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♪ ♪
(waves crashing)
♪ ♪
KRIS: March 11th.
Mostly sunny.
I feel the memories of nearly 20 years in this valley.
Years of joy, pain, doubts, and reassurance.
Love in a new way, so strong, so lasting.
Few have lived as we have here.
So yes my darling, I am lonely for you.
Nothing calms me as your true and steady hand.
Come home to your wife.
♪ ♪
REPORTER (over TV): Douglas Tompkins died Tuesday
in an accident in Chile.
He was a passionate conservationist.
REPORTER: He fell in love with Patagonia in his youth
in the '60s
and returned to buy land in the '90s.
REPORTER: He lived in Chile for 25 years and leaves
a legacy of the biggest philanthropic project
in the world.
MAN: Tompkins was a real visionary.
He built a project at a difficult time when
environmentalists were seen as eco-terrorists.
KRIS: I mean, Doug was a big personality.
He dies suddenly.
Everybody thinks...
they didn't know what to think.
Would I fall apart?
If I fell apart the game was over.
We would lose 25 years of our work.
People had no idea if I was going to come back or not.
I lost the love of my life.
I was seriously wounded, on my knees.
I get a note from a friend who says,
"You have to make a choice
and you have to make it right now.
You can live off this story.
You can tell everybody about this life you had
and mourn Doug for the rest of your life.
Or you can go work, and don't stop.
What are you gonna do?"
And that was a choice.
♪ ♪
(chatter)
RICK: So I got these, these are from K2.
JIMMY: No way!
What?
KRIS: What year is that Rick?
RICK: '78.
JIMMY: Rick's going to drag us up the mountain.
Um, so I brought you a different ax.
It's a lot lighter.
Or, I mean, I brought many axes for myself and Pablo.
KRIS: So this is, this is it?
JIMMY: Or you could take one of these, which is...
KRIS: I'd rather, I think I'd rather have the long one.
JIMMY: Okay.
RICK: Time to go.
JIMMY: After Doug had passed, Rick called and asked me if
I wanted to join him and Kris on a climbing trip.
You know, he told me that Kris really wanted to go and climb,
climb that mountain.
I just thought, yeah, that makes sense.
I can see why.
It's a really special mountain.
RICK: Okay, there's our mountain.
KRIS: Oh, god.
(laughing)
No, really.
I'm sorry, but oh my God.
Look at that.
MAN: Look at that one! It's a bit snowy.
KRIS: A little bit. MAN: Just a tiny bit.
(chatter)
(horse nickers)
KRIS: This is the farthest I've been inside this park.
We never saw this.
I mean, we fly a lot, but
we never got on the ground enough.
We didn't really explore.
We just worked.
This is a real wake up call for me.
In the very beginning,
Doug and I were living in the middle of this paradise,
and we said it would be incredible to save this place.
Just save it.
Because of climate and all these other things,
right now on any scorecard, nature is losing.
What can you do today to try to save
the critical areas of the planet?
INTERVIEWER: What was your vision?
What did you come here for?
DOUG: We sort of started to make a master plan and started
to realize it was possible to create a national park
under a private initiative.
With the idea that we would donate it back to the country.
NEWSPERSON: The ultimate do it yourself approach to
saving the earth: buying it.
REPORTER: Tompkins and his wife, Kris, have assembled land
for conservation on a scale never seen before.
DOUG: Yeah, this is like the size of
Yosemite National Park, here.
INTERVIEWER: So that volcano over there, you bought that?
DOUG: Yeah, that came with it.
(laughs).
NEWSPERSON: Some people here began asking just what were
these Americans really up to?
CLAUDIO: In our opinion, he's nothing more than a businessman
masquerading as an ecologist.
MICHELLE: I think in Chile, many people did not understand
at the beginning what being an ecologist meant.
Some people wanted it to be a place to invest, to invest,
to produce energy with the river.
Some others wanted to cut the forest.
KRIS: We didn't know there were stakes,
that was part of the problem.
INTERVIEWER: Former president of Chile has accused your
husband of throwing people off the land.
It has been reported that you also have gotten death threats.
KRIS: We had death threats for years, the phones tapped.
No, there were huge stakes.
For 25 years, I really put the shoulder to the wheel,
and did everything to make what Doug wanted to do, possible.
This is what you were talking about this morning.
Is all of this.
DOUG: See, I underlined that a long time ago because somebody
told me that place was for sale.
I came down to Chile in 1990,
bought a house and was fixing it up.
You know, we bought a piece of land, not with the idea of
making any large park.
But then another piece became available and then a very big
piece came available.
And pretty soon we had the makings of a park.
DAGO: On the one hand you had a crazy man,
with the dream of making a park.
And on the other hand,
you had someone who would make that dream come true
on a national level.
KRIS: She says I want to fly with you but don't fall...
Don't crash, don't crash.
EDGAR: There was a deep, deep union and
devotion to each other.
They came together with a common vision and they
fought like cats in a bag.
DOUG: We can bicker with each other.
KRIS: No, I think it's a desire to work against the
trend of the destruction of wild nature.
I think that is as big a bond and strong a bond as any
two people can have.
♪ ♪
TIMMY: If you don't mind like, taking a little break...
JIMMY: Here, or up there?
TIMMY: No, no. Up at the edge of the forest.
JIMMY: Yeah, agreed. Just another 200-300 feet.
TIMMY: Yeah. Sounds good.
JIMMY: How you doing, Kris?
KRIS: I'm okay.
JIMMY: Good.
KRIS: I always said I want to live at one end of the
spectrum or the other, but never in the middle.
And before I died, I wanted this life.
I didn't know what this was, but I knew I wanted something
wild, outrageous.
Risky in the sense of
changing everything that was so comfortable.
Doug would be so happy for me,
and proud of me to walk up there
and see what the highest place in the park looks like.
For me, this is a way to say a final goodbye to him.
Doug made the first ascent of this mountain back in 2008.
He was a climber, and it was always his first love.
Doug grew up in the Northeast.
He started climbing in the Gunks when he was in middle school.
He had no interest in school.
Never went to college.
He found it a worthless way to spend your life: conforming.
He just rejected all of it.
And left.
♪ My distractions ♪♪
KRIS: At 17.
Drove west.
I don't think, he had no money.
He had no idea how, what he would do out there,
what he would find.
