Doug Tompkins and Kristine McDivitt Tompkins head out on one of their many expeditions in Chile. They are responsible for the creation or expansion of 15 national parks in Chile and Argentina, along with two marine national parks, and 32 re-wilding, conservation and monitoring projects.
Kristine McDivitt Tompkins is pictured as a child with her family on the McDivitt Ranch on Telegraph Road west of Santa Paula, which her great-great-grandfather, Abner Haines, bought in 1867. Pictured from left are Roger, Marsha and Kristine with parents Wallace and Barbara McDivitt.
Doug Tompkins and Kristine McDivitt Tompkins head out on one of their many expeditions in Chile. They are responsible for the creation or expansion of 15 national parks in Chile and Argentina, along with two marine national parks, and 32 re-wilding, conservation and monitoring projects.
“The deeper your family roots are, the farther afield you can fly,” says Kristine McDivitt Tompkins.
Her roots in Ventura County are deep and she is still flying.
Tompkins flew back to Santa Paula on March 25 after spending six weeks in Brazil releasing jaguars and signing an agreement with the Chilean government on March 21 for that country’s next national park.
“It’s a long story,” she says, speaking on the phone with a reporter from her home, in the company of English Labrador retrievers Finneaus, Beto, and Frida Kahlo.
On April 5, Tompkins spoke to a sold-out crowd at the Kim Maxwell Studio (venue changed from Bart's Books) on “Patagonia National Park — Chile,” the latest volume in a series of books on each new national park she and husband Doug Tompkins have donated in Chile and Argentina.
Image provided
Cover of "Patagonia National Park — Chile," published by Patagonia Books.
Published by Patagonia Books, this book contains stunning photographs of the landscapes and wildlife of Patagonia by Linde Waidhofer, and 18 essays, including one by Tompkins.
Kristine and Doug Tompkins’ donations of land have resulted in the creation or expansion of 15 national parks — some 15 million acres — along with two marine national parks, and 32 re-wilding, conservation and monitoring projects.
Photo by Matias Rebak
Jatobazinho in Iberá in 2021.
The remarkable story about how this all came about is recounted in a 2023 documentary, “Wild Life,” two TED Talks, and numerous articles in national and international publications, including a description of releasing jaguars in Argentina in the March edition of Time Magazine.
Tompkins is president of Tompkins Conservation, which, according to its website, works in the Southern Cone of South America “to confront the twin crises facing life on Earth: climate chaos and mass extinction. From northern Argentina to southern Chile, we are preserving land and sea, restoring biodiversity, and helping communities to thrive.”
Before moving to Chile in 1993, Tompkins was CEO of Patagonia, after rising through the ranks from her start as assistant packer when she was a teenager.
Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, who started the business in Ventura more than 50 years ago, donated the company in 2022 to a specially designed trust and nonprofit organization, famously saying at the time, “Earth is now our only shareholder.”
“It wasn’t until I started with Yvon and Malinda that I knew things were not right with nature,” Tompkins says. Meeting them “changed the entire trajectory of my life.”
She met her husband, a longtime climbing partner and friend of Chouinard, through Patagonia, and moved to Chile when they got married.
Asked if she ever pinches herself when considering her life so far, she says: “I think we’re always pinching ourselves. When you start something, you have no idea if it will fly. ... I think, oh my goodness, we can keep going, can do another one, expand to species that have gone extinct. It’s a process. Nothing is a sure thing in conservation.” Tompkins credits the success of the many projects undertaken to the “teams, long-term partners, who have been in this since we started.”
Doug Tompkins’ life of adventure and donating land on an epic scale to create national parks ended tragically on Dec. 8, 2015, when his kayak capsized and he died of severe hypothermia while on a trip with Chouinard and other friends in Chile.
Devastated, Tompkins says she had to make the choice to go on and continue their work. “You live a quarter of a century with someone with such intensity. A life that was so interesting. ... I take him everywhere,” she says. “Death is not the end of the story.”
Photo provided
Kristine McDivitt Tompkins is pictured as a child with her family on the McDivitt Ranch on Telegraph Road west of Santa Paula, which her great-great-grandfather, Abner Haines, bought in 1867. Pictured from left are Roger, Marsha and Kristine with parents Wallace and Barbara McDivitt.
Given Doug Tompkins’ life climbing mountains, kayaking and flying airplanes in some of the most remote places in the world, not to mention death threats as a result of the couple’s conservation work, “Half the people couldn’t believe he died so young and other half said they can’t believe he lived so long,” Tompkins says.
They have had “very, very close calls,” over the years, Tompkins says, one of which involved a flight she was on with bush pilot Rodrigo Noriega in a Cessna 206. “We hit a wall bank and had to get out of a very narrow canyon,”she recalls, adding: “I was flying with him last week. He is the best bush pilot in the Southern Cone. I’d go anywhere with him and have done in the last two weeks.”
Life in Santa Paula
“It is a marvel coming back to Santa Paula,” she says.
“I’m so grateful and aware of the gift to grow up in a community like Santa Paula. It informed my whole life. When I think about Santa Paula, I’m just deeply grateful, as much as anything.”
Tompkins’ childhood was spent on the Telegraph Road ranch that her great-great-grandfather, Abner Haines, bought when he moved to Santa Paula in 1867. Haines left his home state of Maine in 1853 to mine for gold in Yuba and Marysville before arriving in Santa Paula and buying 200 acres.
The Ventura Signal wrote about his ranch in 1879: "His orchard as it stands is a beautiful sight, with its golden fruit hanging amidst the brilliant gree of the leaves and occasional dashes of blossoms."
Ventura Signal
This image of Abner Haines' 200-acre ranch west of Santa Paula on West Telegraph Road, published in the Ventura Signal in 1879.
Photo by Linde Waidhofer
One of the animals prospering in Patagonia National Park.
Photo by Linde Waidhofer
Snow-capped mountain ridges at Patagonia National Park.
Photo by Linde Waidhofer
A breathtaking view of Patagonia National Park beneath the clouds.
When Haines died in 1893, a tribute was published in the newspaper, under the headline “Death of Abner Haines,” reading: “As we who saw our county Argonauts come; in the pride of manhood with energy and courage for companions, building homes for their loved ones; and in reality making the wilderness to ‘blossom like the rose’...”
The ranch was sold in the 1980s to Randy and Joanna Axell, after belonging to the McDivitt family for four generations. “It was the luck of the stars that Randy wanted to buy the ranch,” Tompkins says.
Her other great-great-grandfather, judging from the historical record, was Clyde J. McDivitt, who founded the Santa Paula Daily Chronicle in 1887.
“We were outside a lot, reading, chores, school,” the Santa Paula High School alumna says of her time growing up on the ranch. “I think it was pretty simple. Every celebration was sometimes with the same people. Gail Pidduck gave me my first job selling melons and fresh corn, sitting by the house.”
Kristine, sister Marsha and brother Roger traveled with their father to Venezuela when he worked for an oil service company. He died there in 1960 from bulbar polio at age 42.
“If parents take us far afield, it reminds us that world is very big,” she says of her early travels.
“Working at Patagonia, meeting Yvon and others, looking at their lives and how they lived their lives” was for her, she says, “the genesis of imagining a wild life, even if you don’t know what that means. People in our lives expressed that kind of boldness. ... Parents reminding you you can do anything with your life, but do something with your life.”
A wild life is not without risks, but, she says, “I’m less afraid of facing these extreme circumstances than I am of having a life I didn’t want.”
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