Credit: James Q Martin
In this landmark 150th episode, Sue Stockdale talks to Kris Tompkins, one of the world’s most prolific conservation philanthropists. Kris shares a powerful, personal perspective on what drives her and urges listeners to ditch the myth of individual powerlessness: “The excuse that ‘I’m just one person’ – that’s the weakest, nonsensical excuse there is. One person, it does matter.”
In the conversation, Tompkins reflects on how her business experience helped shape a vision for nature conservation at scale, highlighting themes of risk-taking, leadership, and the power of direct engagement. She reminds us that the gritty, uncomfortable days in nature often leave the strongest impressions: “I like people being miserable in the national parks – those are the days we remember.”
About Kris Tompkins
Kris Tompkins is the president and co-founder of Tompkins Conservation, and former CEO of Patagonia, Inc. For three decades, she has committed to protecting and restoring wild beauty and biodiversity by creating national parks, inspiring activism, and fostering economic vitality as a result of conservation. Kris and her husband, Doug Tompkins have protected over 15 million acres of parklands in Chile and Argentina through Tompkins Conservation and its partners, making them among the most successful national park oriented philanthropists in history.
Kris served as Patron for Protected Areas for the UN Environmental Programme from 2018 to 2022. The recipient of numerous honours, she was the first conservationist to be awarded the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy. Her 2020 TED talk “Lets make the earth wild again” has over two million views.
Find out more about Kris Tompkins and the work of Tompkins Conservation : Rewilding Argentina : Rewilding Chile : Trailer for National Geographic documentary – Wild Life
Time Stamps
01:57 Developing a passion for nature
04:29 Challenges and Triumphs in Conservation
11:25 Building Teams and Collaborative Efforts
27:34 The Role of Technology in Conservation
31:22 Reflecting on Successes and Lessons Learned
34:24 Inspiration and Call to Action
Key Quotes
- I’m actually inspired and motivated probably more by grief and a kind of yearning, than I am by something that’s fabulous and positive.
- You can’t fall in love with something you don’t know.
- I like people being miserable in the national parks as those are the days we remember- the days you were freezing.
- The excuse that “I’m just one person”. That’s the weakest, nonsensical excuse there is. One person, it does matter.
- People have to decide that they want to participate in something more than what they currently have in their daily life. They see what’s going on in the outside world and they want to do something. And that’s a decision. And that’s probably the most difficult step of all.
- There are people working for nature who need what you’re good at. It’s the wilfulness that people get stuck on.
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Other episodes we recommend are:
126. Sofia Heinonen – Rewilding Argentina and beyond
143. Astrid Vargas – Saving Species, Regenerating Landscapes, and Inspiring Action
125. Jeremy Fish and Lucy Constable Fernandez – The enduring impact of Raleigh International
Kris Tompkins Transcription
Sue: Hi. Welcome to this special a hundred and 50th episode of the Access to Inspiration Podcast, and the final one in Series 20. I’m your host, Sue Stockdale. And today I am excited to be joined by someone whose impact on the natural world is nothing short of extraordinary. Kris Tompkins is the former CEO of Patagonia, the clothing company. And for the past 30 years, she’s been at the heart of one of the world’s most ambitious conservation and rewilding efforts. Together with her late husband, Doug Tompkins, who was co-founder of the North Face and Esprit, they created Tompkins Conservation. And collaborating with public and private partners have driven the creation of 15 national parks, protected over 15 million acres of land and 30 million acres of ocean [00:01:00] in Chile and Argentina, even bringing back keystone species like Jaguars and Giant River Otters.
Now compare that to the total landmass of the whole of the UK, which is about 60 million acres, and it can give you a sense of the scale of their work in South America. Recently, Clive Steeper, co-founder of the podcast and myself, we visited the Ibera wetlands in Northern Argentina, one of their rewilding projects, one of the most important freshwater wetlands in South America, second only in size to the Brazilian Pantanal.
Developing a passion for nature
Well, I have to say, it just took my breath away. There are more than 4,000 species of animals and plants there now, including Jaguar, which now roam free again for the first time in 70 years. Well, if you’re a regular listener, you’ll remember I spoke to Sofia Heinonen in episode 126 about Rewilding Argentina, which is an offspring of Tompkins Conservation, and that episode is well worth a listen too. In this conversation today, Kris talks to me about what it [00:02:00] really takes to lead a conservation movement of this scale from embracing risk and building teams to staying inspired in the face of daunting environmental challenges.