♪ And sweet whiskey stop to say hello ♪
YVON: Doug eventually ended up in Yosemite and climbing in
the valley and stuff, and I climbed with him there.
We became just, really good friends.
KRIS: Years later, it was Yvon who eventually brought
Doug and me together.
JIMMY: Doug and Yvon were best friends and
lifelong climbing partners.
They were both world class climbers.
I mean, these were the original dirtbag climbers and
surfers and skiers.
Who would go on to create the outdoor clothing business
as we know it.
KRIS: Doug really looked up to Yvon,
and that relationship changed over the 50 years.
And Yvon really listened to Doug when they entered into
their business lives.
YVON: Somehow he talked himself in getting the
franchise for a hot dog stand in Yosemite.
He ran a hotdog stand and climbed.
He was an entrepreneur.
And if you want to understand the entrepreneur,
study the juvenile delinquent.
Because they're saying this sucks,
I'm going to do it my own way.
And you know, Doug became a businessman
before anybody else.
I mean, I was a blacksmith and I was making climbing gear,
but I didn't consider myself a businessman until way later.
I was climbing six months a year and I started
making climbing gear.
I was growing the business in all the normal ways,
but we had a lot of different ideas.
And so we had this policy of basically,
work when you have to work
and play when you have to play.
And when the surf comes up, take off.
Go surfing.
And that's when I met Kris.
♪ Dee-dee dee-dee Dee-dee dee-dee ♪
♪ Well, east coast girls are hip ♪
♪ I really dig those styles they wear ♪
♪ And the southern girls ♪
♪ With the way they talk ♪
♪ They knock me out when I'm down there ♪
♪ The Midwest farmers' daughters ♪
♪ Really make you feel all right ♪
YVON: She was a surfer girl.
You know, never wore shoes.
In fact, when she was in high school,
she'd go to school barefooted
and the teacher would go pretty crazy.
She was a little juvenile delinquent herself.
♪ I wish they all could be California ♪
MELINDA: Kris was Yvon's next door neighbor.
She was probably 15 or 16 when I first met her.
She was extraordinarily friendly.
She loves to talk.
She loves to do things, but she's very meticulous.
KRIS: We, grew up on our great grandfather's ranch
in California.
When I was eight, my father and his oil company
decided to go to Venezuela.
Little Hamlet in the Orinoco Basin.
My father became very ill one afternoon and
he was dead five days later of bulbar polio.
After our father died, our mother remarried to our
really close family friend.
He was a real go-getter and he had four kids.
So there were seven of us.
And we were called the hooligans.
We were wild.
My father wanted his kids to be the ones who'd fling
themselves off the high diving board.
Nothing was impossible.
And I was the one who responded to all of that.
The thing that was asked of us was, be great at what you do.
I don't care what it is, but be great at it.
♪ ♪
I refused to go to private school,
but the local high school
was such a bad high school
that I started going to the beach and
hanging out with an older brother and Yvon Chouinard.
This is when I'm 15 years old.
He was absolutely clear about who he was.
On the other hand, I am much more like a pebble in a stream
and it just kind of knocks along, gets moved down river,
and I get hooked on one rock and then maybe a little
current takes me out and keeps me going.
Anyway, I came home from my first year at college
and my mother sat me down and said,
"You have to get a job."
So I went to Yvon and I was complaining and
he hired me for the summer for $2 an hour.
YVON: So she started working for me as an assistant packer.
(laughs).
Assistant packer?
That's as low as you can get.
Hah!
She just kind of worked her way up the company,
and we slowly learned how to run a business together.
Doug had started his own business as well.
DOUG: We started a guide service.
California Mountaineering Guide Service, it was called.
And that became the reason that I started the North Face.
I needed equipment to supply the clients
to the guide service.
KRIS: It was about this time that Doug met Susie.
DOUG: My first wife, Susie, I met hitchhiking.
She picked me up hitchhiking.
SUSIE: One day I'm driving on an in an area called Emerald Bay
in Lake Tahoe and there's this guy hitchhiking.
So I stopped and picked him up, and he had ropes
and he had all his climbing gear.
He was so arrogant.
I just remember thinking,
What a jerk this guy is,
but there's something kind of cool, too.
Eventually we got married.
We lived in North Beach in San Francisco.
When we opened the North Face, we invited this group called
the Grateful Dead to play at our opening.
Doug had a great time building it out
and it was really beautiful.
KRIS: He created this unique environment to sell different
kind of clothing and climbing equipment.
SUSIE: The North Face kept growing and then Doug got very
restless because he wanted to go away and go climbing
and not be tied down.
And so, we sold it.
YVON: At that time, Susie had started Esprit.
She was in partnership with another woman.
SUSIE: We'd been out selling off of these very, very
amateur samples we had made.
And so I remember showing him the orders.
Doug just looked at it and kind of shook his head and
was just like, "Wow, there's an opportunity!"
We were in business.
So then Esprit became a big label, and then we took off.
DOUG: Really built the Esprit company up.
Eventually expanded internationally with a lot of
partners all around the world,
from Asia to Australia to Europe.
(horse nickers)
KRIS: We're here in the middle of what will hopefully become
Patagonia National Park.
But what's going to happen to this?
It's one thing to have a big idea,
but it's quite another thing
to be able to realize it.
And that's where it takes working really closely
with the government.
This park is one of five new parks.
In every case, we've bought significant territory and
proposed to the government to partner with us
and contribute additional federal lands.
DOUG: Alacalufes Reserve can easily be a national park
without losing any productive opportunities.
RICK: It would be so wonderful if all these projects were
ever to actually become fledged national parks.
Being convinced that that was actually going to happen
was another thing.
CAROLINA: Chile has been a country totally based on
extractive economy.
It is said that mining is the salary of Chile,
it is more than 60% of our exports.
Today, Chile is the world's largest copper producer and
the second largest lithium producer.
DOUG: Chile is a mining country.
It's an extractive economy.
The mining industry is a pollutant.
RODRIGO: The politicians economical sense was to
exploit those lands and the forests.
So, you know, the people that were at the government at the
time didn't get the idea of the park.
YVON: In Latin America,
there's no history of land philanthropy.
So here comes this wacko American,
goes down there and he says,
I'm gonna buy up all this land in Chile,
and I'm gonna make parks and
I'm gonna give it back to the people.
