the plan—buy low, sell never
The little Cessna darted out from under the clouds and Doug Tompkins got his first glimpse of Reñihue Fjord, a misty blue gem in southern Chile, where the longest country in the world is pencil thin and the snow-capped Andes tumble toward the sea like an army finishing a long march. A colony of seals basking on the fjord’s rocky beach lifted their heads skyward to bellow at the passing plane as Tompkins banked inland, away from the sparse ranch that occupied the brown and narrow coastal flats. Now he was over a majestic river valley, woods seemingly untouched by saw, ax, or torch, and though he was not a religious man, it was impossible not to think of fabled Eden in this damp and glorious setting, the world’s last intact temperate rain forest. Everywhere he looked, a raw, primordial wilderness filled his senses. Wet, sun-dappled, mysterious, it was colored in shades of green and blue not even Rousseau imagined for his most vivid jungle canvases—colors lit from within and pulsing with life so deep they seemed of another world.
Tompkins’s world was a very different one, the world of industry and commerce, of image over substance—the fashion business. Between 1970 and 1989, he had built a catalog of knockoff clothes into a distinctive brand, and then had made the brand into a symbol of what people yearned to be, and then he had become an icon himself, a personification of his company, the hottest label of the era: Esprit. That made him a visionary, or so people said, a perception he encouraged by titling himself “image director” instead of CEO. But now it was 1990 and his company was in turmoil, his marriage had been destroyed, and the pride he had always taken in his craft had long since ebbed. Cruising now above a turquoise river twisting through virgin forest, Tompkins found himself wondering, not for the first time, just what the hell he had been thinking all those years he spent deciding what color socks teenage girls would wear, or how tight or low-cut their jeans would be next fall. Accolades and success in the world of fashion didn’t seem to mean much here in the heart of Patagonia, the lush southern third of the South American continent, named by Magellan for the Patagons, mythical giants he swore lived there. Patagonia remains one of the last completely wild big places left on earth, home to sleek, elusive pumas and tiny pudu—rare deer scarcely bigger than poodles—and 3,600-year-old alerce trees, towering cousins to California’s sequoias. The tallest alerces still standing are among the oldest organisms on earth. They bore witness to the rise of civilization. And like every other wild thing in Patagonia, they are in danger.
Tompkins had been an outdoorsman all his life: a daring white-water kayaker; a skier with aspirations to compete in the Olympics; a serious mountain climber who once spent four weeks holed up in an ice cave with four buddies, waiting out an epic storm until they could finally blaze a new trail to the summit. That had been in Patagonia, too, twenty-two years and a lifetime ago, and ever since, he had always built into his business model three, four, or five months in the wild somewhere. MBA, he called it: managing by absence. He had done it when Esprit was little more than a young married couple in San Francisco selling flowery hippie dresses out of their station wagon in 1970, and he had done it as CEO of a billion-dollar global fashion empire. More often than not, with the whisper of an ancient forest and the pelting drumbeat of rain so frequent it has to be measured in meters, the wild place that called to him was Patagonia. He understood what Pablo Neruda, Chile’s Nobel laureate poet, meant in writing, “Anyone who hasn’t been in the Chilean forest doesn’t know this planet.”
For years, Tompkins had tried to nurture his inner environmentalist through his business. He regularly wrote checks to respectable conservation groups. He built an urban park near Esprit’s headquarters in San Francisco, a splash of green and transplanted redwoods beloved by the neighborhood’s kids and dog owners. There were the essays he slipped into the company catalogs, urging people to embrace healthier lifestyles, recycle more, consume less. And when his old mountain-climbing buddy, the founder of the clothing company Patagonia, called him in 1988 and asked him to chip in to buy and preserve some fast-vanishing Chilean forest land, he impulsively agreed. Tompkins’s $50,000 helped bankroll a nature preserve filled with endangered araucaria trees,1 towering evergreens with a whimsical Dr. Seuss look, commonly called the monkey puzzle tree. Just like that, a park was born instead of a field of stumps. No red tape. No bureaucrats weighing commercial interests against the environment—the sort of lobbyist-driven balancing act that had turned whole swaths of the United States’ protected national forests into lucrative fiefdoms for timber, mining, and oil concerns. Six thousand miles south, however, it seemed all you had to do was write a check, and it was done. No one would ever cut down those araucaria, living fossils that have survived as a recognizable species since the age of the dinosaurs, impervious to all threats but one: the age of man.
