Flippers was the place to see Gene Simmons in full KISS makeup or Prince in regalia. The Go-Go’s, John Cougar, and The Ramones played live shows. Tompkins dreamed that this chic showroom would sweep Los Angeles off its rhinestone heels. He brought to town (or so he imagined) a sexy new scent: Northern California succulent. The Los Angeles location where Jon Voight roller danced with Jane Fonda would, he declared, be reborn as the epicenter of design and youthful clothing. Esprit’s Los Angeles showroom oozed the company’s ethos that life “is an attitude, not an age.” But as many newcomers to The City of Angels discover, faking an attitude is harder than it looks. Tompkins demanded that the concrete floors be painted glossy black, then waxed. They came out smooth, striking, and so slippery that employees and customers regularly crashed to the floor. A contractor working at the L.A. store observed, “You got the feeling that Doug liked to work off a full-scale model.”
While competitors like the Gap spent about $70 per square foot for their properties, the cost of the former roller disco ballooned sixfold to $400 per square foot. “It was to be a masterpiece for him. Everything was overdesigned,” confessed Aldo Cibic, the Italian collaborator who worked on the project. “Like, if you make a house for yourself and you start to say, ‘I want the floor the best of the best. I want the walls the best of the best. The lighting must be the most beautiful. The furniture has to be fantastic.’”
The Los Angeles store bombed. “Doug completely ignored the first three rules of retailing: location, location, location,” recalled friend Buckley. Esprit publicly acknowledged that the store makeover, budgeted at $7 million, ended up costing $24 million.
“The Wall Street Journal called me for a quote. I guess the banks were worried about Esprit. I said ‘Esprit is a multimedia international work of art,’” laughed Dwelle. “Doug was furious. I said, ‘Well, isn’t that the truth?’ He said, ‘Yeah, but you should have told the banks something about the business.’”
Seduced by eighteen years of soaring profits, by 1986 Tompkins had missed multiple signs that his company was in trouble. Fashion trends were migrating from flashy colors to a more traditional palette. The US dollar sank, thereby spiking prices charged by his Hong Kong manufacturing operations. Profits plummeted to $8 million annually. In a panic, Tompkins fired a third of his 2,000 US-based workers and cancelled the free ballet tickets and rafting trips for employees. But his deeper problems were closer to home. A turf war was brewing with his wife, Susie. “We’ve been fighting like cats in a bag for fifteen years,” Tompkins told GQ. “It’s just a matter of convenience that we remain married.”
Yet the powerful split ran far deeper. For board members and the few in the know, Esprit was cracking under the founding couple’s nonstop warfare. “There’s an invisible line that runs right through the design room. You’re either on Susie’s side or you’re on Doug’s,” said Brielle Johnck, Susie’s personal assistant, who quit after becoming “worn down by Susie and Doug’s unhappiness.”
“Everything that was a problem was my fault,” declared Susie. “And so, when we hit the wall financially because we’d overextended and because he was doing all this monument building, it was ‘my fault.’ I was standing upstairs at our house on Lombard Street, in front of my entire design team, and I heard him say, ‘We’ve got to get her out. She’s too old. She doesn’t know what she’s doing.’ That was the night I left. That was the final straw.”
Tompkins hardly seemed to notice the tremors his marital instability had on Summer and Quincey and his own contributions to Esprit. He felt restless. He seemed to be impatient. If he died, what would be the inscription on his tombstone? “Nearly a Member of the Olympic Ski Team”? Or “Notable Clothing Salesman”? Hardly the legacy he imagined when as a sixteen-year-old he told an interviewer that he was destined to “go places normal humans don’t.”
While company insiders knew about his marital misgivings, Tompkins was also doubting everything about corporate America. Tompkins didn’t want to play the game anymore. “I found myself caught up in the marketing,” he reflected. “I lost track of the larger picture. I was creating desires that weren’t there. I was making products that nobody needed.”
“He had a sense that business was cool,” said his friend Lito. “He was doing it with great enthusiasm for the hell of doing it well. But I never had the sense—ever—that he was trying to make money. He just wanted to succeed because that’s what he was doing. There’s a very financial sort of people who do something to get rich. He never had that spirit.”