And they're going, come on, nobody does that.
(laughs).
No, there's gotta be another reason.
(chatter)
KRIS: Doug started coming down here in 1961.
He was ski racing, and all ski racers trained
in the off season.
So that's how he began to understand what Argentina and
Chile were like.
And he really liked it from the beginning.
So he had this love affair with Patagonia.
YVON: It was his idea to go down to Patagonia.
So we took off two weeks later.
We bought an old van, filled it up with skis and surfboards
and climbing gear.
Driving, I don't know, 10,000, 12,000 miles
or whatever it is.
It was a great adventure.
JIMMY: Super legendary trip.
I mean, they defined an entire era.
They defined an entire way of life.
Climbing, surfing, skiing un-skied peaks.
And eventually climbing one of the most difficult and
significant first ascents of their time.
YVON: We spent 60 days trying to climb Fitz Roy.
We spent 31 days in an ice cave.
I think we had five days where you had climbable weather.
DOUG: I was gone for, you know, nine months.
Yvon Chouinard, an old friend of mine and
three other friends.
We were in Chile a very long time.
YVON: We fell in love with Patagonia, the area.
That was my first time in Patagonia.
It was like the American West of 100 years ago,
but it was authentic.
So that trip was long enough so that we really,
it transformed our lives.
RICK: When Yvon came down to Patagonia, the place, in 1968
with Doug Tompkins to climb Fitz Roy, it was wild.
Then we went back exactly 20 years later.
And, it was different.
YVON: Look at this, they got the streets all
laid out and everything.
MAN: They'll be opening up a McDonald's and a Wimpy's.
(laughs).
RICK: The developers had laid out the grid and put up the
street signs for what became the city of Chaiten.
We also began to notice,
way back, a long time ago,
that things were warming up.
We became aware that the glaciers were
starting to retreat.
We started to learn more about climate change.
And Doug was like the first guy to, to really sense that.
EDGAR: I think it was a dual aspect of his voracious
reading and his being introduced to certain people
who led him to other books.
YVON: He got very much involved with deep ecology and
it was a natural fit because all these deep ecologists
were all climbers.
They saw nature being destroyed and
if we destroy nature, we destroy ourselves.
KRIS: Deep ecology is simply looking at all life
as being interconnected.
All life has intrinsic value.
It is not reliant on humans placing value on it.
♪ ♪
YVON: After being down in Patagonia, I thought,
I want to make clothing for the conditions down there.
KRIS: Yvon said, "I want to make some jackets."
"I want to call it Patagonia."
YVON: Patagonia. It's one of those magical names.
And the label that we came up with
has got that skyline of Fitz Roy.
KRIS: For one reason or another, he said to me,
you should take this on.
I ended up creating it, running it, growing it.
MELINDA: Yvon has lots and lots of ideas,
but he doesn't know how to get there.
And Kris could do it and she also didn't do the bad ideas.
That's the important part.
YVON: She was driven and very confident.
Eventually she was our CEO and general manager.
KRIS: Once Patagonia got going,
it was, especially for its day, really a freight train.
And then in the early 80s,
Yvon decided that we should take Patagonia,
and turn it into an activist company.
YVON: I was building my business and I was getting
concerned about the environment.
I felt like I was going to push my business to be
more and more responsible.
But Doug didn't do that.
He was strictly building it as big as you possibly could.
(laughing)
PHOTOGRAPHER: Okay Fred Astaire, go ahead.
NEWSPERSON: Tompkins is not a fashion designer.
The Esprit look is created by his wife Susie.
But everything else having to do with the company's image
and communicating it to the public he oversees himself.
DOUG: Oh yeah, she's great. Julie Hall, definitely.
WOMAN: Okay.
♪ Turn your back on Mother Nature ♪
♪ Everybody wants to rule the world ♪
EDGAR: Esprit had its own apartment in Milano.
Esprit had an apartment in Paris.
Esprit had an apartment in New York City and Tokyo.
You'd walk into the house and see a Francis Bacon triptych
worth $5 million sitting above the fireplace.
The heyday of Esprit was when he was totally devoted and
totally into being the worldwide entrepreneur
of a fashion mega business.
And then there was the change.
(clicks tongue)
DOUG: I think it really changed a lot.
I just, you know, passed through that gate somewhere
towards the end of the late 80s.
And I just said, I've got to do something else.
KRIS: I think he felt lost.
He was lost by his own hand.
DOUG: First order of business in the fashion industry is to
create the sense of desire,
that you needed new things.
And I started to realize I shouldn't be doing that
because I was just adding to the destruction of the world.
EDGAR: So in the latter years of Esprit their catalogs and
the copy in them is trying to talk you out of
buying the clothes.
SUSIE: I mean, you can't do that and still, you know,
try to figure out how you're going to pay everybody and
move your company forward.
In the early 90s, I just couldn't take it anymore
and the company was struggling and I had to just make a
decision that I had to try to save Esprit.
RICK: He and Susie had split and they had to
split the company as well.
She bought him out and it was because he was interested in
heading in new directions.
PETER: He got to go back to where he was,
the last time he was really happy probably,
which was Patagonia.
♪ ♪
LITO: I think it was a big transition,
but one that was important to him.
He was the same guy, but a different guy.
I think a more interesting guy, actually.
RICK: Moving to South America to commit to a project that
seemed like a dream of some sort.
Because that was his mantra: commit and then figure it out.
And that's exactly what he did.
He committed everything he had.
CAROLINA: He didn't come here with a plan.
When he came to Chile he just wanted to get out
of the Esprit business.
And being a pilot, he realized that all the farms were owned
by absentee owners.
So he bought, you know, little farms from small farmers that
they wanted to move on.
Doug bought that 800 hectare farm, Renihue.
DOUG: Well, right actually, where we're sitting right now,
I lived here for a year and a half.
This right here was the living room and the kitchen,
and dining room while I fixed up the old main house
across the way.
And it was, you know, no electricity,
we have ten feet by eight feet,
or 12 feet by eight feet.
And the, uh, yeah, you know...
YVON: Whatever. DOUG: Whatever that is.
(laughs).
You've got two bedrooms, this is a two bedroom house.
EDGAR: He had a body of money.
It wasn't billionaire money.
It was a chunk, a big chunk.
Like 150 million.