Suddenly it seemed so clear to Tompkins. He had been on the wrong side too long, running a global fashion business with factories in Hong Kong, boutiques and superstores worldwide, and offices in a dozen countries. He shipped clothes all over the earth, using artful images and beautiful models to persuade people to consume things they didn’t need, then eagerly replace them each season with new things before the old were even close to worn out. He had tried to compensate with his donations and his essays, but Esprit was never going to be green or sustainable or good for the earth, and neither was Tompkins—so long as he was part of it. And so, amid crises and takeover bids at Esprit, as the vulture investors circled and his empire of image began to collapse, he rounded up a few close friends and, with no explanation beyond his need to get away for an adventure, they flew to Patagonia in a pair of small planes. Tompkins’s company and his marriage were besieged and yet, as the Chilean rain forests slid by beneath his plane, his friends could see that he looked happier than they’d seen him in years.
Before leaving San Francisco, he had called the Chile-based activist who brokered the deal to save the araucaria trees, and Tompkins gleaned the piece of information that would change his life: A lot more of Patagonia could still be bought cheap. Old-growth forests could be had for as little as twelve dollars an acre, and one such area was Reñihue. When Tompkins completed his flyover and started talking to a real estate agent, he found that a broken-down ranch next to the fjord, along with all its spectacular surroundings, was for sale. The seller would even throw in the cattle. He could have 24,700 acres for $600,000.
Tompkins tried to keep a poker face: $600,000? You couldn’t buy a condo in San Francisco for that kind of money. In Chile—remote, beautiful, wild Patagonian Chile—$600,000 would buy him nearly forty square miles. Hell, the whole city of San Francisco was only forty-seven square miles. In what kind of crazy upside-down world was a tiny three-bedroom piece of the paved-over, used-up urban landscape of San Francisco worth more than the most beautiful wilderness on earth?
“What about the volcano?” Tompkins asked. In the distance, visible from the ranch house, stood the cone of the dormant 8,000-foot volcano Michinmáhuida, snowcapped and heavily forested.
“That’s included, too, señor.” And there were many more areas on the market right next door and up and down the coast, the agent added. The deposed Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s cronies had bought up the land years ago, trusting the old tyrant to develop Patagonia with roads and factories and thereby enrich his friends. Now Pinochet was out and facing indictment, and land newly deemed worthless was priced to move. “It’s all for sale.”
His own volcano—it was almost too much to grasp. You couldn’t preserve even the tiniest parcel for that kind of money in the United States, but here the possibilities were endless. Tompkins was in his fifties, his hair gone silver, his face weathered, but he still had time. If he sold his interest in Esprit, the millions he’d earn could have a huge impact. He could buy more land than he had ever imagined, with plenty left over to stir up some trouble at home, too. He might finally endow that foundation he had long coveted. He could publish books, run full-page ads in The New York Times, dole out grants to environmental groups. And in Chile, he could buy paradise. He could save paradise. He could live in paradise.
Here, near the bottom of the world, the fashion mogul saw a microcosm for all of humanity’s environmental ills—and a laboratory for finding ways to fix them. The big threats were all here: destruction of forests and habitats, dying rivers and ocean coasts, topsoil erosion, brutal extraction of resources and energy without regard for life or landscape. There were displaced populations, lost cultures, and mass extinctions already under way—not just of rare animals but of critical species that pollinate crops, control pests, and clean the air—a rate of dying out that hasn’t been seen in 65 million years, when the once-dominant dinosaurs perished. Underlying it all, there was the inexorable creep of climate change and an utter unwillingness of leaders and populations to confront it in a meaningful, honest way. In Patagonia, as in the United States and throughout the world, nature was under siege as never before, though the difference was that most of Patagonia could still be saved. For Tompkins the issue was no longer about saving a snail darter or a spotted owl; it was about preserving a viable world for his children and grandchildren. It was about averting a disaster of man’s own making—one he had been heedlessly helping along for twenty years. His CEO’s outsize ego would be channeled in a new direction: doing penance.
