Kristine Tompkins at TED2024: Rewilding Beyond Borders
The latest TED Talk from Tompkins Conservation president and co-founder Kristine Tompkins offers a vision to connect ecosystems and keystone species beyond park boundaries and national borders, introducing the first of such initiatives. © Gilberto Tadday
Kristine Tompkins, President and co-founder of Tompkins Conservation, invoked a revolutionary vision for rewilding at the TED2024 mainstage in Vancouver, sharing the latest plans for Tompkins Conservation and its offspring organizations, Rewilding Chile and Rewilding Argentina. Her talk “Rewilding Beyond Borders” asserts, “The speed and power of climate chaos and the extinction crisis demand that we change our tactics, our commitments, and our thinking yet again. And this time, at a massive scale.” Available today, the talk can be viewed here and shared.
Successful programs in both Argentina and Chile are protecting and restoring large-scale ecosystems and working to bring back populations of keystone species like the jaguar—once extinct in the province of Corrientes Argentina, there are now over 25 living in the wild, and Chile’s highly endangered huemul deer, whose population has become so fragmented that only one percent of it remains. Tompkins views a continental-scale approach as the next generation of large-scale protection of land and sea.
The challenge is to reconnect the wild fabric of South America. The talk introduces the first international initiative in Northeast Argentina, where Rewilding Argentina’s Austral Jaguar Corridor will use rivers, nature’s most effective highways, to reconnect fragmented ecosystems across the La Plata basin, a massive region spanning four countries, including Brazil, Paraguay, and Bolivia, and a multitude of ecosystems. The plan involves populating new protected areas with key species that can disperse to existing defaunated ones.
Rewilding Chile is in the initial stages of scaling up work that started with the Patagonian Route of Parks, a collection of 17 national parks, working with other Andean nonprofits to secure an Andean Corridor from Chile to Colombia through collaboration and the provision of key species, in addition to strengthening ocean protections reaching southward to the convergence of the Atlantic, Pacific Ocean, and Antarctic oceans.
For Tompkins, achieving success at this unprecedented scale will require creating a broad coalition of partners, from philanthropists to South American governments and like-minded nonprofits. She says, “After three decades of creating national parks in Argentina and Chile and restoring ecosystems, today we aim to connect them, so nature, something that’s so fundamental for all of our survival, really has a shot at thriving in the long term.”
ABOUT TOMPKINS CONSERVATION
Driven to confront the global crises of climate change and biodiversity loss, Tompkins Conservation and its independent nonprofit offspring organizations, Rewilding Argentina and Rewilding Chile, have spent over three decades protecting and rewilding big, wild, and connected landscapes, so that human communities, animals and plants can thrive. Collaborating with public and private partners, the organization has driven the creation or expansion of fifteen national parks, including two marine national parks, protecting 15 million acres of land and 30 million acres of ocean in Argentina and Chile. The story is told in Wild Life, released in 2023 by National Geographic Documentary Films. Kristine Tompkins’ first talk, Let’s Make the World Wild Again, received 2.2 million views to date and has been translated into 24 languages.
A driving force to curb the worldwide climate emergency and the biodiversity crisis, Tompkins Conservation protects, rewilds, and defends land and marine ecosystems in the Southern Cone through collaborating to create national parks and rewilding key species. Working with public and private partners, the organization has helped to create 13 national parks, protecting 14.5 million acres. The goal is to restore a healthy planet with big, wild, and connected landscapes where animals and plants can thrive. This also means helping to build robust communities that benefit from a healthy natural world.
Kristine McDivitt Tompkins and Douglas Tompkins (1943-2015) founded Tompkins Conservation after leading iconic American clothing brands—Kristine as longtime CEO of Patagonia Inc, and Doug as co-founder of The North Face and Esprit. Changing course in the early 1990s to focus on conservation, they became two of the most successful conservation philanthropists in history. After Doug lost his life in a tragic kayaking accident in 2015, Kristine has continued to build on their foundation. She is now the president of Tompkins Conservation and a UN Environment Patron of Protected Areas.
A 501(c)(3) public charity, Tompkins Conservation carries out conservation projects through the nonprofit network of Rewilding Chile and Rewilding Argentina.
