Imagine buying wild land not to build on it, but simply to leave it alone. That is what Douglas Tompkins did. He co-founded the clothing brands The North Face and Esprit, then sold his stake and started buying land in southern Chile. According to Tompkins Conservation, the organization Tompkins founded, this land-buying effort began in 1992 and eventually grew into Pumalín National Park, a 994,331-acre reserve that is larger than Yosemite National Park. It is one of the largest land gifts a private citizen has ever given to a country.
A quiet start in the Chilean rainforest
Tompkins did not announce a grand plan at first. Tompkins Conservation notes that he began by buying farms and forest tracts to protect the region's pristine temperate rainforest, one of the wettest and least disturbed forest types left on Earth. Over time, those purchases connected into a single stretch of wilderness running from the Andes Mountains to the fjords of Chile's Pacific coast. The park also helps protect the endangered alerce tree, one of the oldest living tree species on the planet, along with the volcanoes, glaciers, and lakes scattered across the reserve.