And he could do a thing and he chose a thing.
CAROLINA: Our first approach was to protect that land.
But in those areas, where there that was the possibility,
was to build demonstrative farms.
Farms where we could show ourselves, first of all,
and then the rest of the people that maybe it was possible to
live in this area, not cutting the trees,
that that wasn't your only choice of living there.
So we start in the farms, we planted berries,
developed honey, and we made jams,
and we had the sheep and we got the wool.
And with the wool we created a network of hand knit craft.
Was that profitable?
No, it wasn't.
You know, every time we sold a jar of honey, we gave you $5,
Doug used to say that.
But he said he could do that.
He could choose to be ecologically sustainable
and maybe not economically sustainable.
And we had the chance to provide work for many people.
YVON: He used to rag on me in that I should sell my company
and do the same thing he's doing,
that he's doing the right thing
and I'm doing the wrong thing.
And I wanted to run my company in a responsible way,
hanging on to my company and using it as a tool.
To do that, I said, okay we got to reassess
what we're doing here.
Our new mission statement is
'We're in business to save our home planet.'
And so I took a dozen of our top people
of the company and went down to Patagonia.
And that's when Doug met Kris, that same trip.
♪ ♪
KRIS: We were in Calafate,
which was then a really tiny town.
We were in this restaurant and in walks Doug Tompkins.
And he comes over and he plunks himself down next to me
and says, Boom!
"Hey, kid, how you doing?"
And then he says, this is classic Doug,
he said, "What are you doing?"
I said, "Well, we're leaving tomorrow morning."
"Why are you leaving?"
"This is the end of this trip."
"Yeah, but why? Why don't you stay?
In fact, why don't you stay,
and I'll fly you back to the United States."
So I just said, "No, and don't ask me again.
I'm not going to fly."
And then he started calling me from San Francisco
once I was back and he was back.
"Well, what are you doing?"
Well, I'm, you know.
I was involved with someone else,
but I knew that that was cascading.
And he's pretty charming.
He was very charming.
RICK: Doug called me up and said,
"Hey, you know that friend of yours, Kris?
She's a good, buddy of yours, right?"
And I just go, "Oh, yeah.
She's one of my closest friends.
She's godmother to all three of my children."
And he goes, "Yeah. What do you think of her?"
So I, you know I told him how great she was.
And then literally the same day Kris calls me up and goes,
"Hey that guy friend of Yvon's, Doug Tompkins.
You've been climbing with him for a while now, yeah?
But you know what...
What kind of guy is he?
Do you know him very well?"
And I went "Oh!"
YVON: I know my wife when she heard that Doug was interested
in Kris was going, "Oh my god, it's a disaster."
Because she knew how he had treated women in the past.
EDGAR: Doug was a wild, young, bon vivant
with many, many liaisons.
And when Kris was talking to people about,
'Is this a good thing?'
And people who knew Doug said,
"No, Doug's changed, this is going to be good.
Doug's changed."
Other women are going,
"Oh, man, you don't want him to get near him, this is crazy."
RICK: There was a part of Doug that was like an ass.
So we were a little bit nervous.
KRIS: I started working with Yvon, I was so young.
I think 23 years of that.
I just, I just thought,
I can't, I don't want to do this anymore.
I was done.
I was done with my life.
Most people think of it, when I say those things,
that I'm always talking about Patagonia.
That's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about me.
My life was over.
I had to change it.
I just thought there has to be something else out there,
something bigger.
Doug would call me from time to time.
And one night I said, "Well, I'm going to go to Paris to
work out of the Paris office."
And he goes, "Great. I'll see you over there."
And true to his form, he's in Paris.
We go out to dinner, his favorite restaurant in Paris.
And we're walking around, walking all around Paris.
He said, "Come see me in Chile."
I said, "No. Absolutely not.
You're a world famous sandbagger."
And he stopped and looked down at his feet,
and then looked back up at me and said,
"I will never let anything happen to you."
It was one of those moments that you see somebody transform,
even in their own mind.
I mean, much later, he said he knew exactly, that was it,
and so did I.
I thought to myself,
"that's the man I was supposed to marry."
But it was crazy, really crazy.
I was engaged to another person,
so I ended up leaving that fiancé.
Then I went down to Chile to visit with Doug for ten days
and I stayed five weeks.
It was chemistry.
When, um, you get hit by lightning.
I'm going to leave my role as CEO.
And we are currently looking for someone to replace me.
My hope is to have someone in place by October, train them,
have them shadow me day to day for three months.
And then January 1st, I bug out and likely go to Chile,
which is where I'm thinking that my home will be.
I mean, I blew up my whole...
(laughs).
It was scandalous.
I just blew up my personal life.
But I was right.
It turned out to be the great thing.
And it was a big leap of faith.
I mean, it could easily have gone either way.
This was insane, what we were doing.
KRIS (over radio): This is Doug's and my first date.
I just remember thinking, "Oh, God, what have I done?"
And this farm where we're headed now,
was absolutely cut off.
KRIS: April 4th, 1994.
Incredible property Doug has here.
Entire peninsula.
Beautiful glaciers.
Falls, rivers.
April 5th, 1994.
Ice on our sleeping bags in the morning.
Incredibly clear and beautiful.
We head south through Coyhaique Forest.
Sleep at Hotel Nires,
no dinner,
and snuggle to sleep.
May 20th.
Storm now at fourth day, no let up.
Water being pushed into the house for force of the winds.
Up at 2 A.M. to tie down the chimney
and kill a giant rat.
No chance of leaving.
MELINDA: There were no telephones,
no way to get in and no way to get out.
So she was isolated with Doug.
KRIS: We're in our 40s and we want to do all of these things
and they're big and they're difficult and
there's not a lot of history out there
of other people doing them.
So you don't, you're sort of making it up as you go along.
And it was a new marriage.
You just hope that the fibers of that marriage can withstand
the pressures of working together, living together
in these intense circumstances.
♪ ♪
(singing in Spanish)
(applause)
CAROLINA: At the beginning, the first part was to make
a nature sanctuary.
It was a way to protect the land.
But some year along the way, uh, Doug and Kris developed
this idea of creating national parks and our work took a
really big shift then.
KRIS: So this is where we got started.
This is where we were living.
And all of this section became Pumalín, from the border with
Argentina all the way out to the Pacific Ocean.