Jerry Mander visited Tompkins at Esprit for lunch often, and he found his pal increasingly unsatisfied. “He admitted that he was making a lot of money, and that’s good, but he wished he was doing something else,” said Mander, who was so trusted that he often received Doug’s confessions. “This went on for years and years. A part of him couldn’t stand being in Esprit. He kept saying, ‘This is not for me. I’ve got to do something else. I’ve got to do what you’re doing.’”
Mander and his business partner, Herb Chao Gunther, had carved out a niche with Public Media Center, San Francisco’s leading—and at that time perhaps only—progressive advertising agency. They developed campaigns for David Brower at the Sierra Club, including the wildly popular slogan mocking a proposed dam that would inundate the majestic Glen Canyon in Arizona. In full-page advertisements they ran the banner headline—“Should We Also Flood the Sistine Chapel so Tourists Can Get Nearer the Ceiling?” Public Media offices became an office-away-from-the-office for Tompkins. He came to study what they were doing, to watch Mander and Gunther in action.
Tompkins dug into a wide range of environmental authors, activists, and philosophers. He peppered these cutting-edge figures with faxes, letters, phone calls, and questions. He frequently developed personal relationships with them. He spent hours a day “doing my scholarship,” as he liked to call his time spent discovering new authors or reading up on activists who fought for forests. He admired the front row eco-warriors willing to ram and harass Japanese whaling ships and the young activists who lived 200 feet high in a redwood tree for months to ensure that it wasn’t chopped down. Tompkins read a wide selection of books about environmental conservation and mocked traditional university education with a passion. Unwilling to be guided or taught, he trusted what he understood, and read.
Tompkins then discovered Deep Ecology, a philosophical call to arms defined by the American writer George Sessions and the Norwegian mountain climber and philosopher Arne Næss. In his work, Næss wrote that humanity required a wholesale rethinking of our place on Earth, and he argued for both a cohesive understanding of ecosystems and an end to human hubris that put one species above all others. The way Næss saw it, the destruction of wildlife and of their habitats was upending the natural balance of life on Earth and sending the entire planet hurtling toward crisis. Decades before climate change and extinction crisis became mainstream topics of conversation, Næss and his band of followers posited that the dream of perpetual economic growth on a finite planet would inevitably—and sooner rather than later—lead to environmental catastrophe. Tompkins was smitten. He fired off letters to Næss and Sessions.
Just five years earlier Tompkins had seduced the deans of design in Milan, and now he was courting the leaders of Deep Ecology. “I was spending my mornings totally immersed in activism, then jolted back to reality by noon and having to concentrate on running the business. Something had to change,” said Tompkins. “I set about extricating myself from the business with the aim of dedicating my life to conservation and environmental work. I still wonder how I could have been so distracted by a successful business, so focused elsewhere that I was not out there with the Earth Firsters where my heart actually longed to be.”
Part II
Chapter 6
Where Is My North? Flying South
By the mid 1980s I had slowly come to the realization that I was doing the wrong thing. I was in an apparel company making a lot of stuff that nobody nee
ded. My main work was adding to the environmental crisis rather than help revert it. I realized I had to do something else.
—DOUG TOMPKINS
On Earth Day 1989, Rick Klein landed in Los Angeles after an overnight flight from Chile. As soon as he grabbed his bags, he rushed to his first appointment, in Ventura, an hour north, depending on the traffic along the Pacific Coast Highway. He was going to visit Yvon Chouinard at Patagonia, to ask for money to protect a unique grove of forest in southern Chile. “I was carrying around nine different Kodak snapshots of the Araucaria trees that I had taken from the pinnacle of the Cañi Sanctuary. That was my funding pitch. I opened up the nine laminated images, full of beautiful lakes and Araucaria trees, and I said, ‘This is what we can actually do now, for $130,000. For that, we can own this and create Chile’s first nongovernmental park.’”
Rick showed Yvon his nine photographs. Taped together, they were about two feet long, and they opened like an accordion. The Araucaria trees were as majestic as the redwoods of California. Rick told Yvon it was important to preserve this stand of old-growth forest. He told Yvon he had received one donation so far, of $50,000. Yvon said, “Okay. Here’s forty grand. And go tell my friend Doug Tompkins in San Francisco that I just gave $40,000. I guarantee you, he’ll try to keep up. That should get you to $130,000.”
