Kris Tompkins

Kristine Tompkins (born June 1950) is the president and co-founder of Tompkins Conservation, an American conservationist and former CEO of Patagonia, Inc..

Early life
Born in southern California, Kristine McDivitt spent most of her childhood on her great-grandfather’s ranch. She spent some early years in Venezuela, where her father worked for an oil company. She attended college at the College of Idaho in Caldwell, where she ski-raced competitively.

At Patagonia, Inc.
Beginning in 1973, she returned to California and worked for Yvon Chouinard, and helped him turn his fledgling piton business into Patagonia, Inc. She became the company’s first CEO.

Conservation work
In 1993, she retired from Patagonia, Inc, married Doug Tompkins (founder of The North Face and co-founder of Esprit). The Tompkins decided to focus their efforts on national parks, and started a suite of nonprofits, including, Conservation Land Trust and Conservacion Patagonica, all of which have now consolidated under Tompkins Conservation. In 1991, Doug Tompkins began acquiring private land for conservation purposes in Chile’s Los Lagos Region, managing it as a public-access park in the threatened Valdivian temperate rainforest. Pumalín Park received official nature sanctuary status in 2005 and was designated a national park in 2018, prompted by Tompkins Conservation’s donation of almost 725,000 acres for the new, roughly 1-million-acre park, Pumalin Douglas Tompkins National Park, named in honor of its founder.

The Tompkins' conservation efforts expanded to Argentina, starting with the Iberá Wetlands of the Corrientes province. In the wetland ecosystem, they have launched projects to reintroduce extirpated species, such as the giant anteater, jaguar, red-and-green macaw, and giant river otter. The rewilding work in Ibera, as well as many other projects in the country, is now carried out by Rewilding Argentina, the team assembled by Kris and Doug, led by Sofia Heinonen.

After years of collaborating with governments, local organizations, scientists, philanthropists, and communities, in January 2018 Kris, on behalf of Tompkins Conservation, and Chilean President Michelle Bachelet signed decrees to create five new national parks in Chile and expand three others, adding a total of more than 10 million acres of new national parklands to Chile. For scale, that is more than three times the size of Yosemite and Yellowstone combined, or approximately the size of Switzerland. With one million acres of land from Tompkins Conservation and an additional 9 million acres of federal land from Chile, this has been billed as the largest donation of land from a private entity to a country in history.

Awards

 * 2021 Rachel Carson Award, National Audubon Society
 * 2018 Luis Oyarzún Award granted by the Universidad Austral de Chile
 * 2017 Woodrow Wilson Award for Corporate Citizenship, Woodrow Wilson Center
 * 2017 Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy
 * 2017 Cynthia Pratt Laughlin Medal, Garden Club of America
 * 2016 David R. Brower Award, American Alpine Club