Kristine McDivitt Tompkins is the cofounder and president of Tompkins Conservation and the UN Patron of Protected Areas. The former CEO of Patagonia, Inc, she has spent almost thirty years protecting and restoring Chile and Argentina’s wild beauty and biodiversity through creating national parks, restoring wildlife, inspiring activism, and fostering economic vitality as a
result of conservation. A key figure behind the establishment of 13 national parks in Argentina and Chile, she has helped to protect approximately 14.5 million acres through Tompkins Conservation and its strategic partners, Rewilding Argentina and Tompkins Conservation Chile. With her late husband Douglas Tompkins, who passed away in 2015, Kristine is considered one of the most successful national park-oriented philanthropists in history. In 2017, she received the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy. Her 2020 TED Talk, entitled “Let’s Make the World Wild Again,” discusses the critical role we all have to play to heal the planet. A global leader in conservation, she currently serves as Chair of National Geographic Society’s Last Wild Places campaign.