A Wild Idea

by Jonathan Franklin

  Arriving at the trailhead, Tompkins and his fellow expeditioners hiked into the forest with two Chilean guides and enough food for their four-day excursion. Rowell felt ecstatic. The oldest Alerce trees had sprouted at least 3,000 years earlier, and he knew National Geographic readers would love the story of the Alerce. On their second night as they ate around a rustic campfire meal near their shelter, an argument broke out. The guides wanted more money, and they put the squeeze on Klein. Tompkins and Cushman told them to forget it. A deal is a deal. When they awoke in the morning, the guides were gone. And they had taken much of the food.

  For breakfast, Cushman distributed power bars, and Klein led a hike to a spectacular stand of Alerce, each tree shooting straight as a ship’s mast, some 200 feet high. Rowell set up his photography equipment and Tompkins pulled out a little umbrella and began admonishing those around him not to tread on the tiny forest of sprouting ferns. “It was the most splendid ancient garden we’d ever seen,” said Klein, who planned to finish the photo shoot and then camp high up in the valley on a ridge. He was told that on the ridge there were a fresh spring and a trail leading down in a steep, twenty-minute hike back to the gravel road. After the photos and the strenuous hike to the ridge, they were stunned. There was no water. No trail. “Yeah, it was twenty minutes to the lake,” Klein cracked, “a twenty-minute freefall over the ledge.”

  Stuck on an exposed ridge with no water, Tompkins exploded. He couldn’t believe that Klein had led them into such a morass. “Instead of having a friendly outing there was fear, blame, hunger, dehydration, and we were bone-racked tired and afraid of rolling off the cliff,” said Klein. “Doug said he would never speak to me again. His face had frozen into a grimace.”

  The group had no choice but to descend toward the lake along a steep, sodden ridge crawling with bloodsucking leeches. For an entire day they slipped and lowered themselves step by step. “It was really, really dense,” said Cushman. “We had to ease through the bramble, and climb down the logs or go under them. There was so much stuff fallen over. It was rugged, slow going, and everybody was exhausted by the time we got down to the lake.”

  Driving home they saw truck after truck piled high with logs or chips. The landscape that had trapped them with fallen trunks and canopy forests was being wiped out. In the larger clear-cuts it looked as if a bomb had exploded. Nothing over two feet high had survived the destruction. Doug was incensed. Breaking his silent treatment against Rick, he shook his hand, looked him in the eye, and asked, “How much did you say this land costs?” He kept pinching himself. “You mean, I can get this for $25 an acre?” He could see how fast the forest was disappearing.

  Hoping to rope Tompkins into another one of his pet projects in Chile, Rick guided Doug to fly over Cahuelmo Hot Spring, a backcountry jewel he coveted. After several passes overhead, he directed Doug to land in the pasture of a small farm in a valley just off the ocean. To clear the runway, Tompkins buzzed the pasture to scare away cows and sheep grazing on the landing strip. On his final approach, a group of Chilean cowboys appeared on horseback and chased off the stragglers. As he landed the plane, the five huasos galloped alongside the airplane, decked out in ponchos and stiff-brimmed woven hats. Doug decided to buy the massive farm on the spot. “It was kind of a capricious purchase,” he later admitted. “I bought it on a whim, thinking at worst it’s sea-level native forest that is worthy of some private conservation.” It was a bargain basement buy. For the price of a two-bedroom condo in San Francisco, he now owned an entire ecosystem.

  Scoping out the dimensions of this environmental wonderland for sale, Doug gazed into the distance and queried one of the huasos who knew the area: “Does the land also include that snowcapped volcano?”

  “Sí, Señor Tompkins,” the caretaker answered. “It includes the volcano.”

  Tompkins returned to San Francisco feeling less tethered than ever to the corporation he had painstakingly built. He began to restructure Esprit’s messaging. Susie had created an “Eco Desk” inside Esprit headquarters, and Doug revolutionized the catalog with environmental inserts that included recycling tips plus a marketing campaign urging people to stop buying unnecessary apparel. He and Toscani produced a disturbing image of a chimpanzee wearing an Esprit T-shirt in a grotesque “unmaking” of the Esprit image. Tompkins also directed his staff to adorn Esprit clothing with the message: “Don’t buy our clothes, unless you need them.” The subversive messaging, Tompkins knew, was likely to create a marketing sensation exactly because it was counterculture. Stunned company bankers and executives confronted Tompkins; one asked in exasperation, “You’re saying they shouldn’t consume our stuff?!”

