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Ex-Clothing Mogul Emerges as Eco-Philanthropist By Keith Thompson SAN FRANCISCO, California, August 6, 2002 (ENS) - Two big things happened to Douglas Tompkins at the height of his success as a fashion mogul. First, he made a phenomenal amount of money. Second, he decided he wanted to improve the world in major way. What Tompkins didn't realize was that his pursuit of the second big thing would lead him to question the core values that made it possible for him to achieve the first big thing. A legendary character in the San Francisco Bay Area's business community, Tompkins was also a skier and rock climber who had come west during the hippie epoch and parlayed a talent for merchandising into a fortune during the 1980s. When his ex-wife and former business partner Susie Tompkins Buell eased him out of Espirit de Corps, the chic fashion firm they built together, Tompkins created the San Francisco based Foundation for Deep Ecology.
After making millions as a clothier, Tompkins felt he faced a necessary rite of passage - how to use his new wealth to make a better world. "As far back as 1985, my hopes and expectations in life began to shift," Tompkins says. "The excitement and involvement that came with building Esprit, improving the craft of image making, marketing, organizing, and growing a complex, multinational operation, began to lose their luster." Tompkins had considered himself an environmentalist since he was barely a teenager, but it was not until his Espirit success that he began thinking about environmentalism as a worldview. "Being out in wild nature was in my veins, but I had little intellectual understanding of the driving forces of nature, culture, and the biodiversity/extinction phenomenon - let alone the epistemological basis of the worldview underlying those forces that directed society into the crisis we were all discovering." A veteran of the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s, Tompkins says he went on to "become distracted by a successful business." "I had become fascinated by marketing and image-making, and as I look back on it now, I wonder what I was really thinking about, what captivated me so," he says. The decisive turn came for Tompkins when he read a book called "Deep Ecology: Living As if Nature Mattered" by Bill Devall and George Sessions.
"The book offered a new vision of how things got the way they were," says Tompkins. "It combined the activism of David Brower, my environmental hero, with the insight of Robinson Jeffers, my poet hero. Gary Snyder's "Four Changes," which I must have read half asleep, finally took on its real meaning." In the process of spending $39 million over the past dozen years to nudge environmental activism in new directions, Tompkins' Foundation for Deep Ecology is credited with playing a crucial role in making opposition to genetically engineered crops part of the critique of modern agriculture. Tompkins' efforts to buy up and preserve land in South America has made him a folk hero in the eyes of many environmental activists. Tompkins is keenly aware of the paradox between how he earned his fortune nearly two decades ago and how he is busy spending it today. "Everybody has contradictions. Life is full of contradictions," Tompkins told the "San Francisco Chronicle" newspaper in July. "In the world of philanthropy, almost all the money earned comes from something exploitive or polluting." He acknowledges that the attire he once sold was more whimsical than practical, and that he made strategic use of cheap labor throughout the world to keep prices down and profits high. "These were products for meaningless consumption. All we were doing was feeding this gigantic consumption machine," Tompkins said. He says that by the time he and his ex-wife split up, he was disenchanted with the economic system he had leveraged so successfully. "I have come full circle to appreciate things from the other side." Tompkins' newest eco-philosophy project is a recently published collection of essays by contributors including technology critic Jerry Manders, chef Alice Waters, and anti-global activist Debi Barker. Entitled "Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture," and edited by Andy Kimbrell, this take-no-enemies attacks every aspect of modern agriculture from chemical sprays to factory farms and the genetic engineering of plants, trees and animals.
"Fatal Harvest" calls for an alternative in which local growers create sustainable farms that cultivate natural seeds and use organic methods that respect the soil and reward its tillers. "Bearing witness, and using our foundation's resources to often do more than bear witness, is a strategy calculated to help future activists and future generations remain energized and active," Tompkins says. "In the face of escalating pollution, accelerating rates of deforestation, atmospheric alterations, and new technological threats ad infinitum, maintaining psychological and emotional equilibrium becomes as important as anything. It is with this spirit, vision, and approach that we embrace all of our work. We carry this perspective forward as our second decade begins. Copyright Environment News Service (ENS) 2002. All rights reserved. |
Douglas Tompkins (Photo credit unknown)
Forest in Woodstock, Vermont (Photo courtesy 
Organic gardens at Camp Joy, a small, nonprofit organic farm in California's Santa Cruz mountains (Photo courtesy 