Klein flew to Northern California, and when he got to town he called Tompkins at Esprit. Klein corresponded through Doug’s personal project manager, Dolly Mah. She told Klein, “Doug’s interested. If Yvon’s in, Doug’s in for $40,000. Here’s the check.” Klein suddenly had money to pursue his dream of saving ancient forests in Chile. He couldn’t believe it—“Boom! It was done.”
Klein was a native Californian who in the mid-’70s had moved to Chile. He managed to survive the bloodiest years of the military dictatorship by working as a park ranger in Reserva Galletue near the headwaters of the Biobío River. Sporting a shaggy head of hair and a wild beard, he lived in constant danger that the secret police would mistake him for a guerrilla and kidnap then torture him. His boss pleaded away his moustache and beard, saying, “Rick’s not a revolutionary, he’s a poet.”
Splitting his time between Chile and California, Klein ran Ancient Forests International, a nonprofit group based in Arcadia, California. He organized activists to protest against clear-cut logging operations. In Chile, he was fighting to save an endangered forest threatened by Fletcher Challenge, a notorious New Zealand logging outfit. Without immediate action, the Araucaria forest would be clear-cut. But the Araucaria forest in Chile was not the only forest nor the only species of tree that Klein was scrambling to protect. After picking up the $40,000 check from Doug’s office, he went to meet with the former head of the Sierra Club, David Brower, who was working at the Earth Island Institute. Klein briefed Brower about his ongoing “Save the Ancient Forests” campaign, which included organizing expeditions that brought activists to the Chilean forests that were facing logging threats along Patagonia’s northern border.
Brower had helped on previous expeditions that Klein ran in the Chilean forests. On one journey they sought to find the “oldest tree in the world,” which Klein believed would be an Alerce, a tree nearly as towering as the California redwoods. Klein had drummed up National Geographic magazine’s interest in the story, but in order to close the deal and to publish the story, the editor demanded a top-notch landscape photographer. Over lunch, Brower introduced Klein to Galen Rowell, one of the magazine’s star photographers. Rowell quickly accepted Rick’s invitation to join an expedition and photograph the Alerce forest because, as it turned out, in a few months, he was heading to Chile anyway, traveling by small plane, along with his friend Doug Tompkins.
Rowell suggested to Tompkins that they explore the ancient Alerce forest in Chile in search of the oldest tree in the world, and Tompkins jumped at the opportunity. The only way he could survive as CEO of Esprit, he felt, was by taking ever-more-frequent escapes. Kayaking to take a population census of beluga whales and monitoring polar bears in the Arctic—those were the kind of meaningful projects that increasingly stole him away from Esprit. While in Chile on this trip, Doug and Galen planned to raft down the Biobío River and climb Cerro Castillo, a spiked peak in Patagonia.
Rowell’s wife, Barbara, would also be flying south to Chile, piloting a Cessna 206 identical to Tompkins’s own. They planned a flight path from San Francisco to Tierra del Fuego. Doug had flown this route a half-dozen times, but it never ceased to awaken the wild corners of his mind. To share the piloting, Tompkins brought along his good friend and sometimes business partner Peter Buckley. For moral support in this boy’s club, Barbara brought along her brother, Bob Cushman, a ski patrol leader and veteran outdoorsman. Klein agreed to meet them down in Puerto Montt, Chile, after they arrived. He would lead them on the Alerce forest trek.
Buckley had just finished rudimentary pilot training and received a temporary license the week before they left. He had only forty piloting hours in the air, but as soon as they took off Tompkins told him he needed to read and handed over control of the small Cessna. “I got to fly the plane a lot because Doug had a manuscript of a new book, In the Absence of the Sacred, by Jerry Mander. And all the way down, he’d read aloud,” said Buckley. “The book was supporting a lot of the ideas that Doug had about developing a critique of capitalism and about capitalism as another mega-technology responsible for environmental degradation. That started his new life.”