I found that she challenges us to think differently about leadership, legacy, and the role that we all have to play in looking after the planet. So if you’ve ever wondered what it means to live a life of impact, this episode is essential listening. As always, you can read along with the transcription over our website@accesstoinspiration.org.
Welcome to the podcast, Kris Tompkins. You are our hundred and 50th guest on the show.
Kris: Well, that’s a big number.
Sue: Well, we’ve been at it for a few years now, so we thought we’d have a fantastic guest for this episode, and it’s a privilege to speak to you.
Kris: Oh, that’s very kind of you.
Sue: What I’d love to discover, Kris, is the visionary element of what has helped to make all of the successes that Tompkins Conservation has had over the years and understand how that has happened. So when in your life [00:03:00] did nature shape what you’re doing now?
Kris: Oh, I think once I started working with Yvon Chouinard, who’s a climber and adventurer producing rock and ice climbing equipment. So you entered into that tribe of climbers and certainly in the early seventies I began to look at nature as something wilful and all her own, and it was really through the eyes of climbers, I would say. And especially Yvon in those days.
Sue: And now when you look at the areas that have been rewilded, where nature has been brought back, species have been brought back. How do you view it now?
Kris: Well, on the positive side, you are extremely happy and grateful that you’ve been able to participate in work like this. But at the same time, on the negative side, you go around and every place you see, you’re measuring it by standards that you weren’t using decades ago and [00:04:00] you’re usually disappointed. So I suppose knowledge and understanding of any system, regardless of what it is, influences how we. Move through our daily lives, it really changes you.
Sue: The more you are aware, the more you realize how little we know.
Kris: exactly.
Sue: And how much work there is to do to change things. Yeah, that’s right. You have changed a system. You’ve changed an ecosystem. Your work and Doug your late husband’s work. It’s hard to comprehend the impact that that has for all of us in other places where we’re not in South America.
Thinking about then how you went about making those changes and how you made it happen. You were CEO in Patagonia, the company. So from your experience of business, how did you bring that business savvy to bear on your work in conservation?
Challenges and Triumphs in Conservation
Kris: Well, I think when we started Patagonia, you’re starting at zero and I seem to be really comfortable with that circumstance.
I [00:05:00] think I like it the most if it’s starting at zero and it’s hard. so I don’t know what kind of personality type that is, but it’s certainly true in my case. And I think you seek out the people whom you think. Are the best at the kind of things that you wanna take on. You split things up.
First of all, you don’t set out doing everything that we’ve been fortunate enough to accomplish from the outset. Most long-term plans are organic, you start out generally because something opportunistic took place and you instinctively sometimes, not knowingly, decide to move, well, let’s buy this first 50,000 acres.
And then it kind of grows from there. So. It’s not as though in terms of conservation. We figured, well, let’s go get 20 million acres of land and rewild it all and give it back to the countries. You don’t start out that way, but you [00:06:00] also don’t put limits on what it is you are doing and always looking for opportunities and calculating the risk of the decisions that you make.
And I think some of that comes from business and some of it is your personality type. I think people in business, the successful ones tend to be very disciplined, relentless. They have a financial background at some level, and so you tend to be more rigorous in terms of how to manage the money that you’ve got and where to deploy it.
What are the things that are the pitfalls? What are the big mistakes you can make? I think all these years in business. Obviously really supported the opportunities that we found in Chile and Argentina to get involved in large scale conservation. There’s no question.
Sue: And I get a sense from what you’re saying, Kris, about that preparedness to take risks in the belief that there’s a [00:07:00] reward, there’s a benefit for doing it and not to think small, but to think big.
Kris: Yeah. I think it’s not that you know what the risks are, you just know a few of them on the front end and then they unfold very quickly as you go forward. It’s just like your trip up into the polar regions, you’re calculating risk. Sometimes it’s on the hour, sometimes it’s by the day. But you’re constantly calculating risks and trying to either stay alive or to accomplish these ideas you have about appreciating and conserving wild nature.
Sue: The sense I get is that even if there is an hour by hour challenge or a day by day challenge, it’s still a preparedness to act to do something.
