Guy Lodge Film Critic Doug and Kris Tompkins’ dream sounded like a fanciful one. Seduced by a region of ravishing South American wilderness in which they found particular sanctuary, and wishing to protect it from any insensitive or unseemly development, they landed on a solution both simple and absurd-sounding: Why not simply buy as much of it as possible?
Backed by the fortune they’d collectively amassed from the clothing industry — Doug as the founder of Esprit and The North Face, Kris as the former CEO of Patagonia — the couple successfully parlayed business tycoon status into an unprecedented scale of eco-activism: As one talking head notes in “Wild Life,” Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s soaring documentary tribute to the Tompkins’ romance and shared conservationist mission, they “could do anything, and chose to do anything.” Not all Chileans, however, take such a rosy view of incoming billionaire Americans buying up vast swathes of the country in what they determine to be its own best interests.
Over the years, the Tompkinses have faced sometimes hostile opposition from local politicians and protesters who deem what Kris terms “a dogged, relentless pursuit of beauty” a more imperial act of what one politico prefers to describe as “businessmen masquerading as ecologists.” To date, their work has resulted in the preservation and gradual rewilding of over 14.7 million acres of land in Chile and Argentina, now protected as national parks: a triumph of environmentalism and climate change resistance that is eminently noble at one level, but equally hard not to see as a manner of colonialism, however good-hearted, enabled by American capitalism.
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