* * *
We were feeling dizzy, and flying way higher than we were supposed to be without oxygen, at 14,000 feet. We turn on the oxygen at the very last minute, and suddenly everything is great. Feeling sharp. Aware of all the instruments, and Doug perks up, and then two minutes later there was a rupture in the line, the tank drained. Doug starts getting nauseous, and vomiting in the plane. I’m trying to fly. He said, “I’m fucked up” and puts his head up, and he’s trying to really focus, because now it’s getting a little bit serious. And he says, “Peter. Go through that notch in those hills, I think there’s a . . . I think that’s . . .” and sure enough, we go through the gap and I see this big air field. And it’s completely by itself. Why is this air strip here in the middle of nowhere? It’s not on the chart. Doug says, “Land the plane.” So I’m going straight in and I’m coming in for a landing, and I’m flaring the airplane, and Doug puts his head up and says, “Fuck!” And we go, “Boing,” bouncing down the runway. And Doug—if it was up to me, we probably would have crashed—but Doug somehow got the plane on the ground. And then he lost it. We pull up, and he falls out of the airplane and is retching on the ground. And then, the military shows up and they take Doug away. And Galen is saying, “Wow, this place is great!” We were essentially under arrest. We were under instructions to fly directly to Lima, and turn ourselves in. We take off and Doug says, “Go down there, and stay low.” I go, “Okay.” So I’m flying down this valley really low, and the radio comes to life, and the people are shouting. They are completely freaking out for forty-five minutes. Instead of going to Lima [Peru], we head to Chile. We went over the border. And we don’t have a flight plan, we’re not registered, this is horrible, horrible, horrible. And Doug says, “It’s okay. The Chileans hate the Peruvians.” The guy who was the head policeman in the town was at a wedding or something. Doug says, “I’m going to go into town and talk to him; it’s all going to be cool.” Doug goes into town, comes back an hour later, he’s a little bit drunk. The policeman is way drunk. He stamps all the papers, he slaps Doug on the back, and we take off.
—PETER BUCKLEY
* * *
After surviving a lack of oxygen as they crossed the Andes in Peru and Bolivia, the two planes continued south to Santiago, where Buckley disembarked and headed home on a commercial flight. As they headed further south, Galen flew with Doug, and Barbara piloted with her brother Bob in the copilot’s seat. Arriving in Puerto Montt, Tompkins met up with Rick Klein for the first time at a hotel in the center of town. Klein
trotted out another accordion-like set of photos, this time of Alerce trees. Tompkins was stunned. The forests reminded him of Norway.
The central government in Santiago had spent a century attempting to colonize the area south of Puerto Montt, yet the rainy wilderness was home to fewer than ten persons in a square mile. Even the 700-mile-long “Pinochet Highway”—dynamited through Patagonia in the mad dictator’s obsessive 1980s public works push—failed to breach this dense ecosystem. “Most of it is volcano, or rock and swamps up the valleys,” said Klein as he described the steep, rugged terrain. “Because of the scarcity of big game, the indigenous people never went back up in there. Arguably no human has ever set foot in the recesses of some of these ancient forest valleys.”
But the forests were under attack. Klein pointed out trucks loaded with native hardwoods that, every few minutes, drove by their hotel toward the docks and added their loads to a pile of wood chips five stories high. Colored like a sand dune and shaped like a volcano, the “dune” consisted of Chile’s native forests ground into pieces the size of Doritos. A constant caravan of trucks rumbled into town and unloaded the “chips” that were sold to buyers in Japan. In Tokyo, they became raw material for fine paper.
Driving toward Alerce Andino National Park, Klein was bubbling with excitement. Not only was National Geographic’s acclaimed photographer Galen Rowell onboard but so was Doug Tompkins, a maverick with cash and a passion to save forests. The drive was sobering. Leaving Puerto Montt, they saw forest destruction everywhere. Dozens of rustic sawmills were producing five tons of wood chips a day. “They’re selling our patrimony for $50 a ton, and the destruction is enormous,” declared Adriana Hoffmann, a Chilean botanist. “We’re fragmenting and destroying habitats that are unique in the world. And what we’re destroying is not a renewable resource. Trees thousands of years old,” she said, snapping her fingers, “cannot regenerate like this.”
A Wild Idea Page 11
