A Wild Idea

by Jonathan Franklin

  “Doug was never afraid to fund things. If anything, it was kind of my job, together with the CFO and the lawyers, to make sure this is okay, like legit,” laughed Quincey Tompkins, his eldest daughter and executive director of the Foundation for Deep Ecology from 1991 to 2000. “There was nothing illegal, just things that were radical. He would support those guys. And we’d have to vet it.”

  * * *

  The first act of tyranny is when large corporate entities in a society try to privatize the public trust and steal it. In a true free market, you have to properly value natural resources, and it’s the undervaluation of those resources that causes us to use them wastefully. What polluters do is they make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise the standard of living for themselves by lowering the quality of life for everybody else, and they do that by escaping the discipline of the free market and forcing the public to pay their production costs. If you show me a polluter, I’ll show you a subsidy. I’ll show you a fat cat using political clout.

  —ROBERT KENNEDY JR.

  * * *

  As Tompkins bankrolled first dozens and then hundreds of direct action conservation groups via his foundation, a campaign against environmental activists erupted in the western United States. In Moab, Utah; Ukiah, California; and Missoula, Montana, environmental activists were threatened, shot at, had their dogs poisoned, and their homes torched. Funded by the coal industry, big oil, and snowmobile manufacturers, an aggressive antienvironmental campaign called “Wise Use” erupted as a countermovement to the rising environmental tide of the early 1990s. Posing as a grassroots organization, “Wise Use” was later exposed to be largely a PR effort funded by polluting industries.

  At the same time, Dave Foreman, one of the founders of Earth First!, was targeted by the FBI in Operation THERMCON. After a year-long sting effort and more than a thousand hours of phone intercepts, along with attempts to lure Foreman into illegal acts, FBI agents arrested him as a SWAT team surrounded his modest New Mexico home. “I never felt so naked,” quipped Foreman as he described awaking, nude, with his wife, Nancy, to find agents pointing a pistol at his head.

  The FBI and federal prosecutors tried to frame Foreman by alleging, on scant evidence, that he was part of a conspiracy to sabotage electrical power lines leading to nuclear power plants. Federal prosecutors sought a twenty-year prison sentence for Foreman. The sham trial might have prevailed had Doug and Yvon not helped fund Foreman’s defense. As the accused activist fought the bogus charges, he and Tompkins spent hours discussing what they both saw as the FBI’s war of “dirty tricks” on Earth First! Tompkins and Chouinard paid tens of thousands in hotel bills and bought plane tickets for the legal team, led by Yvon’s neighbor, the skilled defense attorney Gerry Spence.

  The defense strategy paid off. After months of procedural delays, the FBI was forced to hand over clandestine audios of talks with Foreman. During the final push to frame him, the FBI agent Michael Fain chatted with a fellow agent during the operation and forgot he was recording. “This [Foreman] really isn’t the guy we need to pop, I mean, in terms of actual perpetrator,” said Agent Fain. “But this is the guy we need to pop to send the message and that’s all we’re really doing and if we don’t nail this guy [Foreman] we’re not sending any message. . . . Uh, oh! We don’t need that on tape. Oh, boy.”

  Foreman was declared not guilty of all serious charges. He then celebrated with a nationwide collegiate speaking tour during which he warned Green activists to prepare for “serious prison time” and asked if they were willing to “put your life on the line.” Foreman was an inspiring orator. Dressed in blue jeans and cowboy hat, he encouraged activists to pull up survey stakes, criticize mainstream environmental groups, and defend Mother Nature at any cost. “The great thing about Doug and Yvon,” said Foreman, “is the consciousness that making money isn’t an end, that you need to make money so you can accomplish something with it. Doug was very much focused on the small groups, the hard-hitting groups.”

  By the early 1990s Earth First! was in crisis mode. FBI provocations (including undercover agents having sex with activists, buying explosives, and provoking violence) sent the paranoia factor through the roof. “Earth First! was founded to save big, wild places, and take no-compromising stances on protecting wild nature,” explained Foreman. “It got infiltrated by the FBI, because apparently the Reagan administration saw us as a real threat. Earth First! was also attracting people who were countercultural, against the state—against the man, so to speak—but who didn’t necessarily have a strong wilderness ethic, so the old guard broke away from Earth First! and started a magazine called Wild Earth. Right away Doug Tompkins sent a nice letter and a big check.”

  To expand his conservation plans, Doug turned to two voices he respected and trusted in the environmental movement: those of Foreman and John Davis, both central cogs in the Earth First! organization and the Wild Earth brain trust. “Doug asked me, ‘Who are the best activists?’” said Davis. “I don’t think he told me much about himself. He just told me that he was a successful businessman and interested in investing in effective wilderness and wildlife groups, and who did I think was the best? I spent some time with him on the phone talking to him about which groups were very effective at defending wild places and wildlife.”

  From the office inside Tompkins’s San Francisco property, Davis, Foreman, Jerry Mander, Quincey, and Doug honed their environmental agenda. After years at Esprit, dreaming of an escape from corporate life, Doug was a “free radical” with $150 million in cash. Wasn’t anything possible?