Kris: Oh yeah. You have to want something pretty badly because generally speaking, if it were easy to go to the Poles or to work in conservation and rewilding, there’d be more people doing it.
So there’s an [00:08:00] inherent block busting set of breaks that you have to decide that you’re willing to overcome those things. Or you’re gonna try anyway. You are not always successful.
Sue: I guess it’s about. The willingness to try and potentially fail than not to have tried at all. Yeah,
Kris: absolutely true.
Sue: We are of that school. So you mentioned motivation there, Kris. What gets you outta bed in the morning these days?
Kris: Oh, a lot of things. I think the more results success you have, well, many things happen, but one, a lot of new things are presented to you, they come your way because you develop a reputation.
If your record of your work is consistent and a lot of things come your way. I’m sure you know this, so I’m motivated by new projects, but I’m also dogged about finishing and sticking with the ones that are either on the way or even some of the ones that have been [00:09:00] donated and they belong to Chile or Argentina.
You still, they’re like gum on your shoe. It’s never really over. So you’re always in a state of looking back over your shoulder and checking on. Everybody, you’ve already passed along to the governments and you’re working on current projects that are taking some form of the kinds of things you’ve been doing for 30 years.
And then in parallel to that, you’re always looking at new opportunities and deciding, yes, no, let’s go for it. Let’s pass. So you’re always working in, in those three dimensions in parallel,
Sue: from what you said so far, is that pioneering opportunity, what’s still yet to be done, yet to be accomplished, perhaps holds more of a degree of energy for you than the other two?
Kris: Yes. I mean, if I’m honest, that’s true. Because when you’re looking at maps and you’re drawing out what’s possible in terms of territory. And then [00:10:00] figuring out who’s missing, what species are not present, and they need to be present, especially top predators. And yeah, the challenge of trying to, again, this love of starting at zero. and creating something from scratch, that’s something I really, really seem to go toward.
Sue: And of course, changing an ecosystem requires a lot of collaboration. How have you gone about that?
Building Teams and Collaborative Efforts
Kris: Some of it may come back to my years at Patagonia. If you can’t build great teams, then you’re not gonna go anywhere because you can’t really go anywhere unless you’re in the shelter in some ways. And, and the power of a team. That’s what I think. I never look at my personal life nor my working life as me. I just don’t see it that way. I’m the product of a lot of people and a lot of things, a lot of luck. I never think of it as me. So that’s one place to start. And [00:11:00] most of the teams, all the team leaders in Chile and Argentina, in Chile, we’ve worked together for 30 years and in Argentina for 25 years.
So I am 50% of the first generation of this work, and we have a full blown second generation whom we’ve worked with for years and years, and now a third generation of people, team members. So to me, that’s the main core of any success and or failure. Whatever happens, happens. But I wouldn’t go anywhere without them, and I wouldn’t achieve anything without them.
And so. How you build those teams. I’m a terrible teacher of things, and Yvon, the owner of Patagonia Company, he’s a good teacher, but my way of learning something was being thrown into the deep end of the pool. That’s just my personality. And so there’s a lot of that that goes on with the teams whom I work with today, because a lot of the stuff we’re doing is [00:12:00] unusual and some of it’s never been done before.
And so. In the absence of some sort of roadmap, how to accomplish these things. Finally, in some categories of work, you just have to have people who say, okay, this is my best shot. This is how I think we need to do it. And then letting or encouraging them to figure it out. And I’m very rarely disappointed by them.
Sue: When there is no map, everything is new. We haven’t got any track record or knowing what it ought to be like. It just is.
Kris: Yeah, and I think Patagonia Company and the work that we do in South America, it’s not that you’re running out and finding all of these incredible people. By yourself. In many cases, they come to you because they want to be rewilders, they wanna be doing this kind of thing and at this scale and at this pace.
And so they come to you. And this certainly happened and still does, people like the [00:13:00] ethos of the business. And we still get people who, they just wanna be part of that part of something that’s doing. Things a little differently. So this makes our work much easier is we have tremendous people joining these teams because they want in.
What’s better than that? And anyway, I’m terrible at interviewing people and trying to decide. They don’t even let me interview people anymore ’cause I’m so bad at it. So think the work itself is really the hiring mechanism often, and clarity. You know, we’re very. open. We really believe that failures and mistakes are where you actually learn more about what you’re doing than your successes.
