Surrounding himself with a cadre of young thinkers and activists propelled Doug forward. He was as far from the country club set as humanely possible. “I go to the Telluride Film Festival but I sleep on the couch of my friends that are running the festival,” he said while confessing that he thrived on the buzzing energy of youth. “So many kids—far more than the average adult—have bright and sparkling eyes. They’re really receiving stimuli; they’re taking things in from all over. You can see it. It’s all in their eyes. They’re looking everywhere. Stuff is coming in unfiltered . . . and then you’ll see some parents that have got these kids dulled down so fast, things are coming in very slow.”
Tom Butler, the longtime editor of Wild Earth magazine, spent decades with Doug working on books and publications as his editor-in-chief. Butler, who helped Tompkins publish more than a dozen different coffee table books (each as large and exquisite as Clearcut) described the strategic thinking behind the Tompkins publishing empire. “Doug thought that the scrappy grassroots wing of the conservation movement, because it was undercapitalized, under resourced, was never going to have the money or the creative capacity to produce an oversized coffee table book on the damage caused by mechanized forestry on public land,” said Butler. “But if they were effectively given that tool, they would have, in his phrase, ‘a paper tiger.’ You look different if you go into a meeting as an activist with a book that clearly has high production values. Your political opponents take you more seriously than if you’re just some scruffy dirtbag conservationist.”
Over the course of their joint publishing efforts, Tompkins and Butler produced a library shelf full of books ranging from criticism of industrial animal farms to suggestions about how to control wildfires. The final bill for the book publishing was just over $13 million, and Doug never regretted for a moment his bet on books.
“Doug was like an Indian rishi,” said Vandana Shiva, the food-sovereignty activist who participated in the San Francisco strategy meetings at Doug’s house. “Rishis are the sages who recognize that the world in which we live, the material world, is a passing one, and they dedicate themselves to the lasting. They do it by having very little of their own. He shifted his money to live the ultimate life of giving. Giving to nature. To protect nature in a time when nature is being trashed. For me, shifting money from growing profits to growing nature is the highest level of human elevation, of consciousness.”
As his conservation plans took form, Tompkins prepared to migrate to Patagonia. As he prepared to leave San Francisco and move to Chile, Tompkins held a yard sale and sold his Lycra cameras, Amish furniture, and Lange ski boots, vintage from the days of The North Face. He prepared to abandon his chic San Francisco home and cede his ranking on the San Francisco social scene as he relaunched his life in a direction that even he couldn’t begin to explain. His Lombard Street house would continue to host the foundation, but Doug was migrating. He took his girlfriend Catherine Ingram to southern Chile, flew her over the farm he’d bought, and suggested to her it could be their new home. “I could see he was having a love affair with South America,” said Ingram. “Everywhere we went, he was raving about, ‘Taste these tomatoes.’ Everything was so beautiful for him about Chile.” Ingram refused to join the mission. They disagreed on hemisphere. She didn’t speak Spanish and thought British Columbia sufficiently remote.
She appreciated that Tompkins called her “the best indoor girl” he ever dated. But when frustrated, Tompkins would say that of all the women he had dated, Ingram was “the worst outdoor girl.” They broke up just as Tompkins finalized his plans to escape to a remote corner of southern Chile.
“Doug used to say to me, ‘I expect to die in an accident someday,’” said Ingram. “And we would have these terrible conversations in which I would try to convince him that his life was more than just his own, that many others cared for him, and that my life would be forever affected in that loss. You don’t casually play around with life! And he’d say, ‘My life isn’t worth living if I can’t do the things I love.’ I would argue, ‘Well, aren’t there ordinary things that you love well enough that wouldn’t require risking life itself?’ But I could never prevail in this—not for one minute. He would never concede that this was an option.”
Chapter 8
Pioneer Village
There wasn’t a master plan, but this wasn’t a guy who was throwing darts at a board. We had many conferences at Lombard Street where we’d bring in the top environmental thinkers, the top conservation biologists. He was informing himself. He was learning. He was thinking about big, connected, wild, beautiful areas. He was nearly fifty years old. He was ready. He was shifting from a business that didn’t fit his world view anymore, and yet, he couldn’t ever get the empire building out of his system. He was an empire builder. He couldn’t stop. Ever. That was his deal.
