Douglas Tompkins

Douglas Rainsford Tompkins (March 20, 1943 – December 8, 2015) was an American businessman, conservationist, outdoorsman, philanthropist, filmmaker, and agriculturalist. He founded the North Face Inc, co-founded Esprit and various environmental groups, including the Foundation for Deep Ecology and Tompkins Conservation.

Beginning in the mid-1960s, he and Susie Tompkins Buell (née Russell), his first wife, co-founded and ran two companies: the outdoor equipment and clothing company The North Face and the Esprit clothing company. Following their divorce and Tompkins' departure from the business world in 1989, he became active in environmental and land conservation causes. In the 1990s Tompkins and his second wife, Kris McDivitt Tompkins bought and conserved more than 2 million acres (810,000 ha) of wilderness in Chile and Argentina, exceeding that of any other private individuals in the region, thus becoming among the largest private land-owners in the world. The Tompkinses were focused on park creation, wildlife recovery, ecological agriculture, and activism, with the goal of saving biodiversity.

He had assembled and preserved the land which became the largest gift of private land to any South American government. Due to this, he was posthumously naturalized Chilean.