[Full Length] Rewilding — with Kristine Tompkins

“I like the intensity of what I think is a wild life and a wild mind. I have come to seek that out and to have that confrontation with the true world.”

- Kristine Tompkins

SYNOPSIS:

Kristine Tompkins is an American conservationist who is the president and co-founder of Tompkins Conservation,  and former CEO of Patagonia. For nearly thirty years along with her late husband Doug Tompkins, she has been protecting and restoring wild beauty and biodiversity by creating national parks, restoring wildlife, inspiring activism and economic vitality across 14.7 million acres of parklands in Chile and Argentina and 30 million acres of marine areas.

Kris is Chair of National Geographic Society’s Last Wild Places campaign, the first conservationist to be awarded the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy and the United Nations’ Global Patron for Protected Areas.

Kris shares with us just what ‘wild’ means to her, how she transitioned from being a high-rolling businesswoman to living in the Chilean bush, the role of beauty in her life and why macaws need to befriend robots. Her story and what she shows is possible are of sheer inspiration to me and many others.

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GUEST BIO:

Kristine Tompkins is the president and co-founder of Tompkins Conservation,  an American conservationist, and former CEO of Patagonia. For nearly thirty years with her late husband Doug Tompkins, she has committed her career to protecting and restoring wild beauty and biodiversity by creating national parks, restoring wildlife, inspiring activism, and fostering economic vitality as a result of conservation.

As the president of Tompkins Conservation, Kristine Tompkins oversees a multitude of projects rewilding the Americas. Having protected approximately 14.7 million acres of parklands in Chile and Argentina through Tompkins Conservation and its partners, Kristine and Douglas Tompkins, her late husband who died in 2015, are considered some of the most successful national park-oriented philanthropists in history.

Kristine Tompkins serves in various positions of global leadership in conservation, including as Chair of National Geographic Society’s Last Wild Places campaign. She was the first conservationist to be awarded the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy. In 2018 she was named the United Nations’ Global Patron for Protected Areas.

QUOTES:

• I like the intensity of what I think is a wild life and a wild mind. I have come to seek that out and to have that confrontation with the true world.

• If you are going to rewild key species, you have to eradicate the reasons they went extinct in the first place. There is a tremendous amount of work to do in the socialisation of species coming back. With the jaguar, for years we socialised the idea that the rockstar of the province had the chance to come home.

• I’m a student of beauty now and I will study beauty now until the day I die, and hopefully after I’m dead — because then things could get really beautiful.

• National parks were never the goal. The goal was always to create properly functioning ecosystems. For that, we have to go back in and reintroduce the missing keystone species

• We are all deeply capable of being self realized at any moment in our lives.

SHOW NOTES

• Lifeworlds Resource Page: Rewilding

• Tompkins Conservation

• Rewilding Argentina

• 1990 - 2010 Twenty Year Retrospective of Kris and Doug’s work

• Kristine Tompkins: Let's make the world wild again | TED Talk

LINKS:

REWILDING

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