He would be making the ultimate flip-flop, from global capitalist to anticonsumerism ecologist. Inevitably there would be opposition once his intentions became clear—he could foresee being called an arrogant gringo, a colonizer, an environmental extremist, a hypocrite who had made his own millions but wanted Chileans to forgo progress and remain peasants. This was an age-old response. Buying land to exploit it, pave it, mine it, or build on it was welcome everywhere from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America, but preserving it…that was suspect and subversive. Sixty years earlier in Wyoming, mobs had burned John D. Rockefeller Jr. in effigy when he proposed protecting the land that eventually became Grand Teton National Park. Now they would go to war against anyone who tried to take it away. At Esprit, Tompkins knew, his colleagues and employees would think he had lost his mind. But he thought he had finally found himself.
He made the deal that same day. Reñihue—pronounced, coincidentally and appropriately, “rainy way”—was his. And soon Esprit was a memory and he was living half the year on the fjord, holed up in a tiny cabin with no electricity or phone, working to restore the ranch, working with his hands, pulling stumps, preaching the virtues of a local economy in lieu of a global economy. And he acquired more land, a great deal more land. There, in the first piece of an empire-to-be, he began a new life of conservation and activism that would make him one of the most influential eco barons of his time—perhaps the most influential of them all.
There is a plan. It is audacious. It is huge. It has provoked a silent, high-stakes war that most Americans know nothing about, though it will affect every one of us and generations to come.
It is already unfolding, a secret plan to save the earth.
In an era in which government has been either broke, indifferent, or actively hostile to environmental causes, a band of visionaries—inventors, philanthropists, philosophers, grassroots activists, lawyers, and gadflies—are using their wealth, their energy, their celebrity, and their knowledge of the law and science to persuade, and sometimes force, the United States and the world to take a new direction. They use lawsuits, charitable foundations, land trusts, mass protests, armies of schoolchildren, and billions in corporate profits. They use pictures of beached whales, videos of starving polar bears, and murals of vast fields of stumps where towering pine forests once stood. They use anger and fear, and they use hope.
They are following in the tradition of Rockefeller, Carnegie, and the storied initiatives that saved Yellowstone, Yosemite and the Grand Tetons from the bulldozer and the Grand Canyon from the dams. Their goals are to save wilderness and rain forests from destruction, to slow the rising tide of mass extinctions, and to “re-wild” large swaths of land and migratory corridors where development has long intruded. They are pushing new (and old) green technologies, farming methods, and sources of energy, beginning the process of weaning the country and the world from the fossil fuels that drive global warming, whether government leaders like it or not. They seek to show, in deeds and words, that it is possible to strike a better balance between consumption and conservation and still prosper—to save the world, piece by piece, species by species, place by place.
They are the eco barons.
They are the antithesis of the robber barons of the “gilded age,” those clever and powerful railroad, land, and banking barons who used any means necessary to accumulate wealth and power—transforming an America of individual farmers and merchants into a global industrial powerhouse of prosperity. But along the way, they also laid waste to the rule of law, human rights, natural resources, and America’s vast unspoiled rivers, forests, and landscapes. Today’s eco barons, like the robber barons before them, are also accumulating vast amounts of land, building new industries while transforming old ones, pioneering new technologies, and taking advantage of legal loopholes and underused statutes. But instead of making money, these latter-day barons have vowed to save the natural environment their predecessors despoiled, and in the process to secure a better future for humankind. Some are fabulously wealthy, some live off modest paychecks even as they realize outsize ambitions—it is their impact, not their bank accounts, that makes them eco barons.