So we’re very open. If one of us makes a mistake, we’ll be the ones to say, look, I tried this. It’s complete failure. I don’t know if the idea is bad, or my execution on it was bad, but something really went sideways [00:14:00] and that really breeds a different kind of team. You don’t applaud mistakes and failures, but you know that that’s where the, the school of hard knocks is truly a school. Put it that way,
Sue: and given our podcast is called Access to Inspiration, I’m wondering what role inspiration plays.
Kris: I think inspiration can be born out of grief. It can be born out in grief in this sense. The loss of biodiversity territory. It’s happened to largely non-urban people around the world over the last 50 years.
So I’m actually inspired and motivated probably more by. Grief and a kind of yearning than I am by something that’s fabulous and positive. And I think our inspiration comes from, well, there’s something about field work. There’s [00:15:00] something about being in the field. There’s something about how people who aren’t in the field react to it.
It’s like creating your own weather in a way. The inspiration comes from one another. And then if you have a big win, then you think, good God, this is possible. ’cause most of the time you dunno if you’re gonna make it or not, but we have so far, everything we set out to do in the big picture, we get done.
But that in itself becomes a driver, a motivator. So if we think one park up in northern Argentina, just under 2 million acres. Oh my God, I can’t believe we were able to pull this off. And again, it’s, when I say we, I’m saying the big we, it’s the provincial government, it’s the national government. It’s the local community.
So the we is quite large and that’s a huge motivator. So if you think that’s possible, then let’s turn up the heat. And now we’re looking at things on a continental [00:16:00] scale rather than within one country alone or one even National Park by itself.
Sue: And what inspires you to keep going? Are there ever any days when you don’t wanna get outta bed or think this is all too difficult?
Kris: Never.
Sue: You wanna jump outta bed every day? Every day.
Kris: And I’m not bragging about it, it’s just an honest answer. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if I look at certain politics and so on, especially at the moment, yeah, I’d love to bury myself in the backyard sometimes, but no.
Sue: That’s such a powerful message for any leader to think about how they are a role model for those around them.
Because I imagine that energy that you generate, that belief in what’s possible, will filter out into those that you are engaged and working with.
Kris: Oh, I think so. And I think it’s a feedback loop. I get it from all of them. I think that’s true in almost everything. Whether you’re on an expedition someplace, this is kind of an expedition. drawn out. And, [00:17:00] but they require things of each individual that isn’t required of you every day. And it requires your, usually living in isolated places. Each project is its own nucleus of, a little environment all its own, whether it’s in the subtropical areas, down in Patagonia, grasslands in the forest, you name it.
The teams that were made up of people who wanna be right there, and some of ’em are working with wildlife, some of them are taking down 500 miles of fence line and a particular project. We’ve built six different schools for kids of our team members and. They become little villages, as it were. And all that stuff is, there are huge reasons to get out of bed.
Sue: And if you’re enjoying this episode, we’d have many more episodes ranging from business and sports to the arts and [00:18:00] social change, all organized into categories on our website. Just hop on over to access to inspiration.org to discover them all. One of the things that you’ve mentioned, Kris, I is about the importance of being on the ground.
Kris: Yes.
Sue: How do you think we can encourage more people to be present on the ground? Because we live these days so much in technology and in often like a virtual space. You and I are speaking in a virtual space. There’s a real power in being on the ground and experiencing nature and connectedness to nature. What do you think can encourage more people back to seeing the value of that and experiencing it?
Kris: Oh, Sue, it’s a very good question, and I’m not sure I have the answer for it. In fact, I’m sure I don’t have the answer for it, but I’m inspired by, I have a friend who was in New York City for 20 years because her husband’s work was there.
And she’s an avid [00:19:00] birder, a serious Cornell University type birder. And so when she first got started, she decided she would take kids out of the Harlem School district. Into Central Park three days a week and she did it for those 20 years, maybe longer. And you see these kids who lived quite close by to the park really, and they would never have known it was there, much less have known who’s there.
And it changed the lives of a lot of these kids. But I do think that for really urban people. I really don’t know the answer to this because it’s actually going the other way. That if you can go to Antarctica virtually, then on one hand you say, well, at least people get to see what’s there. And that’s absolutely true.