This is the first one.
We bought 763,000 acres and it increased from there.
None of this is ever done in a vacuum.
We go out immediately and talk to everybody, mayors,
everybody involved.
So there's a lot of suspicion.
And many times a lot of pushback.
DOUG: We're coming to talk to the mayor here.
We want to explain to her what the idea of donating this land
that's out in her district.
I think that, you know, she'll be supportive of this,
she understands about conservation.
MAN: The project is to create the national park
starting at Cabo Leon and include the nature reserve.
DOUG: We have to say "we have a national park"
because national parks create their own touristic pull.
KRIS: In this area, this is all temperate rainforest.
It's impenetrable.
So the opposition was largely from the federal government
at this point.
This is where five years of serious political and
social conflict took place.
INTERVIEWER: What is it you don't like about
Douglas Tompkins' project?
JAIME: They don't want any progress.
We are a poor country,
we need the progress
to raise our standard.
RODRIGO: We were coming from a dictatorship in the country
for 20 years,
so there's a hardcore right wing politicians
that wouldn't understand the philanthropy.
NEWSPERSON: Chile is a country that has good reason to be
suspect of Americans.
(explosion)
In 1973, the Nixon administration supported
the coup that began 17 years of brutal dictatorship
under General Augusto Pinochet.
Yet when the Tompkins began assembling cheap wilderness
land for conservation here,
they were stunned to be labeled ugly Americans.
ANDRES: To be fair, at the same time, you know,
Chile is a very long and very thin country.
And Doug and Kris were buying a lot of land,
which, you know, amounted to
a good chunk of one of Chile's regions.
PEDRO: The main concern of the military and the navy was
having Mr. Tompkins owning such an amount of foreign land
that went from the border to the ocean.
So he was accused of cutting the country in two pieces
EDGAR: Now the right wing in Chile was going
through the roof,
trying to figure out ways to deal with this.
KRIS: March 13, 1995.
Virtually every newspaper around Chile and
all television stations covering us last night
and again this morning.
Heavy attacks from the ultra right wing
and the salmon industry.
We were taking up the fight against
commercial salmon farming.
DOUG: These are fish farms.
These are the equivalent of uh, hog farms.
You go down to the ocean floor, you'll see underneath
these cages here, a dead sea.
Marine ecology has been smothered.
Nothing's living under these cages.
CAROLINA: The sea lions would go towards the cages to eat.
So we used to find sea lions dead with gunshots on the beach.
KRIS: Doug put a wanted dead or alive.
We'll give anyone $2500 that leads to the guy
who's killing the sea lions.
And that was just gas on a fire.
April 21st, 1995.
More attacks in the newspaper against Doug and me.
It's beginning to seem a clear threat to our life here.
October 17th.
Phones tapped for sure now.
New allegations against us coming from the military.
Wondering what will fall next.
Worried for Doug's safety.
YVON: They had to hide out in the American embassy
for a while.
They had death threats.
The FBI told us, my wife and I, that our phone was tapped.
You know, we were friends of the Tompkins.
BELISARIO: The government isn't harassing him.
CLAUDIO: Well, there was a lot of suspicion.
It seemed to be the first step in acquiring cheap land
to then sell at higher prices.
So, the collective imagination gives rise to many things.
MICHELLE: At that time I was minister, yes, minister.
And I was studying defense issues.
And the military had all kinds of theories,
that this was Israel who was trying to
take power of Chile, etc., etc...
KRIS: We were accused of creating a new nuclear waste
site for the United States,
a new Jewish state,
even though we were raised as Anglicans,
a new base for the Argentine military
to come in and finish Chile off once and for all.
A really good one was that we were going to take all the
cattle out of southern Chile and replace it with
American bison.
INTERVIEWER: Between the two of you with all your projects
in Chile and Argentina, how many acres are we talking?
DOUG: About 2 million.
INTERVIEWER: 2 million?
KRIS: Yeah, just under 2 million.
INTERVIEWER: It's an awful lot of acres.
KRIS: It's peanuts.
If you weigh it against what's being saved on an annual basis
versus what's been destroyed.
We're on the losing team.
We're losing wilderness at the rate of 40 million acres a year.
At this rate, we'll lose all wilderness within
the next 50 years.
People can say, "Oh, the Tompkins have protected over
2 million acres of land."
And it is a lot of land,
but it's a drop in the bucket compared to
what's taking place every day,
whether it's in the forests in Indonesia
or grasslands in Eastern Africa, wherever it is.
It's not as though we are gaining ground.
We're just trying to hold back the onslaught.
We're at this perfect storm of rising human population base,
rising consumption and a fall in natural resources.
And yet anybody who could really change some of that,
they're unwilling to because the cultural impact of those
changes is just too much for them to consider.
When we tried to make Corcovado Park,
we ran straight into the military.
A lot of what would eventually become the park was
owned by the military.
And they were using the area as a bombing range.
Doug was meeting with Generals to try to convince them to
preserve this place and stop the bombing.
Before we go to the government to make an offer,
we're completely prepared saying this is what
we have invested in the land.
(speaking Spanish)
We said to the government,
we'll donate our park with all the infrastructure
if you match one of our acres with up to nine acres of
unused federal land.
That leveraging allows us to do something much greater than
what would have been possible for us to do by ourselves.
Patagonia Park was another very contentious project.
We bought several thousand acres in Argentina and then we
bought an old estancia, and 200,000 acres in Chile.
We had an idea that this park could eventually go across the
border to Argentina,
to protect a couple of million acres in total.
In the case of the nearby communities,
it was by and large a ranching story.
And some people were upset that we would be taking one of
the largest ranches in Chile out of production.
And when we got to Ibera, it was incredibly challenging.
REPORTER (over TV): Some residents say that they've
been displaced and then ignored by the people they
sometimes refer to as eco-barons.
WOMAN: We don't believe Tompkins is a multimillionaire
who suddenly turned into a philanthropist.
KRIS: There were also disputes about land deeds and titles
around Pumalín.
CLAUDIO: The 1 or 2%, which would represent
approximately 200 families,
they felt their presence in the area was being "threatened".
KRIS: We spent five years going out and getting everyone their
land titles, so that they would be comfortable,
so there would be no question about
what's yours and what belongs to the park.
DOUG: I'll say that we're as good as anybody in the country,
uh, about how we have dealt with land disputes.