Among them are Kieran Suckling and Peter Galvin, the two former forest service employees who launched America’s most effective environmental law firm, consistently outwitting the best private, corporate and government attorneys in the world to protect millions of acres of forest and wilderness. The eco barons’ public profiles range from famed media figure Ted Turner, who owns—and has preserved—more land in the United States than any other individual American, to obscure inventor Andy Frank, a university professor who is giving the world a better, greener, cheaper way to drive. There is Terry Tamminen, once a pool cleaner, then head of California’s Environmental Protection Agency, now a sustainability consultant, who has somehow persuaded two Republican governors to create the most environmentally friendly states in the union. There is Carole Allen, a single mom and volunteer who marshaled an army of schoolchildren to shame fishing fleets into saving endangered species. And there is Roxanne Quimby, the founder of a cosmetics powerhouse, Burt’s Bees, who is fighting to preserve the great Maine Woods—an inspiration for Henry David Thoreau 150 years ago and now one of the largest forests left standing in the United States.
Then there are Doug Tompkins and his wife, Kris, the Rockefellers of their generation, the eco barons whose impact seems to reach farthest. Their network, influence, and support for green causes stretch throughout the nation and the world, sometimes highly visible, often out of sight yet exerting a profound impact on the environment and the daily lives of Americans. They try to lead by example, running ranches, resorts, private parks, organic farms, industries, and entire communities in a renewable, energy-efficient, nonpolluting, wildlife-friendly, and profitable fashion. They say America needs to follow this example in a big way, to create the conservation and energy equivalent of President Kennedy’s declaration in 1961 that the nation would reach the moon within the decade. Action for conservation and against climate change need not take a backseat to economics and national security, they argue, rejecting the very notion that there is a conflict between the two. The Tompkinses and their fellow eco barons not only say that immediate action to avert disaster is vital to security and prosperity—there are many voices in that chorus, including the new president’s—but are actually taking action, and asking the rest of the world to catch up.
And so the eco barons’ plans stretch from the majestic Chilean fjords to the Alaskan wilderness preserves, with their coveted oil reserves deep below virginal landscapes occupied by moose, polar bear, and seal. They span North America from the Everglades to the Adirondacks to Newfoundland, swamp to mountaintop to forest, and stretch westward through the plains states, the Big Sky country, and the deserts and forests of the Southwest. Those plans reach from the jade shadows of Patagonia’s vast temperate rain forest—the last one of its kind in the world, a treasure trove for conservationists and logging companies alike—to the granite peaks and riotous wildflower fields of the Tejon Ranch just north of Los Angeles, one of California’s last wild places, a magnet for biodiversity and endangered species. Developers want to build a new city out of nothing there, 75,000 people (plus malls, gas stations, and supermarkets) plunked down instantly in a pristine wilderness where some of the last California condors forage near cliffs they have occupied for thousands of years.
For decades it has been possible to say, as each new suburb, freeway, and industrial park swallowed up yet another million acres of wilderness, that there was always plenty more where that came from. Now the wild areas are running out, and irreplaceable habitats are under threat. Vital natural partners in the human ecosystem—bees and birds and old-growth trees—are being wiped out with the same certainty that there will always be more, but this certainty is misplaced. The rate of extinctions in some places has exploded. Instead of the average extinction rate—one species a year going extinct per million species alive (a rate that had persisted for many thousands of years as a normal aspect of evolution and natural selection)—some regions are seeing 1,000 times that rate of extinctions in a year. In the South American rain forests, the rate has reached 10,000 extinctions per million species a year. Entire lines of evolution, of DNA, of potential cures for diseases and food for the masses are gone. Many of the creatures that pollinate the crops we depend on are vanishing. One in eight bird species faces extinction—one in eight, gone. Turtles and other amphibians? One species in three is at risk. Three-quarters of flowering plant species, critical parts of the food chain, are also at risk. The oceans are dying, and with them the food supply for billions of people: 90 percent of the big fish—cod, tuna, and swordfish—that once swam the ocean depths are gone. This is not a natural process. It is a human one.2
