Lale chats with Kris Tompkins, an American conservationist who is the subject of a new National Geographic documentary, Wild Life, about her work restoring the wild beauty of Patagonia by protecting and creating nearly 15 million acres of parkland. Her philosophy? "If you buy a Picasso and you hang it in your living room, you and your family can enjoy it. But if you take that same Picasso and you donate it to MoMA or any place really around the world, millions of people will see that every year and be informed by it, entertained by it." The same applies to nature, says Kris.
Lale Arikoglu: Hi, and welcome to a new episode of Women Who Travel. I'm Lale Arikoglu, and today I'm taking us to one of my favorite places in the world and somewhere that I've spoken about on this podcast before. It's wild. It's remote, with spectacular landscapes and some of the world's most unpredictable weather. It's Patagonia, home to glaciers and the Andes, deserts and rainforests, almost all of which has been protected by the creation of national parks in huge areas of Chile and Argentina.
Kris Tompkins: If you buy a Picasso and you hang it in your living room, you and your family can enjoy it. But if you take that same Picasso and you donate it to MoMA or any place, really, around the world, millions of people will see that every year and be informed by it, entertained by it. Doug and I decided that whatever land we bought, we would return it to the country in the form of a new national park for exactly that reason.
LA: That's how Kris Tompkins, an American conservationist who is the subject of a new National Geographic documentary, describes her philosophy when it comes to restoring the wild beauty of Patagonia and beyond. For three decades, her foundation, Tompkins Conservation, has been protecting and creating nearly 15 million acres of park land. Last year, I saw some of this work firsthand when I went to part of Northern Patagonia in Chile, only 10 kilometers from the Argentine border. My destination? A village that's known for its adventure tourism, hiking, and whitewater rafting. Here's a recorded clip of my own journey to and across a section of this giant region, a story that we covered in our show last fall.
I got on a domestic flight to a small city called Puerto Montt, which is perhaps best known for a volcano that erupted several years ago, and I can't really tell you much else. I got on a 10-seater propeller plane which flew me to the tiny village of Chaitén. And, from there, a very generous and kind older couple who didn't speak a lick of English, and I didn't speak a lick of Spanish, drove me for three hours through gorges and past glaciers and into the mountains to my final destination, outside of the village of Futaleufú.
On my first morning waking up in the Andes, the owner of the lodge that I was staying at, Marcelo, decided to take me out for a hike with him and his two dogs, Baloo and Poncho. It was misty. It was drizzly. I had my rain jacket zipped up and my hiking boots on. And the only sound other than the dogs sniffing in the grass was the sound of the mud squelching beneath our hiking boots. We talked about everything, from Pearl Jam, to psychedelic mushrooms, to Tokyo, to where the color of the river in Futaleufú was such a brilliant, iridescent blue. It was one of the best days I've ever had. It was one of the best travel experiences I've ever had.
Marcelo: Sometimes you can spot some condors over there.
LA: Mm-hmm. We didn't see any condors, but I spotted myriad birds and even an otter searching for its dinner along the coast. And on that journey, two names kept coming up in conversations I had with people who call Patagonia home, Kris and her husband, Doug Tompkins. So when I discovered that there's a new documentary film about their work, asking Kris to be a guest felt like a way to travel back to that beautiful place.
It's funny. When I was in Patagonia, which is a line I love to trot out-
KT: Yes. [laughs]
LA: ... at a bar ... [laughs]
KT: When I was in Patagonia-
LA [laughs] Exactly. I mean, what a treat to get to say that. I heard both of your names constantly.
KT: Oh, you did?
LA: Within ... I had got a l-, lift from the airport in Puerto Montt to take me to, like, another small plane, and even the woman driving me, when she asked me why I was there and I said I was there for a story, she immediately was like, "Oh, well, you have to read about the Tompkins." And so before we get into all the work you've done to protect that land, I'd actually love to start by talking about the time when you were just exploring and discovering it and what wild beauty you saw.