NEWSPERSON: Is that the one that hurts the most?
DOUG: That's the one that hurts the most because, um,
it's been just the absolute opposite.
KRIS: It wasn't only individuals and some
politicians who were opposed,
but there were some institutions as well.
NEWSPERSON: Opposition to the Tompkins is being fermented
by none other than the Catholic church.
This is the missing link of Pumalín Park.
30,000 hectares of land owned by the Catholic Church
known as Winai.
Douglas Tompkins came this close to getting Winai.
DOUG: What happened was, pressure was put on the
Catholic University not to sell to us, and they sold to
the power company,
to Endesa, the big power monopoly.
NEWSPERSON: That would seem pretty spiteful thing to do.
DOUG: It was, it was.
KRIS: Okay, but this property down on Lago General Carreras,
are we buying that?
DOUG: Yeah.
PEDRO: They had to have
a lot of faith in what they were doing.
98% of the people would have simply given up and said,
"Impossible to live in your country"
Because we behaved, Chileans, very badly.
KRIS: February 25th, everyday more news to bear.
Doug completely overpowered with anger and frustration.
And my nerves are frayed.
Why are we doing this?
I go home to serious confrontation,
a lot of crying, honesty and a loving response.
DOUG: I'm thinking about maybe filling all of this up
but I don't want something that is too straight
Like that, and then it curves out.
That way it has a natural appearance.
DOUG: I believe in public access.
We have to build public access infrastructure.
You have visitor centers, you have campgrounds,
even hotels, parking areas,
trails, trailheads,
offices for administration, signage.
You've got all that kind of stuff that goes into
making up a national park.
(speaking Spanish)
RICK: He was such a perfectionist.
When he ran Esprit he had a little sign above his desk
that said, "no detail is small."
DAGO: Doug was convinced that a world without beauty
wasn't worth it.
KRIS: You have to remember that for Doug,
these are canvases.
And what he did do is he created a dogged,
relentless pursuit of beauty.
DOUG: The tractor driver is like an artist.
You can paint the landscape with the tractor
but you must have good technique.
Because later we are going to take a photo
and see your work, the work.
KRIS: When we first began to work in Chile and Argentina,
we thought we were just protecting vast territories.
But in fact, it's like they say,
landscape without wildlife is just scenery.
Everything changed when we got to Ibera.
We realized that a lot of species were missing
from the jaguars all the way down.
We were no longer in the business of
making National Parks.
We were in the business of creating
fully functioning ecosystems.
Time to rewild.
Simply put, rewilding is bringing back the species
that belong in a place but have been lost for whatever reason.
Poaching, hunting, grazing of livestock.
CRISTIÁN: Each species plays a major role in the ecosystem.
So that guanacos are in large numbers
to provide food for pumas,
Pumas are preying on guanacos
and are providing food for scavengers.
It's not merely the recovery of a single species
it's the interaction.
The rewilding program has
our park wardens
many of them are former cowboys
but today they are monitoring pumas.
KRIS: Arcelio was the son of the Chief Puma hunter.
So he would go out with his father
and they were paid a salary,
but they were paid a bonus for every skin they brought back.
KRIS: What would your father think if he could see you now...
doing all of this?
With so many pumas!
ARCELIO: With so many pumas without killing them!
KRIS: Without killing any of them!
It's a shift!
ARCELIO: Of course it's a shift. It's a huge shift for me!
DOUG: From an ethical standpoint, we have to serve
biodiversity as a principle.
We have to share the planet with other creatures.
That means we have to make habitat available for
evolution to continue to unfold.
We are squeezing out creatures
from their habitat by over-expanding.
It's a self defeating development and
that's what we find is pathological.
That we're continuing to expand and expand and expand
until the inevitable collapse.
♪ ♪
KRIS: February 18th.
Lolo, why did we never climb our mountain together?
It's such a gift to be up here
and see all of this through your eyes.
JIMMY: Doug made the first ascent.
And, you know, traditionally,
when you make the first ascent of a mountain,
you get to name it.
And Doug named it after Kris.
Great, great, great push.
That was huge!
KRIS: So, Kristine is the highest point in the park and
sort of the crown jewel.
RICK: You know, you can't do a better Valentine's present
than that for your wife.
KRIS: Yeah, he was always doing stuff like that for me.
RODRIGO: No, they were intense, but they were totally
deep in love, you could tell.
He was always taking care of her and likewise.
TIMMY: I mean, you would see them together and it was like
teenage kids, you know, like off in the corner, canoodling.
It was all about love.
LITO: I think virtually every day he would send her
these messages.
They were photo messages.
EDGAR: They had their nicknames for each other
and she was 'Birdy'.
LITO: I can recall, vividly, a really lovely DVD he made.
DOUG: The love of my life is a world class woman
for all seasons.
She's so beautiful at 60.
You are my number one and only.
YVON: That's a secret side of Doug I never saw, but...
(laughs).
RICK: There it is.
It's quite a peak, huh?
KRIS: It is.
I'm so happy to be right here.
RICK: Jimmy and I were here before.
We were here 12 years ago with Yvon and Doug.
♪ ♪
(cheering)
JIMMY: That's another one for us!
YVON: First Medicaid ascent.
(laughing)
DOUG: You can't beat it.
RICK: I remember having an incredible sunset,
just like the one we had last night.
I was thinking about Doug.
DOUG: Now it's my biological clock ticking.
I really feel it.
YVON: You've got a lot of jobs you've got to finish.
DOUG: I got projects to do, that are long term projects.
And, you know, you're thinking, you know,
I'm going to make it to finish that.
I'm really interested to see if we could
finish this or finish that.
And it takes a lot of time.
Time is everything.
Yeah, it's the most valuable.
YVON: Always is.
DOUG: Life flies by.
YVON: Yeah.
KRIS: I had talked Doug into going on this trip,
well at first, and then he became enthusiastic about it.
RICK: We thought it'd be fun to do a sea kayak trip of this
big lake not far from the Patagonia National Park.
KRIS: We took them all to the lake and they spent hours
getting all their boats ready.
Let's go honey!
MELINDA: They were world class kayakers,
but they hired somebody to put a trip together.
KRIS: They took the Zodiac out,
then put their boats in the water.
RICK: Doug and I were in a double kayak.