  Tompkins challenged Foreman. “You’ve been talking about North American wilderness recovery, you’ve been talking these big ideas for years, they’re great ideas,” he said. “Why don’t you implement them? Why don’t you get the key people together, make a plan to implement this North American wilderness recovery strategy?” Foreman took the bait and began preparations for a forest restoration summit. Tompkins paid airfare and food. Lodging was on his living room floor.

  At his hilltop home in San Francisco, Tompkins gathered scientists, authors, young forestry activists, grizzled vets like Foreman, and top biologists, including Michael Soulé, the “intellectual grandfather” of the scientific field of conservation biology.

  Evening after evening, the living room overflowed with passionate debate. Tompkins loved to mix up the crowd, adding friends like the Italian jean designer Fiorucci and Randy Hayes, the founder of Rainforest Action Network. Although he could harangue a table of VIPs with no pause for diplomatic niceties, when meeting the activists he could also listen. “Doug knew that there were people around him that knew more, read more, and were more experienced in these nonbusiness issues than he was,” said Hayes. “With all of his energy, and his curmudgeonly way, he was actually very humble in his relationship to us, to those around him he considered to be people of knowledge and thought that he could learn from.”

  “If you were in a situation where you need to achieve something by compromise, that just wasn’t the outcome that interested him at all,” said Rick Ridgeway. “He didn’t have any interest in trying to bring unaligned people into an alignment. But he’s good at bringing like-minded people together to reach a common goal.”

  Doug’s overdose of ego, along with his cocky and blunt way of talking to people, sometimes meant he was described as an egomaniac. But he often stunned his friends and enemies alike with his ability to sniff out cultural trends long before they were recognized. As a global businessman, his nose for the future provided him with hundreds of millions in wealth. Now, having converted his house into a hot spot for environmental thought and activism, he asked himself big questions: What are the boldest plans to save intact forests? What are the most destructive clear-cut practices? With tens of millions of dollars, how could he slow industrial destruction of ecosystems?

  When a forestry activist trying to shame British Columbia into action needed a place to crash, Tompkins allowed him to sleep o
n the couch at Lombard Street for weeks as he strategized how best to rebrand his province. When together they pushed the slogan “Canada, the Brazil of the North,” Doug was delighted. He loved to attack corporations with clever phrases. Especially if they contained humor. “It was a comfortable setting. People felt empowered. You had a bunch of people just like Doug, who wanted to make something happen,” remembers Andy Kimbrell, a sustainable agriculture expert who attended activist summits with Tompkins at his home.

  With vanguard conservation ideas top of mind, Tompkins funded a range of activities that spanned from three-day strategy meetings to lawsuits that might last years. He considered litigating for wilderness and wildlife to be one of his most efficient investments, and he routinely poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into legal battles around the globe. Although some legal protection for forests, rivers, and wetlands had existed for decades, environmental activists were routinely outspent and outgunned by corporations with white-shoe law firms vying to snare their accounts. Few grassroots groups could endure a years-long legal siege that cost a million dollars. How could a neighborhood environmental defense group—on a garage-sale budget—triumph over pockets that deep?

  “Doug put money down on big ideas. And he was challenging the system with a lot of it,” said Victor Menotti, an author and antiglobalization activist who brainstormed with Tompkins at his home on Lombard Street. “Doug was unique in supporting thought leaders, bold-ideas people, giving them the space to come up with plans, articulate agendas that were impactful and unique and so badly needed. You’re taking a risk on an idea, and you hope that they pay off. It was kind of like venture capital.”

  While ignoring five-star hotels and flying economy, Tompkins allowed himself some luxuries. He rarely went a couple of days without jumping into the cockpit of one of his airplanes. Sometimes it was for business, but usually it was to visit a property he was considering buying. On a trip to British Columbia with environmental author Doug Peacock, Tompkins overflew intact forests, relishing mile after mile of untouched trees. The forests were so thick that from the air Tompkins could rarely see the ground. Then he saw the scar. Running parallel to the majestic trees was a tangle of mangled stumps, shattered branches, and tire tracks. “We were both awestruck by the extensive destruction of native forests we saw below,” he lamented. “We watched with sadness and despair the landscapes below laid waste by industrial and technological managers who had clear-cut vast tracts of ancient forests. As I gazed out the windows of our small plane, we withdrew into ourselves, reflecting on how one person could help stop this madness.”

  A vision formed in his mind: Tompkins would design, then publish, a book on forest conservation. As a pilot, he saw how forestlands were cleared away. It looked as if a giant had taken a razor and shaved the green fuzz from the skin of the Earth, leaving only stubble.

  He was determined to divorce his actions from anything close to mainstream sensibilities. He saw many environmental NGOs as soft, ineffective, and unable to truly appreciate the wild.

  * * *

  Those people are all city oriented, they don’t have much. . . . They look around and the landscapes are just scenery. They don’t see it as an integral whole. They’re believers in technology, so they believe in industrial forestry, industrial agriculture, industrial fishing, and all this stuff, because they are technology optimists. They really think this stuff is all okay; we’ve just got to reform this a little bit, or this other. But they don’t have a deep, systemic analysis of the crisis that we’re all ensnared in. So, they put their efforts, as I see it, in the wrong places. You could call it shallow ecology. They’re reformists. Human welfare environmentalism: which sees nature as a vast storehouse of resources for human use. They don’t have a deep respect for other creatures. They don’t really see that sharing the planet with other species is fundamental: a point of departure in order to orient ourselves toward our human economies and social structures.