KT: I think my first trip to, to the Patagonia region was on the Argentine side, and even though I grew up in a rural area and never had really had a seriously urban life, I couldn't believe the expansive territory. It's like being in Tibet. For a Western modern mind, the scale and the emptiness and the harshness, really, I found transformative.
LA: The air was very striking to me in that it was so clean.
KT: Yeah. It reminds some ancient part of you what life was like for 99.9% of human life on this Earth. And so I think you, you begin to relax. You begin to imagine yourself in another lifetime or in another life. That's what happened to me anyway.
LA: Kris, who was always interested in the outdoors, was running the clothing company Patagonia at the time when she met Doug. The feature-length film Wild Life captures the moment in 1993 when she decided to move to Chile.
KT: Doug would call me from time to time, and one night, I said, "Well, I'm gonna go to Paris to work out of the Paris office." And he goes, "Great. I'll see you over there." And, true to his form, he's in Paris. We go out to dinner at his favorite restaurant in Paris, and we're walking around, walk a-, all around Paris. He said, "Come see me in Chile." I said, "No. Absolutely not. You're a world-famous sandbagger." And he stopped and looked down at, at his feet and then looked backed up, back up at me, and said, "I will never let anything happen to you."
It was one of those moments that you see somebody transform even in their own mind. I mean, much later, he said he knew exactly. That was it. And so did I. I thought to myself, "That's the man I'm supposed to marry." But it's, it was crazy, really crazy. I was engaged to another person. So I ended up leaving that fiancé. Then I went down to Chile to visit with Doug for 10 days, and I stayed five weeks. It was chemistry. When, um, you get hit by lightning.
I'm going to leave my role as CEO, and we are currently looking for someone to replace me. My hope is to have someone in place by October, train them, have them shadow me day to day for three months, and then January 1st, I plug out, and, uh, likely go to Chile, which is where I'm thinking that my home will be.
I mean, I blew up my whole ... [laughs] It was scandalous. I just blew up my personal life. But I was right. It turned out to be the great thing, and it was a big leap of faith. I mean, it was, could easily have gone either way. This was insane, what we were doing.
LA: The documentary is, at its heart, it's a love story both for that part of the world a-, but also for you and Doug. How did the two of you fall in love with that land together?
KT: Well, Doug really fell in love with the Patagonian region on either side of the border with climbing in 1968. And Doug had already bought one piece of property when I, uh, once I retired and moved to Chile. And I don't think we knew exactly what we were going to do with these territories at first. And then we realized these, these should be national parks. And that's when we really started meeting with governments and, and people throughout the country, talking about the possibility of protecting the jewels of this country in that form, so all are welcome and that every hectare of these territories belongs to every citizen.
LA: What was that process like in terms of working with these governments and a-, and, I guess, like, creating that accessibility?
KT: Well, it's a process because when we, in the early years, in the early '90s, of course, there was great suspicion about what we were doing. We were buying up large tracks of forest and not cutting them down, and that was highly suspicious, uh, irregular. So it was kind of rough at the beginning.
LA: Do you think part of it was to do with the fact that it was, you were two non-Chileans coming in and with this radical idea?
KT: When I look back 25 years, 28 years, and I see the tremendous suspiciousness surrounding us, we were known as the couple who cut Chile in half. Um, people thought we were looking to create a new Jewish state, even though we were raised as Anglicans, and all these outrageous things said about it. Today when I look at it, I think things like that, the country, it was new to the country, and I think these things would happen anywhere, frankly.
There's always a first, and the first is usually the one who has to tackle these suspicions and, and, and kind of ride it out because I think that culture is so strong that when, as it begins to evolve, even in a small direction, you have to be prepared for a reaction that won't always be positive. And we, boy, did we learn that with great humility, honestly. Um, and now, everybody takes our work for granted. And, um, what people really forget, oftentimes, Tompkins Conservation is the Doug and Kris Show. There are hundreds of Chileans who worked on the Chilean National Parks, and Argentines on the other side of the border. So these parks were never just created by Doug and Kris.