—DAN IMHOFF, Esprit environmental desk officer and son-in-law of Doug Tompkins
In 1991, Tompkins flew thousands of miles to Santiago, then another two hours south to Puerto Montt, where he piloted a small plane to the run-down Reñihue farm with the snowcapped volcano—this was now his home. None of the buildings in Reñihue were near-waterproof or capable of holding heat. While surveying his ragged farm, Tompkins found an eight-foot-by-eight-foot structure. Itinerant shepherds found it useful to survive the rain. Mounted on wooden skids, this tiny house had once been dragged by oxen through fields hacked from thick forests. Without electricity, candles and oil lamps provided light. Refrigeration came in the form of a metal box strapped to the outside of the hut and cooled by winds from nearby ice fields. Drinking water was collected on the roof and dripped into a wooden barrel. Instead of the Golden Gate Bridge, Tompkins now had a view of Michinmahuida, a volcano, which was blanketed in snow and prowled by pumas.
Doug sought out local artisans and renovated the tiny shack, added a second tiny house, and installed a wood stove to replace the fire pit, then created a freshwater collection system that funnelled water into the kitchen and an exterior bathroom. Even Doug had to stoop to pass through the front door. Friends called the shack the “Hobbit House.”
A caretaker led Tompkins by horseback on a tour that showcased the rivers, lakes, and miles of coastline he now owned. There were few settlements larger than fifty inhabitants for a hundred miles in any direction. Ferns with six-foot leaves sprouted from the mossy forest floor. With as much as two feet of rain a month, the region was shimmering green, with shrubbery so thick that no ordinary-sized deer could penetrate the thickets. Just thirteen inches high, the endangered pudu, the world’s smallest deer, was endemic to these forests.
Tompkins loved the pioneer experience. By day, he kayaked the remote fjords swarming with black-and-white dolphins. He ice-climbed to remote glaciers with friends when they could penetrate the weather to visit him from the Northern Hemisphere. When hungry, he fished from either riverbank or kayak, and he harvested vegetables from his recently constructed greenhouse. The rain and cold were so persistent that a wood stove was required to keep the plants alive even in the greenhouse. When ocean storms reached a peak, Doug launched a wooden-hulled boat into the raging waves of the Pacific.
Decades of generous government incentives—including free title to land, subsidies for home heating, and exemptions from sales tax—did little to boost population. Along the route, abandoned human settlements lay scattered like seeds that never sprouted. Few towns registered more than a thousand inhabitants. Several areas, like La Junta and Cochrane, grew, but they were few and far between. Summertime visitors to the region were measured by the dozen. In winter, mud and landslides made the road impassable for weeks. Hundreds of rivers descend the rugged terrain, most mapped N/N—“No Name.” Given the Chilean’s love of placing numbers on the map, each slice of Chile was given a Roman numeral. Reñihue was part of the tenth region and designated simply “Region X.”
Ferryboats passing by the area offered transport north to Puerto Montt, yet few frontier families could afford
these expensive journeys. Unless they needed to visit family, buy provisions at a proper store, or seek medical attention at a decent hospital, locals tended to travel infrequently, rarely straying more than 200 miles from their humble outposts. Sunday horse racing was an excuse for gathering at the impromptu racetracks cut from the fields.
Most supplies that arrived by boat were loaded in Puerto Montt and then after a day of navigation unloaded at a small pier near Tompkins’s home on the fjord. This flow of goods and deliveries continued nonstop. But when tides were at their lowest, the boats would beach a mile off shore and Doug, in boots, would wade into the waters carrying crates of supplies on his shoulders.
Despite the outward appearance of neglect and abandonment, Doug was certain this neighborhood held vast potential. Plots of land extended as large as tens of thousands of acres, with the price per acre as little as $25. A backyard the size of Manhattan’s Central Park could be bought for $60,000. “Some dude lost $35,000 at the gambling table and was willing to sell Doug a whole valley full of old-growth Alerce trees,” said Dan Imhoff.