But on the other hand, that’s happening with other ecosystems and places to get to know and visit. And I don’t know how to counter [00:20:00] that. I’m not sure. I know that there’s some schools now who are really. Taking kids at a very young age and really raising them as foresters. I mean, the UK started the forest school, that whole system, which is now in Chile, by the way.
So I don’t know, I don’t know how you go up against telephones and television and all the, the visual input that technology has on kids and adults on all of us. And say, no, no, no. Put all that down and go outside and meet your neighbours, and not just the neighbours. The Jones on one side and the Smiths on the other, but who’s in your neighbourhood?
What? Where are you? It’s very hard to inspire that I think at the moment. Mm. What do you think?
Sue: Well, I’ve got a experience or a story to share with you that is Chile related because back in 1996, I was Deputy Expedition leader for a [00:21:00] charity Raleigh International, which was down in Coyhaique you know, the Aysen region?
Yeah. Coyhaique and that organisation, it’s no longer a charity, but it’s a organisation for a purpose. They have instituted a ban on mobile phones. So young people today going on their expeditions are experiencing this and they’re loving it. That’s what we had when we were in Chile. There weren’t even mobile phones then in the nineties.
And so I guess I reflect on how do we make that hip and cool to have that experience and trending to see the value of human conversation and connect to our emotions in a different way. And that’s the wonder. Of being on the ground, I think, and being able to fully experience something through all our senses.
Kris: Yeah, I agree with you. That’s the reason why anything we’ve been able to acquire, we donate them back to the state. So they’re reason for being, besides restoring the landscape and whatever else may be going on, is to make sure that [00:22:00] they are. Places where all are welcome because we believe in what you’re saying that kids and adults need to get outside.
You can’t fall in love with something you don’t know. And I like people being miserable in the national parks, and those are the days we remember. The days you were freezing are the days you thought you’d never arrived to wherever you were headed. Those kinds of things are the. The real experiences that form us if we’re lucky.
Sue: and are the things we look back on with our photograph album or our memories and recall those days where we probably would describe it as feeling alive.
Kris: Yeah, that’s right. I would agree with that. So, I don’t know. I think it’s a tough question right now, and I think you can’t look at kids in the absence of their parents and in the absence of where they go to school and in the absence of sports and everything else, and the [00:23:00] understanding of the importance in nature in our schooling.
And our education is long gone. Even when we were growing up, I mean, our parents didn’t think about it. Yeah, it’s a tough question. It’s easier to describe when you’re talking about just restoring natural ecosystems and trying to develop fully functional ecosystems. Because that we can do, we know we can do that and we do it every day, but the social questions I kind of despair over.
Sue: So just to take the question of technology, which we’ve been touching on in our last point there, Kris, and thinking about how it does help in the conservation work, in the rewilding. What examples might you have to share with us about how it’s being used?
The Role of Technology in Conservation
Kris: Well, in terms of the territory, of course, all the satellite mapping that’s been done and now it’s becoming ever more accurate.[00:24:00] And you could see individual trees today. So before we donate any land back to the countries, we zone the gift that is to say what areas are to remain untrammeled by anybody. Usually because they’re species recuperating or something like that. What are the areas which can hold heavier visitor impact and all those things.
So from a technological side, we can do that with very skilled hands because one, we know the territory well by feet, but we have mapping that’s extraordinary that even 20 years ago, you wouldn’t have had it. So there are a lot of reasons and ways that we use technology. Certainly all the radio collars used to be VHF collars on wildlife and eventually they’d fall off or something happens.
It was quite unreliable, [00:25:00] and especially when you’re working with top predators like Jaguars and and the others, you need to know where those individuals are if you’re releasing them back into the system for the first time in 70 years. So that’s all the satellite collars, all that stuff. It’s made a huge difference in not only making it possible that some species comes back when there’s a sense of high potential conflict.
But also the success of their reintroduction weighs heavily with the satellite and the technology that we use in that sense. And then of course, in our airplanes, all that stuff, it’s all technology and things are changing month to month on what’s capable, what’s available. The cost of technology, of course, tends to come down very quickly once it gets started. All those things. In any field, so it has a keen [00:26:00] role.
Sue: You talked about getting feedback from your team to know that their feedback to you is inspiring you and your way of being with them is inspiring them. I guess the feedback that you get from the technology, being able to track the progress of the reintroduction of the Jaguar and so on. Gives evidence measures that then help to demonstrate impact.