  Tompkins loved the hullabaloo. Esprit advertising expenditures topped $25 million a year, and as image director, he had authority to shift the campaigns. “My message was really to ask consumers to buy less, which of course is heresy to the concept of free enterprise,” he noted. “The response was incredible. Even the advertising industry picked up on it immediately—comments and articles started to appear.”

  Doug’s marital battles with Susie continued to cause friction at the company’s highest levels and dragged Esprit deeper into a rut. Finally, the founding couple was demoted and removed from direct managerial roles. “We joke around here that we moved from Doug’s MBA program—management by absence, which is fine for an entrepreneurial company—to a program of management by walking around and working,” gloated the new CEO, Federico Corrado. Tompkins saw daylight—a chance to escape the confines of corporate America. In secret, he plotted to dump his fifty percent ownership in Esprit and dedicate his energy to fighting for forests.

  Susie Tompkins was also eager to divorce her business interests from her ever-more-estranged partner. She described Doug as “a malignant narcissist” propped up by a long line of sycophants. “The way you get people to follow you is by being arrogant, rude, and inappreciative—and not gracious,” she said. “That person wants your approval, and so they keep doing things for you. Narcissists are brand-builders because the brand is themselves.”

  Financial institutions, including banks, also felt wary of Doug Tompkins. “The bankers regarded Doug as sort of a loose cannon, and he certainly was characterized that way by Susie’s representative, Isaac Stein,” said Peter Buckley. “They were telling the bankers that Doug was just the world’s worst executive manager. And Doug said, ‘Yeah, that’s true, but I’m not going to be the CEO. I’m the artistic director. Peter is going to be the CEO.’”

  To launch a new phase of his life at age forty-nine, Tompkins needed cash, free time, and an exit from the corporate world. He made it appear that he was still enamored of the Esprit business in hopes of sparking a bidding war for his 50 percent share. In June 1991, Tompkins first gave signs he was going to lead a flamboyant relaunch of the Esprit brand and then suddenly sold his share to his former wife, Susie, and a team of Goldman Sachs bankers. “They were just head fakes. He couldn’t just sit there and say I’m going to relaunch the company. He had to make it appear like he was sincere,” said Buckley, who was on the Esprit board at the time. “But at no point, no way, no time, did Doug ever intend to buy that company.” Doug liquidated his 50 percent share of Esprit’s US operations for roughly $150 million. Running the nearly billion-dollar-a year Esprit empire with operations worldwide was no longer his problem.

  Even after cashing out of Esprit USA, Tompkins conferred weekly with accountants, lawyers, and tax law specialists. He needed to organize the sale of his minority ownership position in Esprit Europe and also the Esprit Far East divisions. With the Esprit brand powerfully placed in Germany, Italy, and Hong Kong, these shares could allow him to deposit an additional $50 to $150 million, making his total take from Esprit approximately $300 million.

  Two decades earlier, Tompkins had sold The North Face, said adios to his family, and driven south with friends on a wild adventure through South America. By the early 1990s, he was as radical and revolutionary as ever. He had no comm
itments, no shortage of ideas, and a bank account stuffed with hundreds of millions of dollars. As Doug cashed out of Esprit, he was signing myriad piles of documents with his lawyers and with Susie’s bankers. “They were in their suits and he was in his usual khakis,” recalls his then-girlfriend, Catherine Ingram. “One of the bankers asked, ‘So, Doug, what are you going to do with all this money?’ And Doug said, ‘Try to undo everything you guys are doing.’”

  Chapter 7

  Earth First!

  He was very driven. He was just one of those people. There are only a handful on Earth at any given time, I’d say. He had a fire burning inside of him to do what he thought he had to do. That didn’t translate as a kind of “Look at me.” He’d be happy to be anonymous in a lot of cases.