There are those who wish to continue business as usual, who say that changing the way we drive, build, shop, make electricity, grow food, and cut down our forests would be too inconvenient, too disruptive, too costly. No one knows for sure what the future holds, these voices argue, so why disrupt everything when we can continue burning coal (and removing whole mountaintops to get it), when we can drill offshore for oil and get the same twenty-five miles a gallon that we got when Ronald Reagan occupied the White House and the most popular car in America was an Oldsmobile? It is tempting, especially during times of economic turmoil, to embrace such wishful thinking, to avoid the hard choices. For the first eight critical years of the twenty-first century, America was ruled by a president who thought this way, who blocked attempts to save wilderness, to protect endangered species, to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming, and to curb the country’s insatiable thirst for oil. Instead, the president and his allies in Congress took the opposite tack: drilling for oil in pristine wilderness areas, logging in national forests, refusing to obey environmental laws, even giving enormous tax credits to subsidize the purchase of one of the least efficient, most wasteful passenger cars ever built, the Hummer. Such a tax policy provides an unintentionally apt metaphor for America as a whole, the most wasteful nation in human history, with 5 percent of the world’s population consuming nearly 25 percent of its energy and producing 25 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases. Americans love the idea of conservation, but few of us have vigorously practiced it since World War II, when rationing was imposed. Our mass transit system is, except for pockets in the Northeast, an international joke. Our cars, our appliances, and even our lightbulbs are less efficient than those of the rest of the world. We actually waste more energy in our homes, cars, and businesses than we import in the form of foreign oil, and this is one reason why we consume nine times as much electricity per capita as the world average. We offer tax breaks, investment incentives, and direct subsidies for sprawl, pollution, and waste that far outstrip any incentives to conserve, to build smart, and to pollute less—in effect, our policies, from urban planning to homeland security, almost seem designed to encourage inefficiency and environmental degradation. Industrial agriculture receives government subsidies on a huge scale that make it cost-effective for farmers to burn the equivalent of 400 gallons of oil a year for every person fed——so that simply feeding America expends 120 billion gallons of oil a year, more than most countries consume for all purposes. Overall, America consumes 1.3 trillion gallons of oil a year, about two-thirds of it for transportation. In order to sustain this level of consumption, we transfer our wealth on an epic scale to foreign oil suppliers, a pattern that remained unchanged even though the attacks of 9/11 were financed with some of those same oil dollars. Developing nations worldwide are busily cutting and plowing over rain forests, extracting resources, and killing off species in order to feed America’s and their own growing appetite.
The new eco barons have a word for this: unsustainable.
This is another way of saying that, however uncomfortable facing up to it may be, business as usual cannot continue without incurring certain disaster. The eco barons offer a message of change—not in the3 form of rhetoric, but as a series of national and global projects that are, right now, saving parts of the planet. Acting individually and sometimes in concert, these remarkable visionaries are showing the world that nature can be nurtured; that forests can be sustainably logged; that energy efficiency and conservation can protect the environment and save enormous amounts of money; that alternative methods of farming, driving, and making electricity can enrich our lives and our bank accounts while reducing the threat of climate change. Many Americans were awakened to the severity of global warming by Al Gore’s landmark documentary An Inconvenient Truth—and despaired. The eco barons are writing the next chapter in the story, and theirs is a message of hope: The world can be saved. Civilization, society, prosperity, a good life, a stable future—all are still there for the making. The real question is not if we can, but if we will: if the world will follow the lead of the eco barons, or if the naysayers and deniers will win, with business as usual continuing until disaster is inevitable. The world as we know it—the stable sea levels, temperate weather, and ample natural resources that allowed civilization to flourish and grow—will change in a few short years if we don’t follow the eco barons’ lead. Resources will be used up. Extinctions will go out of control. Ice packs will melt and coastal regions will flood. Droughts and extreme storms will plague once temperate regions. Fuel and food supplies will shrink. And life will become very, very hard for much of the world. Soon, the eco barons say, inaction may lock us into that fate, and it will be too late.
“Sometimes, it seems it already is too late,” Doug Tompkins says. His grandest of plans, his hope to restore and reconnect wilderness areas around the world, stretches many years in the future, 100 years perhaps; it is a plan for his grandchildren and great-grandchildren to see through. He lives with the knowledge that the eco barons’ battle to save the natural world will not be won in his lifetime, though certainly he could witness it being lost. “Sometimes we despair, we see nothing changes, and we think, yes, it probably is too late. But then we keep going, because, who knows, we may be wrong.”