Kris: Exactly.
Sue: So that technology really is helping with the impact side of things.
Kris: Yeah, and the good news is it also shows you that there’s a problem in the field someplace that heretofore we wouldn’t have been able to react to until it was long since over. So yeah, I don’t think you can separate out the term technology from conservation today. And also if you’re trying to work at speed. Makes a big difference.
Sue: So as you look back now and reflect on the successes that have been achieved, is there anything that you think, I wish we’d done that earlier, or I wish we’d done it differently? What are the things I suppose that stick in your [00:27:00] mind as areas that could have been changed or different?
Kris: It’s a really good question, and it’s always a hard question to answer. When we first got started. All the trouble broke loose in Chile, all the political trouble and social trouble over us. I’m still amazed at how naive Doug and I were that we would go to another country, start buying up a lot, large tracks of land and, and think everyone would be happy with it.
Do I regret that naivete? Yes, I do because how I look at how everything exploded for nearly five years, which was quite serious. Could it have been avoided? Probably not. But had we understood that taking a new idea, especially working at such a large scale so fast, that there would be a serious pushback.
I wish we had not been so naive about that. No, I don’t have [00:28:00] many regrets. I wish we could do more, and I wish we could go faster, but to people looking in from the outside, that might surprise people. But the rate at which landscapes and seascapes and species are disappearing require that we figure out how to move faster and do more in the same number of months a year.
I don’t have many regrets. No, I think we’ve been really fortunate. Have we made a lot of mistakes? Of course we have. But again, I think that we learn more from our mistakes than we do from our successes. So as hard as I am on myself and everybody else, I know that. Each of those mistakes is like going back to school
Sue: and you’re a lifelong learner
Kris: going back to school with a switch.
Sue: So you talk about wanting to move faster and make more [00:29:00] impact.
Kris: Yes.
Sue: What could our listener that isn’t based in South America has a passion for Rewilding, wants to do their bit for conservation, what could they learn or take from your experience? and apply in their own part of the world.
Kris: Do you know what I think?
Reflecting on Successes and Lessons Learned
I think the number one thing is people have to decide that they want to participate in something more than what they currently have in their daily life. That they see what’s going on, in the outside world and they wanna do something. And that’s a decision and that’s probably the most difficult step of all.
Inspiration and Call to Action
Just deciding that every day, whatever it is, you’re gonna do something that changes your local village, whatever it is, whatever scale. And most people are kind of stuck on how to do that. So one of the things for people to think about is ask yourself, what are you really good at? What can you do? Whether you’re 12 years old, maybe it’s just [00:30:00] energy, maybe it’s a love of squirrels.
I don’t know. Doesn’t have to be much. If you’re an adult, what are you really good at? Are you an accountant? Are you a caregiver? Because in every community, regardless of where it is, the size it is, there are people working for nature who need what you’re good at. I promise them. It’s the willfulness the people get stuck on.
It’s the willing to abdicate your future, and I hope that your listeners just think about that, and especially in the UK, remember King Edward, nobody’s ever gonna forget that was one abdication. Now we have billions of us who are abdicating our futures. That’s an action, that’s an active term, and people don’t wanna feel like that.
They don’t wanna feel like they’re just rolling over. And whatever happens to ’em happens, especially when it [00:31:00] comes to nature and the things that they inherently instinctively understand about where we come from, what we depend on. Even if you, through modernity, have been separated from those ancient feelings, we know.
Nobody wants to abdicate their future, much less the future of their children and grandchildren and your dogs and your horses, or whoever it is. But there’s a price to pay in our daily lives to get out of this conundrum that we’re in, that we’re not acting. And it can be the smallest chore, but it will become the biggest thing in your life.
That small chore, it starts as a small chore. But I think people need to think about why are we letting our future go? And the excuse that, [00:32:00] well, I’m just one person. Well, we’re all just one person. But that’s the weakest, nonsensical excuse there is. I’m one person. It does matter. And what matters now for all the people out there who aren’t doing anything for the things that they love, then, you know, we kind of deserve what we get.
So I’d much rather be working on a losing team toward, beauty and toward wholeness and human dignity and all the things we care about than sitting there waiting for whatever outcome. We find, and that’s not an interesting life in my opinion. And the people you meet once you get into conservation or community work of almost any sort, God, you meet people you would [00:33:00] never run into otherwise.