  —CATHERINE INGRAM, author, In the Footsteps of Gandhi

  Within months of selling his shares in Esprit, Tompkins transferred tens of millions of dollars into the Foundation for Deep Ecology. After The North Face and Esprit this was his most audacious idea, a California nonprofit designed as a vehicle to invest his fortune in environmental causes. Under California law, the maximum initial tax-exempt endowment was $50 million. Tompkins maxed out. After twenty years building Esprit into a global brand, he switched sides. Could he now reverse all the environmental damage he caused while amassing this very fortune? Did he have enough money to make the world a little bit better?

  The Foundation for Deep Ecology was a godsend for a select group of environmental activists coming of age in the early 1990s. Seed capital grants ranged from $3,000 to $300,000, as the nonprofit spent millions of dollars every year to fund activist conferences, wildland preservation campaigns, and attempts to slow down what Doug saw as the rampant destruction caused by unchecked global corporations. “Above all we believe that nature comes first, that we are bound ethically to share the planet with other creatures,” Tompkins wrote as he sketched his plans for his nonprofit’s funding priorities. “We will strive to embody ecocentric, not anthropocentric, values.”

  Tompkins asked Ernst Beyeler, the Swiss art dealer, to auction the art. Beyeler was stunned when he inventoried his friend’s private collection. Not only was Doug’s art radar finely tuned—he bought masterpieces by Bacon and Botero decades before they hit mainstream—but he honed an even finer eye for individual pieces. Beyeler raised $18 million selling the art collection, and in a gesture of support for Doug’s conservation campaign waived all fees. One hundred percent of the proceeds went into Doug’s deep ecology dream fund.

  The grants were divided among dozens of cutting-edge groups that Doug and his team found worthy. Or at least Doug. Convinced that loss of biodiversity was “the mother of all crisis,” he assumed that environmental restoration was a centuries-long play, a game where final scores would be tallied in the year 2100 or perhaps even 3000. He was equally certain that without a vigorous defense of Mother Earth, there wouldn’t be much left to save by 2020, a date many environmentalists held out as the last year to change before critical loss of species and habitat tipped into an exponential extinction cycle. And from his perch—the crow’s nest office atop San Francisco’s Russian Hill with sweeping views of the Golden Gate Bridge and the waters of the Pacific Ocean—Doug was aghast. The more he read, the more he dreaded the ongoing destruction. Doug loved a quote from Henry David Thoreau, “What’s the use of a house if you don’t have a livable planet to put it upon?”

  Although his mailbox was awash in invitations to ceremonial dinners, awards ceremonies, and art openings, he ignored it all and instead focused on his reading list. Piles of books laced his dining room, kitchen, and bedroom. Even in his plane he often brought a dense treatise on environmental philosophy or stacks of magazine articles with the latest grim news from the extinction front. But rather than let the gloomy predictions dent his enthusiasm, Doug used them to fuel a new passion: he was determined to be the most well-read environmental activist in the room—and he approached the task with the discipline of a man training for a triathlon. With the same passion that infused his love of design, architecture and quilts, Tompkins surrounded himself with the intellectual tools to better comprehend the ecological meltdown that he saw in every country he visited. The guest house on his San Francisco lot became a buzzing hive of activism as Doug assembled a crack environmental team including many young activists.

  While interviewing candidates to run his new foundation, Tompkins had fallen in love with one of the applicants. His relationship with author Catherine Ingram was like none other that he had ever experienced. She was a Buddhist, as well as a dharma teacher with an emotional skill set perpendicular to Doug’s meager application of empathy. She led him on an inner journey. “We were invited to a very small, private lunch with the Dalai Lama in San Francisco at a museum. It was the first time Doug met the Dalai Lama,” said Ingram. “Doug was fascinated by him. He knew he was in the presence of somebody unusual. I brought the whole dharma element into his life, which he loved.”

  With Ingram, Tompkins had epic battles and a deep transformation. “She’s introducing him to a softer side, a more philosophical side, a more spiritual side of the world,” said his friend Edgar Boyles. “And it’s just at this time when he does not have the obligation to business, and he hasn’t quite yet decided the path that he would eventually take. The people that she introduced him to had something to do with the epiphany. I know there was some ayahuasca involved, as well. She was connected to a different area of the world, which was somewhat astonishing to the Doug watchers that we were. Wow, this is different, she’s different.”