Tompkins felt enamored of his new home, but he needed to organize logistics with the outside world. So he set up offices and a home in the city of Puerto Montt, a grubby outpost of loggers, fishermen, and ranchers. With packs of mangy street dogs both endearing and ghastly sick, Puerto Montt left a nasty first impression. Aesthetics seemed to have bypassed the mayor’s office, the parks commissioners, and the public works department.
The lack of city sewage, proper drainage, and municipal zoning regulations, and salaries that rarely topped $200 a month meant that family life in Puerto Montt carried few signs of the modern era. Even by the mid-1990s color TV had only just arrived. Telephones were still a privilege. Clearly, the city was born from the wealth of the forests, in particular the Alerce wood. Shingles told the story. Overleaved in layers to seal out windblown rain, the shingles came in dozens of designs. A single Alerce shingle could absorb eighty years of rain and still remain solid. Several hundred industrious families from the ruling class built Victorian-style homes in the region. Elaborate doors were carved out of Alerce for the Catholic churches. The distinctive look became known as Estilo Chiloté, in homage to the nearby island where boatbuilders and carpenters crafted hulls and homes by hand. To Doug’s deep delight, a love of craftmanship and woodworking was alive. But few residents could afford the labor to cut, carve, and set the Alerce shingles. Most families in Puerto Montt huddled under tin roofs onto which raindrops the size of gumdrops clattered noisily while rivulets of water leaked into their humble homes.
Chile in the early 1990s was a country traumatized. Much of the populace suffered from what might best be described as a collective case of PTSD, following seventeen years of harsh military rule, state-sponsored assassinations, military propaganda flooding the airwaves, secret police hit-squads, and widespread use of torture and “disappearing” one’s enemies. The populace had been cowed into if not submission then at least a broad-based conformity.
From 1973 to 1987, the United States had supported the brutal tactics of the Pinochet regime, but in 1986, they smelled change in the air when a team of Cuban government–trained assassins ambushed the general, killing five bodyguards and wounding but not killing the dictator. Clearly his days were numbered. In 1988, the United States finally switched sides and supported the civilian movement calling for his ouster. Chilean political and business leaders were opening to the world, eager to demonstrate that the nation’s free-market ideology and “everything is a commodity” mentality would remain immune to the passionate clamor for social change at a deeper, structural level. It had taken nearly two decades of brutal implementation, but the mission was complete—Chile was regularly cited as the “freest market in the world.” Destruction of the local environment began to ratchet up.
Despite the deep misgivings about complicity by the armed forces in human rights crime, many residents of Region X felt abandoned by the central government and were thus loyal to the few signs of authority—including the navy and army—who provided rescue services and delivered emergency supplies.
In Puerto Montt, Doug bought an architectural masterpiece known as “Buin House” and set up shop with Marci Rudolph. At Esprit, she had been the showroom guru. Before a showroom would open to the public, it was Marci who came to set the stage. When Tompkins first began talking about jumping ship and launching a new life in remote Chile, she was tempted to join him. And when she got a letter from him, she moved to Patagonia for months at a time, helping Doug.
“We lived with this family and their dogs, their grandmother, and their kid in this wild house,” said Marci. “We lived in this upstairs space that I don’t even know if it was really supposed to be part of the house. There were three teeny rooms. The oldest daughter, she was out of architecture school, but she lived at home. Then me and Doug. We would share a bathroom. He just thought it was so great. And I was thinking to myself, What’s so great about this? He loved the weirdness of it all. The grandmother would shuffle to breakfast with the dog, who sat on her lap.”
While the Buin House in Puerto Montt was being rebuilt, Tompkins studied local geography, ordering government surveys, tourist maps, highway plans, and geological overlays. He became in effect an amateur cartographer, a student of infrastructure, and a fierce critic of Chile’s resource-extraction-based economy. Doug continued to read a book every week, sometimes faster. He devoured scientific reports, and studied development plans for the region. He acted with the passion of the recently converted, yet even his closest friends couldn’t figure out what was his plan? Was he going to stay in Chile? Would he become bored and move back to California?
