing this somewhere between Argentina and Brazil, on our final week in the field with the Jaguar Rivers Initiative. I’ve found myself rethinking what power and influence are actually for as we drive through these countries once so wild we can hardly visualize what it means in our modern world. Hearing those who knew Doug describe the kind of leader he was has forced me to look inward. At the kind of impact I want to leave behind. We spend so much energy in business chasing perception—titles, property, status, awards. But what does it all mean if the resources beneath our feet disappear?

Legacy is built through the choices we make about where our skills, capital, time, and effort go. It’s built by uplifting the communities who need it most and inspiring others to carry the work forward long after we’re gone. The question no longer is whether we can make a difference. We already know how. It’s whether we will rise up and choose to do so.

Written by: Andi Cross

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Andi Cross is an explorer, strategist, and extended range diver with Scuba Schools International and Scubapro, who leads Edges of Earth—a global expedition and consulting collective documenting resilience and climate solutions across the world’s most remote coastlines. Her work centers on “positive deviance”—spotlighting outliers succeeding against the odds—and using storytelling and strategy to help scale their impact.

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MEET THE LEADERS BEHIND THE LEGACY

REWILDING CHILE

REWILDING ARGENTINA

POR EL MAR