  Ingram preferred comfortable hotels; Tompkins a sleeping bag on a random couch. He was impulsive and stubborn. She was the author of In the Footsteps of Gandhi and books on dharma. They thrived in the moment, but he could never settle down. “He couldn’t quite do it; it was a bridge too far,” she recalled. “A couple of times, I led him in guided meditations; did the Big Mind guided meditation now and again. He would say afterwards, ‘Yeah, I should do more of that.’ But somehow life was always galloping along with him.”

  With Ingram motivating the ride, Tompkins launched an impromptu whirlwind world tour, one month chasing Deep Ecology founder Arne Næss across Norway, the next traveling to Mexico with the Anglo-French environmental philosopher Edward “Jimmy” Goldsmith. “Jimmy invited us to his pad in Mexico, this extraordinary place,” said Ingram. “And we brought Jeremy Rifkin, Norman Lear, Richard Branson, Jerry Mander, and others for three days to strategize a plan to start challenging globalization.”

  When he wasn’t with Ingram, Tompkins pined for her. Tompkins shocked his longtime aide Tom Moncho by narrating their road trip across Norway with sentimental love stories and a Van Morrison ballad that reminded him of her and that he played over and over on the eight-track. “We actually fell kind of crazy in love, I have to say,” said Ingram. “It was one of those things. You know, there is a Shakespeare line, ‘Whoever loved that did not love at first sight?’ That was kind of how it was for us.”

  As his environmental grantmaking took shape, Tompkins turned over day-to-day operations of his foundation to his eldest daughter, Quincey. “When I was a teenager, Esprit was the thing,” she said. “I was the first in my family to go to college. Doug said, ‘Just go; just go study language, go study art, go study culture, history, or whatever, and then come run the company.’ Yeah. Sounds good to me. So I worked at Esprit, on the environmental desk. But then a couple years later, he said, ‘Come and run the foundation.’ Well, an environmental foundation? This was new.”

  Convinced that mainstream environmental groups were as complacent as they were complicit, Doug searched out those activists who threw their bodies on the line, the kind of protesters who might chain themselves to a bulldozer—or, like Doug, Yvon, and other guests at a memorable Thanksgiving party on the beach, pull up acres of survey stakes to slow down construction of a new highway.

  Pranks and media hijacking pleased Doug. Always a fan of circus acts, he appreciat
ed the humor when activists unrolled a “crack” three hundred feet down the face of the hydroelectric dam in Glen Canyon, Arizona. Of all the dams built in the western United States, few provoked such outrage as the $800 million cement structure that drowned Glen Canyon and created artificial Lake Powell, 186 miles long. From a distance the unrolled plastic looked like a crack, as if the structure was buckling. The “crack” was actually a strip of dark plastic weighted to roll hundreds of feet down, like a burgeoning break.

  These kind of pranks and public relations stunts were immortalized in Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, in which a band of merry pranksters wage war on industrial machinery under their slogan “No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth.” The hero is George Hayduke, a Green Beret Vietnam veteran who rebels and takes the side of nature. The “comic extravaganza” novel became a sensation, with a following that inspired a real-life movement dedicated to catapulting Abbey’s “monkey wrenching” from fiction to fantasy to fact. They called themselves Earth First and their logo always carried the exclamation point, as in “Earth First!” These were the little-known but highly effective corners of the environmental uprising that Doug Tompkins gleefully seeded. “Doug helped this magazine called Ad Busters,” explained close friend Edgar Boyles. “He funded the magazine; it was based out of Canada. It was what they called a ‘culture jamming’ operation, where they’d do fake ads and posters that challenged people’s norms and perceptions about consumption and overconsumption.”

  Captain Paul Watson was another activist who found in Doug Tompkins a passionate ally. Watson participated in the founding of Greenpeace with a half-dozen fellow activists, then broke away. In 1977 Watson assembled Neptune’s Navy, a motley flotilla that would eventually include a catamaran and a pair of run-down icebreakers, useful as battering rams. With his rebel armada, later renamed the Sea Shepherds, Watson launched a campaign of resistance against whaling ships. His declaration to disable “the enemy fleet” inspired followers, donations, and worldwide sympathy that was later enshrined by Whale Wars, the Animal Planet miniseries. “The Sea Shepherd crew is doing what governments should be doing, but refuse to do themselves, because of the threats of trade retaliation from Japan,” said Watson, who for years received donations from Doug Tompkins via the Foundation for Deep Ecology.