With beavers returning to British rivers and bison roaming the American prairie again, rewilding—the reintroduction of locally extinct or critically endangered species to their natural ecosystems—has grown from a fringe idea to a globally recognized conservation movement. But when Kris Tompkins and her late husband Doug started thinking about the idea back in the early 1990s, it wasn’t even really a word yet.
“The question didn’t even arise,” Tompkins says. Kris, a former CEO of the outdoor brand Patagonia, and Doug, the cofounder of The North Face, had at that time recently moved to Chile and bought a large expanse of land, which they had set about trying to restore to health. “We were really focused on land conservation, in this case primeval temperate rainforest,” Tompkins says. “We didn’t know of any species that was missing.”
But Tompkins says, they soon realized something was amiss. “We were really confronted with the fact that all of the keystone species were missing,” Tompkins says. “So as our work expanded, it was very clear that there was no escaping the fact that we didn’t want to be in the scenery business, we wanted to be in the fully functioning ecosystem business. And if that was true, then we had to commit ourselves to what has become easily half of everything we do: Rewilding species which had gone missing.”
Throughout the 90s and 2000s, the Tompkins purchased several swathes of land across Argentina and Chile, often from absent landowners, for the purpose of conservation—with the intent of eventually transferring the land back to the countries as national parks. To date, Tompkins Conservation and its offshoots Rewilding Chile and Rewilding Argentina, have helped to create 15 new national parks across Patagonia, totalling more than 14 million hectares. Cumulatively, their work represents the largest known donation of private land in history.
Doug Tompkins died in 2015. But Kris remains one of the world’s most generous and active conservationists, continuing the expansion of national parks and rewilding efforts throughout Patagonia. Her work, and the work of Rewilding Chile and Rewilding Argentina, is among the many projects supported by the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, which supports pioneers in exploration and conservation striving to protect the planet for future generations.
Rolex has supported pioneering individuals since the 1930s, when its founder, Hans Wilsdorf, tested its watches by sending them to the most extreme places on Earth. Ever since, Rolex has sustained the work of explorers and conservationists working to protect our fragile ecosystems. “Rolex has the most extraordinary reputation for quality, for longevity, and good company ethos,” Tompkins says. “Having come from business, I understand how important it is—and unusual, actually—that businesses stand up and very publicly support the restoration of damaged species or lands, and help in protecting the jewels of a place that are still pristine. That kind of partnership between conservation and business is very important, I believe.”
Today, Tompkins’ rewilding efforts are the subject of books and documentaries; among the species that Rewilding Chile and Rewilding Argentina have successfully reintroduced to the region’s national parks are the huemul deer—Chile’s national animal—giant anteaters, ocelots, and river otters.
But, as Tompkins puts it, pioneering the rewilding movement is not as easy as it might sound. “There wasn’t a roadmap for it,” Tompkins says. “So, I have often felt that we cut our teeth on our own work, and some of it was really trial by fire.”
In 2021, for example, Rewilding Argentina released jaguars into the country’s Iberá wetlands, where the cats had been extinct for 70 years. But reintroducing top predators like jaguars, for example, isn’t as simple as releasing captive populations into the wild. In order to thrive properly, the cats need to have been reared with no relationship to humans. “Nobody had ever imagined creating a Breeding Centre for Jaguars with the eventual goal of releasing them,” Tompkins says. To do so required years of painstaking work, sourcing male and female jaguars from zoos and private collections, and mating them. The offspring of those couples were then reared in specially designed enclosures, never coming into contact with a human being.
After years of preparation, it paid off. In 2022, the team recorded its first jaguar cubs being born in the wild. “It took us 10 years from the time we started putting up the first areas for jaguars to when they were finally released,” Tompkins says. “It was very complex, very expensive, but very successful.”
It’s not just jaguars that have required herculean efforts. To reintroduce the red-shouldered macaw, an endangered species extinct in the region for 130 years, the teams encountered an even more difficult problem: The birds no longer knew how to fly. “There were no wild members of that species left. So, they were all coming out of long-term cages. That’s the most heart-breaking one of them all, because imagine these birds that have no muscular structure for flight, nothing. There’s never been the circumstance where they could fly—and so you’re teaching them how to fly.” In order to model the bird’s natural behaviors, the Rewilding teams turned to an unconventional solution: Puppets. “You’re teaching them with live puppeteering, what happens when a fox comes along? Do not stay on the ground, stay up in the trees. How fast do you have to move? What do your enemies look like? So little by little, they begin to understand, ‘Oh, there are things that could be scary.’”
Rewilding is about more than the animal species, however. Doing it successfully is also about gaining the trust and support of the local communities. “In conservation, whether it’s rewilding or marine or terrestrial conservation, the communities have to be involved from the very beginning,” Tompkins says. “When you’re bringing back top predators, for example, there is a fear for livestock, human safety, pet safety, and so on. Those conversations can be very contentious.”
Over the years, Tompkins and her organizations have worked intimately with local communities, helping to involve local staff and volunteers, and where possible supporting the local economies, for example through tourism. In doing so, they’ve also galvanized the local people around conservation. With the red-shouldered macaw, for example, Rewilding Argentina enlisted the help of local volunteers. “The team had the idea to get it out on the radio and local newspapers, on Facebook, wherever people were to be found. ‘If you see a red shoulder, to call this number’, so the community became part of the project. So as the birds have been released, and they’re getting around, they come into someone’s backyard, you see these phone messages coming in. And it’s exciting because now everybody is a warden.”
Even after all these years, Tompkins’ is not losing momentum. Her energy and passion for conservation is remarkable. “The parks, the reintroduction of species, infrastructure, books, everything. I’m really proud of it. What I want our legacy to be is not looking backwards,” Tompkins says. In March 2023, she met with Chile’s president about setting up another national park in the country, in Cape Froward. In Argentina, Tompkins is working on the creation of the Patagonia Azul national park, a 20,000-hectare stretch of coastline on the Argentine sea that is home not only to penguins and other mammals, but seaweed, a significant carbon sink. With the support of the Rolex Perpeptual Planet Initiative, her team are chronicling their work and sharing progress with the wider world, to better inform rewilding efforts elsewhere.
And the challenge is only growing: In 2023, for example, fires in the Ibera wetlands devastated the national park, threatening the rewilding program. So, she is continuing not only to campaign for conservation in Patagonia, but also to set an example for others about the impact that private individuals and support from organizations such as Rolex can have on conservation efforts.
To find out more about Rolex and its Perpetual Planet Initiative, visit rolex.org, and explore our Planet Pioneers partnership page here.
