Audi 2009 Annual Report Download - page 78

ouglas Tompkins is wearing a beret and dark rubber
boots. At 66 years old, he no longer fits the image of
the fashion market superstar he once was, but then
again the southern Patagonian wilderness is not exactly the
right kind of backdrop for fashion and short-lived trends.
Tompkins has long since swapped his executive office at textile
groups The North Face and Esprit for a civilizing outpost in
South America. From his window he no longer looks out at big
city skyscrapers “but the snow-covered peak of a volcano situ-
ated at the end of our valley.”
In his youth Tompkins, who hails from the United States, was
an excellent mountaineer and a world-class skier. Later he
founded a climbing school in California, the equipment com-
pany The North Face and ultimately, together with his then
wife, the lifestyle brand Esprit. Annual sales soon exceeded the
one billion dollar mark, he was flying around the world open-
ing one store after another. Until the turning point in the late
1980s, when Tompkins was angered by anything that was de-
stroying the world. “I felt I was partly responsible for the so-
cio-ecological crisis,” he says. Which is how his escape into real
life began, as he refers to it. Having sold his stakes in the tex-
tile groups, he has since been trying to save the world – by buy-
ing part of it. He was primarily driven by the idea to purchase
primeval forest in order to make it inaccessible for timber
groups. He initially considered Canada, the United States and
Norway, but then opted for Chile and Argentina. “I want to put
a stop to this horrendous destruction of the countryside.”
Since 1991 he has purchased more than 800,000 hectares of
land in Patagonia and Northeast Argentina through a system
of foundations – primeval forests, steppes, lakes, rivers, vol-
canoes, rugged coastal areas – and combined them to form
several nature reserves. Parque Pumalín alone spans an area
larger than the German federal state of Saarland. One of the
biggest private landowners in the world, Tompkins does not
use the area to grow raw materials or develop real estate
projects. Rather, he prefers to leave nature to itself.
Today he lives in a modest house located on the edge of Par-
que Pumalín. “Luxury to me means being able to live in the
rugged, unspoiled countryside,” he says. “As far as I am con-
cerned there is nothing as poor as city life.” His first life as a
businessman and fashion mogul now strikes him “as being
somewhat surreal and long since past. In fact, that period of
my life has become so remote that I sometimes wonder if that
was really me.”
DOUGLAS TOMPKINS
The fashion mogul’s second life
D