Yvon and Weston were in singles,
and Jeb and Lorenzo were in another double.
The fourth day the wind really started to come up.
MELINDA: The wind was blowing eight foot waves
every which direction.
RICK: We're having trouble with the rudder of this boat
that we had borrowed.
It was really getting increasingly difficult for
Doug and me to keep our boat pointed downwind.
This wave hit us, all of the sudden we're upside down.
And so I said to Doug,
"God I wonder if we should try to swim for it.
Because if we get out in the middle of a lake,
we're dead, for sure."
And then we both said, "Okay, let's try and go for it."
I thought, you know, I've probably got 10 minutes left.
You can only stay alive in water that cold for
a half hour, maybe.
And then another wave broke over me and I realized I was
starting to drown.
And then something snapped.
And I said, I screamed, "No."
I started swimming as hard as I could.
And in a minute, Jeb and Lorenzo arrived
in their double kayak.
I grabbed onto the back and they started towing me.
WESTON: I just happened to arrive to Doug first.
He grabbed onto the back of my kayak and I got the kayak
turned towards shore and began to paddle.
He was not panicking, he was kicking.
He could have so easily grabbed on to me,
flipped me over.
But, there was no way to fight the hypothermia that was
starting to set in.
And I could really feel that he was losing strength to kick
and hold on.
In the final moment, Doug was looking up the Aveano valley.
And just, humming almost to himself.
When he lost the strength to hold on anymore to the boat
I needed to get him up in my arm
to keep his head out of the water.
I just couldn't hold him and hold the paddle.
And I lost my paddle at that point.
Doug and I floated like that for about an hour,
an hour and a half.
And then I heard a helicopter coming.
They pulled us floating in the water to shore,
and they went from there to the hospital.
KRIS: Broken messages coming in slowly.
Finally it is Doug, Rick, helicopter.
I know you're in serious trouble.
Instinctively, I know, without knowing.
Outside pleading with the gods.
Please, please, please, please bring him back to me.
RICK: And they took us to the lodge where the phone rang and
the lodge owner answered.
In a short minute later,
hung up and looked at us and said,
"Now Doug is really dead."
KRIS: Rushed into the room where I now know
they worked on you for hours.
Cold body, soft.
I crawl up onto your bed and lay next to you.
I only wanted the two of us to be cocooned together and
let everything and everyone else just slip away.
RICK: And I just stared into my soup.
And I remember Yvon staring into his soup,
and then he picked up a spoon
and started eating it very slowly.
And then he looked over at me and he said,
"Eat your soup. It's really good."
And I made sure that I
respected every spoonful of warm soup
going down my throat.
KRIS: And then we flew him the next day.
And I was in the back with the coffin and I had a knife in my
bag and I started carving our names.
I didn't notice but as I'm carving these big letters and
I'm just carving as hard as I can,
I'm cutting myself.
There's blood on the box.
There's blood on me.
And I was out of my seatbelt.
I just was so intent on getting Birdy and Lolo into that box.
So finally, Rick, who's sitting way up by the pilot,
comes back there, said,
"You sit down, you get in your seat,
you put your seatbelt on, and give me that knife.
You are done.
Is this what you want people to see when we land?"
YVON: She was off the deep end, you know,
to the point where she didn't want to live.
She didn't want to go through life without him.
KRIS: Doug died three days ago
on a trip with his best friends.
With Yvon Chouinard, his lifelong friend
with Rick Ridgeway, who also almost died
and with Weston Boyles,
the group's "little boy",
who stayed with him until the very end.
He never left him alone.
And for that I will be eternally grateful.
This person, Douglas, lived a life worth centuries.
I can't picture a life without him, but here we are.
KRIS: Thank you for coming.
(applause)
♪ ♪
RICK: We lowered Doug's casket into the grave.
And then all the people who had come, all the citizens
from surrounding towns, hundreds of people,
we all started tossing dirt on his casket with our hands.
KRIS: It took me a long time to decide not to go with him.
This is a good place to come.
I was so crazy for so long after he died.
Everyday.
May 17, when you left Esprit,
you went on a grand search for what could be next,
the grand gesture to live a new life.
And now I'm sitting on that same precipice.
Somehow there has to be a new story.
Perhaps this is the point, Birdy.
It's time to write it all down.
Even though I feel still that it was an amputation,
not just a loss.
I feel this big, audacious vision of Doug's
was the thing that probably kept me in one piece.
That was like a life raft for me.
We never stopped.
I managed everything.
YVON: All these things that she knew that were unsustainable,
she stopped all that.
And she pulled herself up and took over.
KRIS: All the farms are gone.
We had 13 farms at one point.
We couldn't make them self-sustaining.
It was just too expensive.
I couldn't help but feel that I was failing Doug.
It wasn't an option to keep them going,
but it was tough to let them go.
It became so black and white to me.
There was no question.
It was binary, my whole life became binary.
I want to die, I'm going to live.
We're going to do this, we're not going to do that.
Doug wanted to do this, we're not doing it.
Close it down.
Pumalín, you're done.
Colchagua you're almost done.
Ibera, we're going to do this.
We're going to go twice the speed, twice the scope.
Just go.
We have nothing to lose.
That was my mantra: I have nothing to lose.
The worst thing that could happen to me happened.
RICK: She was into a complete new phase in her life.
And little by little,
Kris not only found that reason to keep going,
but she became more and more fierce and bold.
KRIS: I always felt like a pebble in a stream.
Not anymore.
I know exactly what I want to do.
I'm really living with a lot of intention.
KRIS: So the new park would be
KRIS: 2.3 million.
KRIS: 2.3 million acres.
WOMAN: It's another Pumalín or Corcovado.
KRIS: 20 million acres.
KRIS: Now we're talking!
RICK: She's inevitably had to ask herself, "what's next?"
I think that the most energizing opportunity is rewilding.
CRISTIÁN: So these are
two of the first group that was released,
but they interact with the others that are wild.
So they are doing much better outside than in the pens.
KRIS: There was so much more to do than just protect the land.
You can't call any of these places restored or healthy
until everybody's back.
RICK: Kris helped with the reintroductions of over a
dozen species at this point,
ultimately including the Jaguar,
which nobody's ever done before.
KRIS: It was Doug's idea to do whatever we could
to bring Jaguars back.
The Jaguar is emblematic.