Tompkins brainstormed various strategies to protect the forests of southern Chile. The deforestation was running full speed, and he wondered if he might slow the clear-cutting of ancient forests by impeding the expansion of roads into Patagonia. He was convinced that “come road, come destruction.” He’d seen it happen in California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range, in British Columbia, and in the Rocky Mountains. As he projected the natural extension of roads that eventually needed to cross a river, he calculated the most economical spots to build a bridge. Could he sabotage bridge building? What if he bought up those potential river crossings? Could he slow down the bridge building? If he bought up enough narrow channels, could he stave off industrial forces long enough for public consciousness to catch up with the insanity of short-term profits? It was only a matter of time, Doug posited, until citizen’s awareness and outrage aligned with his dire prognosis: that globalized capitalism was killing the planet. His diagnosis pointed to “development plans” and road building schemes as preordained wounds that would spider-web out in all directions, like an infectious disease or growing tumor. Tompkins believed that David Brower was spot on when he suggested that the US government fund a Peace Corps–style program to restore abused ecosystems under the moniker “Global CPR: Conservation, Preservation, and Restoration.”
“I had no idea who Doug was,” remembered Eduardo Rojas, the award-winning architect then living on Chiloé island. Rojas recalled an out-of-the-blue phone call from “a gringo from California” who in heavily accented Spanish asked for a meeting. “He told me that he had bought Reñihue, and that he was looking for an architectural studio to help him with this adventure. He had been researching, and found a little book I had helped to author. Doug read my name in the acknowledgments and decided I was the guy to work with. He flew in, we met, and later that day we flew to Reñihue. Doug was a person who made decisions quickly and demanded action.”
Landing in Reñihue, Doug outlined to Rojas the extent of the neglect. The barn was half collapsed, the cows had escaped to the hills, and the only terrestrial access was a treacherous boat ride, through channels from Puerto Montt. Tompkins loved the challenges of this mission. Like the tiny North Face boutique he had renovated in San Francisco as a twenty-one-year-old, here he had a challenge worthy of his prodigious energy.
Could he restore this abused land?
Before Tompkins’s arrival, the caretakers and their families living on the Reñihue property had rarely met a non-Chilean. They studied the new owner closely. The first week, he organized a micro-trash pickup. Locals typically buried their trash or burned it in a hole. Tompkins was incensed. He couldn’t believe that there were cigarette butts and little pieces of trash everywhere. For the first couple of days he demanded that the staff pick up all the micro-trash. “The people were like: This can’t be for real!” laughed Marci. “They were cowboys, gauchos—tough guys. They didn’t pick up trash.”
While he was fixing up his airstrip, Tompkins bought a Husky, a high-horsepower, lightweight airplane able to fly as slow as forty miles per hour, swerve like a bird, and take off or land on anything longer than a pair of tennis courts end to end. Tompkins explored his lands, buzzing along just above the treetops. With extra fuel tanks added to the plane he could fly longer, explore deeper. He entered tight canyons and gaped at the singular beauty of his new neighborhood: active volcanoes, soaring condors, forests never logged, rivers never dammed—all undisturbed, exquisitely designed by nature, without a single flaw. Except for the cows.
“One of the things that drove Doug crazy was these feral cows,” said Andy Kimbrell, the writer and environmental activist. “This whole area had been chomped by cattle, to the point of ruining the soil. So, he had a big remediation job. All these cattle guys were gone, but the cattle had gone feral; they’d gone wild. It’s sort of like a canyon, a valley between mountains. He would go up in the airplane, I’d go up with him, and he’d fly way in the back where these feral cows were, just hanging out, getting fat and all-ferally. He would chase them flying low in his airplane. If you were afraid of airplanes, you didn’t want to do this with him, but I liked it. He would chase them, because they hated the noise. He moved them repeatedly to the front where they could be captured. He loved getting rid of every one of those cows.” After corralling the cows, Tompkins packed them on a barge and shipped them back to the mainland where they would be sold.
A Wild Idea Page 14