  —DOUG TOMPKINS

  * * *

  Twenty-five years earlier, Tompkins had studied the activist books published by the Sierra Club, which were the brainchild of David Brower, whom John McPhee had labeled the Archdruid of environmental activism. “One of his great legacies was the Sierra Club book program, from which I learned a lot and which was the inspiration for our own books,” said Tompkins. “I owe Brower all the credit for sowing that idea in my head. I thought that if the Sierra Club could do that for beauty, we can use that same process with ugliness.”

  The Foundation for Deep Ecology granted a quarter million dollars to launch the forestry preservation project with a coffee table book that thunked down at eight pounds and was entitled Clearcut: The Tragedy of Industrial Forestry. The book was a beautiful presentation of all that is ugly about clearcutting old growth forests. Hillsides, valleys, and checkerboard cookie-cutter scars the size of football stadiums. Doug never planned to sell the book; he would give it away. It was meant as a gift and a tool in the larger public relations campaign to denounce destructive forestry practices. Clearcut would illustrate how timber companies destroy mile after mile of native forests, then leave “beauty strips” along highways to deceive the public about the extent of forestry destruction.

  Tompkins was a pilot and knew these truths; in the book he wanted to bring the message to “flatlanders” traveling in autos who rarely knew that the gorgeous trees lining the roads were not the entryway to a forested paradise but a curtain hiding massive destruction. The book design was placed in the hands of Tamotsu Yagi, the award-winning designer who spent years working with Doug at Esprit and later for Steve Jobs at Apple.

  When the mock-up for Clearcut was finally ready, Doug asked for each page to be blown up to a 16 × 20-inch image—he wanted to walk his mind through the pages. Together with Yagi, Tompkins gathered at the Japanese designer’s San Francisco studio. As Tamotsu and Doug rearranged the layout of the photos and eagerly tweaked the overall design, a seventy-two-year-old gray-haired and slightly stooped mountain climber showed up. It was David Brower, the veteran of World War II and then countless battles to create national parks in the US. Brower had been booted from the presidency of the Sierra Club and went on to found Friends of the Earth and Earth Island Institute.

  Brower jumped into the critique. The three men paced the room as they discussed each photo. “Doug was forty-nine years old. And Brower was in his mid-seventies, white haired. I sort of stood back, and I could see the wheels turning in both their heads,” said Edgar Boyles, the photo editor for Clearcut. “Brower made books about beauty to try to save the world,” said Boyles who instantly realized what his friend Doug was doing. “Here was this book which was going to be this beautiful book, about destruction. I saw a passing of the torch.”

  When Clearcut was ready for printing, a controversy erupted. North American printers refused to print the tome. They wanted no part in the project. Trashing the pulp and paper industry was not in their interest. They were afraid of a backlash. Exposing companies that chopped down old-growth forests and planted tree farms to make paper would be commercial suicide.

  Finally Doug and Tamotsu found a printer in Japan willing to publish the book. The result was stunning. Each copy of the book arrived in a custom-made box. The cover was straw board while interior pages were printed from postconsumer paper. Essays by Bill Devall, Michael Soulé, and other leading thinkers on the future of wildlands were interspersed with apocalyptic images of destroyed forests. Printed in both hard- and softcover editions, thousands of copies were given away, including to every member of the US Congress. Public libraries across the nation and activists working on the frontline of wildlands conservation also received a copy. “It was under the mattress of students studying at forestry colleges. It was almost a banned book,” laughed Boyles. “And of course, it was checked out of libraries in Montana, never to be returned. It was checked out and destroyed.”

  To many environmental activists, including Doug’s close friends, the production costs
for the book were exorbitant. Doug, however, measured the worthiness of his investments on a different axis. His “balance sheet” valued the recuperation of apex predators or the projected health of a forest some 200 years later, in the year 2192. A redwood tree that sprouted in 1700, for example, would not reach middle age until roughly the year 3000. By the end of the redwood’s life it would be closer to the year 4000. That was the kind of radical thinking that propelled Doug Tompkins out of bed every morning. “I always did more than anybody else I knew, with few exceptions,” Doug told an interviewer as he approached his fiftieth birthday. “I don’t have the sense of not having done something, or that I should accomplish more in my life, or know more experiences—because I do them all the time. That’s what staves off any of this classic midlife crisis syndrome. I’ve already led the lifetime of ten people.”

  Doug actively refused to get old. His energy level was brutal. Before his friends were awake, he’d bike from his hilltop San Francisco home, across the Golden Gate Bridge, into the Marin Headlands, and after bouncing along ridgelines would then complete the full roundtrip and be home before 8:00 a.m. “Doug, in a day, he would do what I would do in a week or two,” said Ingram, who lived with him at the time. The energy was both wildly attractive and fiercely independent.