LA: After the break, how Kris and her team have been releasing jaguars back into the wild after a 70-year absence.
Condé Nast Traveler writer Alex Postman, who I think you maybe crossed paths with-
KT: Yes.
LA: ... when she was reporting this story, um, wrote a feature for us last year about rewilding in Argentina, and she opens with this beautiful description of seeing a very faint, but very much there, paw print of a jaguar in the Earth.
KT: Yes. Well, you know, I'm very spoiled in this regard [laughs] because I get out there quite a bit. I mean, it brings tears to your eyes the first time you see jaguars out free after 70 years gone missing. It can be the small mammals. It ... I get to see a lot of it, and it's something you never take for granted because they're free, but you're always vigilant. Did we really take care of the reasons they went extinct in the first place? So the work we have come to learn is actually never over. And, um, you know, it's emotional when you're talking about rewilding and local communities. Top predators such as the jaguar are not easy to bring back socially, generally. In Corrientes, Argentina, they couldn't wait for the jaguars to come back because those cats represent the way they see themselves, the Correntino, the, the valiance of, o-, of a Correntino. So, in that way, you have the whole province protecting them now when, in fact, that was utterly missing when they'd gone extinct in the first place. So you, you're watching yourselves and everything around you evolve as these species come back.
LA: In the documentary, there's wonderful footage of this elusive big cat, the largest in the Americas.
KT: There was so much more to do than just protect the land. You can't call any of these places restored or healthy until everybody's back.
Speaker 4: Kris helped with the reintroductions of over a dozen species at this point, uh, ultimately including the jaguar, which nobody's ever done before.
KT: It was Doug's idea to do whatever we could to bring jaguars back. The jaguar is emblematic. It's, it's the top of the food chain there. It was one of his dreams.
So we have nine to release, and that's assuming that both the cubs, who are now both females, [laughs] have two cubs, maybe. Maybe one.
LA: When you walk through these parks now and on this land, what difference do you see now compared to before the rewilding efforts? I mean, it comes to these ecosystems being rebuilt and reintroduced.
KT: Well, let me start with a description of our reaction as people who are working on the ground. In both Chile and Argentina, you actually have to pay attention now. Where are you? What are you listening to? Are you going out in a sector where maybe you should retrace your steps? In terms of the landscape itself, certain grasslands are starting to be modified, especially in the Patagonian grasslands, where pumas are back now in, in, in really healthy numbers. That is the extraordinary nature of rewilding, um, species who are at the top of the triangle, who ... It's like the wolves in Yellowstone. There's nothing in Yellowstone that behaves the way it did before the wolves came back. And that's how I feel.
A, a good example of this around the Iberá Wetlands, which is roughly two million acres, there are 10 communities, communities that have been largely forgotten, even by the provincial government. It's, it was, uh, a territory in the p-, in the province that nobody really had mapped. Nobody really understood what was out there. It's flat. It's just water. That has completely changed today. Every one of those communities has economic activities that are born out of Iberá, jobs and all sorts of things, and they have the jaguars back. And they have giant anteaters, and they have these points of pride that they needed and wanted to get back, and they're back.
LA: Do you think these rewilded areas can ever feel whole again? Or do you think they've experienced so much loss to their ecosystems, even as they, these animals and this nature returns, do you think it, it can feel complete?
KT: Oh, I think yes, but in some areas, even down in the Patagonia grasslands, where you, where you have these arid conditions, and in some areas, I wonder, "Even with the livestock taking off, a lot of care being put into it, I know that there will be some areas that probably don't come back to their original richness and diversity." That said, maybe even the majority of it will. Of course, they're, they're influenced by this, these 200 years that they've gone through, with pretty rapacious use and extractive economies. But yes, as they say, "Mother Earth bats last." [laughs]
LA: I love that. I love that phrase. Terrifying phrase. Hopeful phrase.
KT: Yeah. [laughs] It's both hopeful and terrifying. [laughs]
LA: Yeah. Um, and also quite, quite a good ego reset-
KT: Yeah.