And what do you have in common? You have this sense that, no, I’m not going to abdicate the future. What have I been thinking? And that’s a huge bond among people. And it’s not a sacrifice. A lot of times people think, oh, it’s such a sacrifice. Are you kidding me? It’s fun for one, and the other side is lethal, and you’re on the right train. I don’t wanna be on the bus toward just a technological society that’s on a dead planet.
Sue: I think what you’re saying, such a powerful message, Kris, around consciously deciding to act and that every person’s actions matter. If you follow your passion, then you can make a difference in some way.
Kris: Yeah. And report back on yourself or tell somebody what you’re doing and [00:34:00] tell ’em that every month I’m gonna tell you what I’m doing.
You do the same and I’ll listen, what are you doing? And there will be not one person who says. Oh Christ. This is a bag of beans. I’m gonna go back to just looking at my Instagram.You can always look at your Instagram.
Sue: You’re reinforcing. One of the things that we have done since we started out this podcast is we’ve published two impact reports to answer that exact question that you have just shared there or reflected upon is are we making a difference? So let’s hold ourselves to account and just see. We didn’t know what the answer would be, and thankfully we realized we are making an impact, which gives us more motivation to do more of it.
Kris: Yeah, because then the day after you get going, you can ask yourself, because the change, the click, is the moment you decided to do what you and your team are doing, [00:35:00] and from that day forward, it’ll never be as bad as it was just that minute before you said, okay, we’re gonna do this. That’s an impact. And it’s only going in one direction. It’s going up. I just don’t see any downside to sitting on our hands.
Sue: I think that’s what you’ve shared with us and reflected upon today, Kris. Wonderfully is everybody needs a purpose. Yeah. And the way we can see that purpose materializing is by taking action, small steps, getting outta bed, making the decision to change.
Kris: And I think people listening, they’re gonna say, well, I really don’t know what to do. Okay. Fair enough. Get some help. Call somebody up. Call up a local organization. It’s a trust, it’s a land trust. It’s somebody who wants to save the red squirrel, uh, you name it and say, look I have no particular skills, or I have lots of skills, but I have no [00:36:00] idea what to do. I wanna work towards something for you. What do you have that I should be doing? It’s asking for help- to help. I think that’s how most people get going.
Sue: Well, it’s certainly been wonderful to speak to you today, Kris. Of all your life’s experiences and the journey that you’ve had, what’s the one thing that you hold in your mind that’s always a touchstone that you come back to?
Kris: How tiny I am.
Sue: in this big world?
Kris: Yes.
Sue: And yet making a big impact along with your team.
Kris: Well, I hope so. But when you see yourself as tiny and you’re doing things, then you know that anything’s possible. If you band together, there aren’t many things that are impossible.
Sue: Lovely. Thank you so much for your time.
I’m sure our listener will find this episode inspiring, fascinating, and I hope will instigate some action within them to make that [00:37:00] decision to do something different.
Kris: Wow. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it, and I wish you the best. There in the uk there’s all sorts of things going on, so you’re in a lucky country in that sense.
Sue: Thank you. Well, it was a great joy to speak with Kris Tompkins. What stood out for me was the clarity over values and her conviction to be fearless and set a bold vision, no matter the odds. She also showed me that legacy isn’t built overnight. It’s carved out with consistency and courage and an unwavering commitment to build something bigger than yourself.
It also challenged me to reflect on some questions. What are you willing to stand for? In what way can you be courageous? And how will you use your own influence no matter how big or small to restore nature that will benefit us all? I highly recommend the National Geographic Documentary Wild Life Which chronicles Kris and Doug [00:38:00] Tompkin’s journey to preserve one of the last wild places on Earth.
Definitely worth a watch. And we’ve put lots of links on the show notes for you to find Tompkins Conservation, Rewilding Argentina, Rewilding Chile, and as I mentioned at the start, you might also want to listen to episode 126, the episode with Sofia Heinonen on Rewilding Argentina, and beyond. Thank you for joining me on this 150th episode, and if Kris Tompkins story inspired you, please share it with a few friends that might enjoy it and leave us a review on the platform that you’re listening to this podcast on. It really does help us to find new listeners who can enjoy this episode.
Sound Editor: Matias de Ezcurra
Producer: Sue Stockdale