It's at the top of the food chain there.
It was one of his dreams.
So we have nine to release.
And that's assuming that both the cubs,
who are now both females...
WOMAN: Yes.
KRIS: Have two cubs, maybe.
Maybe one.
KRIS: Incredible!
Every time I think about this I almost cry.
KRIS: Really and truly.
Maybe national parks are like petri dishes.
And when everything goes to hell,
national parks being protected areas
might be a petri dish in which evolution could
kind of restart itself.
Who knows?
♪ ♪
RICK: Helping to protect biodiversity, as Kris is doing,
actually has a direct link to climate change,
and through that link to the survivability of our species
on this planet.
KRIS: March 2nd, 2017.
The government sent up a smoke signal today.
We will sign the agreement here on March 15.
At first, enormous relief, and then momentary happiness
that gave way to my unending admiration for you.
I asked myself how I can come this far without you.
But then I remembered you've been here all along.
ANDRES: You know, when you devote
not only a lot of your wealth, but a lot of your life,
and then you choose to be buried in that place,
you know, it made it impossible
for someone to say, oh, he's just visiting.
RICK: There was this outpouring of grief
for a widow across the entire country.
It galvanized everybody and any opposition to what they
were trying to do seemed to vaporize.
KRIS: Historic. It's historic.
Seriously, no one has ever done this before.
MICHELLE: When I was the president, we met with Kristine
and we decided that this could be an interesting thing
that two women could continue pushing what
Doug had as a real important dream.
KRIS: The truth is we needed to finish up these parks.
You have to remember that we were carrying untold overhead.
In the last year or so,
we'd been spending up to $6 million a year
so not donating them would be economic disaster eventually.
Ay yay yay!
Egan! Hola.
EGAN: All of our best carpenters are putting up the sign!
KRIS: I can't believe this!
KRIS: It was so audacious and so unlikely that
you could pull that off.
All five new national parks at once and
the enlargement of three others.
But I just felt like it's now or never.
This is the moment.
WOMAN: Say, Pumalín!
GROUP: Pumalín!
KRIS: This is a hell of a team.
And there are hundreds of people involved.
We want the government to keep them on,
but who knows what will happen?
Some of them we'll see again.
Some of them we won't.
But it's a lot of people coming to the end of something.
KRIS: We've been a family
for 25 years.
And we honor and love each other.
On behalf of the team,
we toast to Douglas and Pablo Carrasco."
(applause)
(cheering)
KRIS: The weekend before the president arrived
for the ceremony,
I read something and I saw immediately
two words that were conditional.
We 'could', we 'would', not we 'are'.
That told me that one of the parks and the biggest one,
in this collection of eight, wasn't completely clear
if it was a go.
And for me, it was all or nothing.
We do them all or we do nothing.
So it's a huge risk if it doesn't go through.
MICHELLE: After all, what happened to them for all of
those years, trying to convince different governments
to do something like this and never being able to go forward,
then I guess of course, she had to have doubts.
She thought anything can change.
KRIS: Right up to the hour before the ceremony,
I had no idea whether it was going to go or not.
That's it. Let's roll.
When she arrived, I was really stone faced.
We meet again.
And she wanted to meet at Doug's grave
in the little cemetery there.
She was acknowledging Doug's grave and talking about Doug.
And I just thought, I'm about to pull the plug
on all of this work.
I had two speeches.
One: wrath and brimstone,
if somehow something had gone awry.
And another one that was congratulatory.
(speaking Spanish)
And then someone came around next to me and she said,
"It's in there. It's okay."
So I turned around to the president and said,
"God, what a historic day."
(laughs).
(singing in Spanish)
♪ ♪
KRIS: I have a map of a place that only the gods
could have imagined.
What for Doug was a dream in 1992,
will become Pumalín National Park.
These parks belong to you.
Protect them with all your heart.
Choose life.
Choose beauty.
KRIS: Lolo, we made it!
(applause)
(cheering)
(applause)
Oh my god, you guys.
YVON: Here was somebody I kind of mentored,
and a good friend.
And now standing here with the president of Chile
signing these papers to create these parks and geez
(laughs)...
Yeah.
I had tears coming down, it was a pretty proud moment.
KRIS: It's the biggest in the world.
You should be so proud.
WESTON: They created the largest land donation in the
history of mankind.
Doug was setting the bar really high,
but he would be proud if somebody
tried to out-do him.
Bigger parks, more conservation.
KRIS: Oh, my God.
Look at him.
Look look look look.
It's a condor.
RICK: Look at this incredible wildness
that she and Doug protected.
As far as you can see.
♪ ♪
YVON: It's changed the whole attitude about conservation
in Latin America.
People want to establish these parks now.
So now I'm involved in starting a new park down
in the tip of Tierra del Fuego.
750,000 acres.
I came up with this idea and I gave it to
Kris's organization.
We're calling it End of the World Park.
I mean, you know, here, Doug was ragging on me that
I should be doing the same thing he was doing.
So now I'm starting to do it.
KRIS: I was always the sweet one to the two of you.
I was easier to accommodate and tougher to turn down.
(laughs).
But, god, what a life.
YVON: Yeah, yeah.
KRIS: What a life.
♪ ♪
(music plays through credits)
♪ What would you do ♪
♪ If it all came back to you ♪
♪ Each crest of each wave ♪
♪ Bright as lightning ♪
♪ What would you say ♪
♪ If you had to leave today? ♪
♪ Leave everything behind ♪
♪ Even though for once, you're shining ♪
♪ Standing on higher ground ♪
♪ When you hear the sounds ♪
♪ You realize its just the wind ♪
♪ And you notice it matters ♪
♪ Who and what you let under your skin ♪
♪ If put to the test ♪
♪ Would you step back from the line of fire? ♪
♪ Hold everything back ♪
♪ All emotions and desires ♪
♪ Convince yourself ♪
♪ To be someone else ♪
♪ Hide from the world ♪
♪ Your lack of confidence ♪
♪ What you choose to believe in ♪
♪ Takes you as you fall ♪
♪ No one else around you ♪
♪ No one to understand you ♪
♪ No one to hear your calls ♪
♪ Look through all your dark corners ♪
♪ You're backed up against the wall ♪
♪ Step back from the line of fire ♪
♪ ♪
Captioned by Cotter Media Group.