Danny Padilla

The Man Who Gave Away Patagonia Doug Tompkins sold his stake in The North Face for $50,000.  He used the money to co-found Esprit. Then he sold that too, and did something almost no one does with a fortune: he disappeared. He moved to the tip of South America in 1990 with a theory most businessmen would find absurd. He believed the best thing a rich man could do was buy wilderness before someone else destroyed it, then hand it back to the country it belonged to. Together with his wife Kris, a former CEO of Patagonia clothing, they bought and conserved more than 2 million acres across Chile and Argentina. For context: that is roughly the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. Most of it had been degraded farmland. Overgrazed, stripped, exhausted. The Valle Chacabuco ranch alone had been one of South America’s largest sheep operations. They bought it in 2004 for $10 million, then spent another $55 million over 20 years restoring the grasslands.  Pumas returned. Guanacos returned. The land remembered what it was. The Chileans were not immediately grateful. Many locals saw it as a land grab. An American buying millions of acres and telling them to change their way of life. Some accused him of planning to split the country in two. Others claimed he was building a nuclear waste site. He kept buying land anyway. The deal his wife finalized in his name after his death became the largest-ever private land donation to a country. Over 1 million acres handed directly to Chile, triggering government protections on another 9 million. Five new national parks. Three expanded. A conservation corridor stretching 1,250 miles. He died on December 8, 2015, in a kayaking accident on a Patagonian lake, surrounded by friends including Yvon Chouinard. He had called what he was doing “paying rent for his time on the planet.” There is a certain kind of person who builds something great and then builds something greater by walking away from it. Tompkins is the rarest version: he walked away from two fortunes, bought a wilderness, and gave it to strangers. The land is still there. The sheep are gone. If this kind of story is what you read on weekends, you might belong here. Gandalv / @Microinteracti1