permaculture

[Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>]

R.I.P. Douglas Tompkins, What accomplishments!

Profile: Douglas Tompkins, billionaire-turned-conservationist - BBC News
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-35048806

"Douglas Tompkins made a fortune selling high-end jackets and adventure
gear as the founder of North Face, but he spent his final years railing
against the very corporate world that made him a billionaire.
"There's no doubt whatsoever that there's no future in capitalism," he said
in a 2012 interview
<http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/eij/article/doug_tompkins/>.
"It's probably no more than 500 years old, and it's demonstrating over and
over again that it is destroying the world." He moved to the wilds of Chile
and Argentina, espousing an anti-consumerist philosophy, buying huge swaths
of land and making enemies along the way."

"But in the late 1980s, he left the business world for South America in
order to pursue environmentalism, co-founding the Foundation for Deep
Ecology in 1990. He often said that he felt lucky to have escaped the
shackles of the corporate class and, in his own words, do something with
"meaning". That, it seems, he unquestionably did, spending millions of
dollars buying up swathes of pristine land in Argentina and Chile - areas
in which he claimed to feel like a "de facto citizen" - and turning them
into conservation areas."

"He and wife Kristine McDivitt Tompkins, it said, had purchased some 2.2
million acres of land, including Pumalin Park in Chile, one of the world's
largest private nature reserves, made up of forests, lakes and fjords
stretching from the Andes mountains to the Pacific."

""It is really your behaviour that determines whether you're a patriot," he
once said. "If you're trashing your own country, ruining the soils,
contaminating the waters and the air, cutting down trees, overfishing the
lakes, rivers and oceans, you're not much of a patriot.""