LA: ... I think.
KT: Indeed.
LA: Coming up, how Kris kept going after insurmountable loss and what she still hopes to achieve.
KT: This was an amputation for me. It wasn't just a loss.
LA: In 2015, Doug Tompkins died unexpectedly of hypothermia after his kayak capsized while he was crossing Lago General Carrera in Southern Chile.
After it being the two of you, how did you figure out to carry on and, kind of, in short, how did you keep going?
KT: I certainly was asking myself that question right after he died. And I struggled. I knew I could survive it. I just wasn't sure that it was a life that I'm was interested in. And then for a few reasons, I, I first of all said, "Sit up. Sit upright. [laughs] Um, we have to finish this stuff. We have families. We have loved ones. We have ... What am I thinking?" And the minute I made that decision, not to set aside grief, but wrap yourself up in it in a way that it's not choking you to death, which it was, and then I just kicked in, uh, probably a lot of my business years. [laughs] Everything was so clear to me. It was very, very black and white. We are going to the end and do it all.
LA: What, what ... You know, you said, "I have to finish this." What was finishing it?
KT: In our case, at that point, we had a lot of parks in Chile and in, in Argentina, which we'd been working on, and I wanted them to be donated as fast as possible, get them finished and get them donated back to the countries. So in, in the case of Chile, we put together ... I think it's still the largest donation in history, donating the last million acres we had in the country and working very closely with the national government to add in nine million additional acres from the government. And we, at one signing, we created five new national parks for Chile and enlarged three others. And at the same time, a, well, a little earlier, on the Argentine side, we worked with the standing government to do the same thing in, in, in Argentina.
LA: What do you think, especially in the last eight years, the wilderness has, has given you, just on a personal level?
KT: It has accompanied me in loss, not just of Doug, but in many things. And I feel best when I feel really small. And, uh, the only way I can feel really tiny and part of something much greater than myself is when I'm out in nature. It doesn't have to be so far out. It doesn't have to be down in Patagonia. But then I understand my place in the order of things. And struggling with whatever it is, if you make yourself small, at least, the way I see it, I find contentment and almost joy, I would say, in being a part of something that its heart is so beautiful and so powerful. And that, for me, it can ... My cathedral is in nature.
When we think about the local communities whom we've been neighbors to over the last 30 years, um, I think it's always important to remind ourselves that any conversation about conservation has to begin with the people who have been there all along, the local communities. And Doug always called it consulting the geniuses of the place, and he was very serious about that. And in the film, you'll see that a lot of, most of our wildlife work, uh, teams are all local people, and the reason for that is they know how to track pumas. They know how to work with the nearly extinct huemul deer. There are all these people locally that have knowledge. Doug always, he is, he was the most straightforward person in the world. But the, the conversations have always been direct and honest and, from our side, completely open. And they do, those conversations do influence our thinking.
I'm going to do this until I physically, mentally, you have to put me in the, in the ground. Um, but I will say that it is a kind of legacy point for, for me, for Tompkins Conservation, because when Doug died, and coming out of the business world, immediately, I started a very serious succession plan because with only one of us left, I had to decide, "What, what is the value here?" I mean, this is a revolution, and we wanna be on the front lines of this revolution.
LA: Patagonia has long captured the imaginations of writers and adventurers, and I was no different. Its landscape left me breathless from the first morning I woke up there, yes, because of its beauty, but even more so because of its exquisite emptiness.
Wild Life, chronicling the highs and lows of Kris Tompkins' journey, is made by National Geographic. Next week, I talk to actor Gabrielle Union about taking her extended family and many friends on a trip to Zanzibar, Ghana, Namibia, and South Africa in honor of her 50th birthday, as part of a new docuseries on BET+. I'm Lale Arikoglu, and you can find me on Instagram at @lalehannah. Our engineers are Jake Lummus and Gabe Quiroga. The show is mixed by Amar Lal. Jude Kampfner from Corporation for Independent Media is our producer. See you next week.
