Douglas Tompkins, co-founder of North Face and Espirit, has died after a kayaking accident in Chile. After being rescued from the water by his party, Tompkins was found to have a body temperature of only 66º Fahrenheit, and was flown to a Chilean hospital with severe hypothermia, of which he would soon die.
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Tompkins and five other people were kayaking Tuesday in cold water and bad weather when they were hit by a large wave and capsized, sfgate.com reported, citing Chilean Army officials.
No one else was injured.
“We are all deeply saddened at the news of Doug’s passing”.
While Tompkins was brutally critical of his home country in many respects, he was a staunch defender of its conservation ethic.
His daughter, Summer Tompkins Walker, recalled him as an adventurer on a life-long love affair with nature.
In one of his final interviews, with Chile’s “Paula” magazine, he said he would like to be remembered for the land he had preserved: “I prefer it to a statue”.
Tompkins spent his entire life fighting to conserve the environment, and after his initial success in the business world with The North Face and Esprit, shunned the business world in pursuit of nature and conservation.
He owned hundreds of thousands of hectares (acres) in Patagonia.
Tompkins also co-founded clothing company Esprit, which started with he and his then-wife selling clothes out of the back of their auto before becoming an internationally recognized brand, according to his conservation website.
Via Wikimedia CommonsNorth Face founder Douglas Tompkins. “… we need to pay our dues to live on this Earth; we need to pay the rent and I’m doing that with the work we are carrying out here in Patagonia”. Together with land contributed by other government and private sources, the Tompkins’ holdings have been used to create vast park systems such as Pumalín Park, which stretches from the Pacific to the Andes. He moved to South America in the 1980s and poured his fortunes into buying land in Argentina and Chile, according to the BBC.
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“Our honest condolences to the family of Douglas Tompkins”, the environmental group Chile Sustainable said in a statement. Tompkins was willing to take a tough stand on issues he cared about-and on behalf of the people he trusted. Doug Tompkins strongly supported the Patagonia sin Represas campaign, a network of activists that grew into a national movement. “You’ve got to be very naïve and out to lunch to think that certain sectors of society are not going to put up resistance”, he told the New York Times in 2005.
