Kristine Tompkins

Kristine Tompkins is co-founder and president of Tompkins Conservation, where she oversees projects rewilding the Americas. A conservationist who has committed her career to protecting and restoring wild beauty and biodiversity, she and her late husband Doug Tompkins are considered some of the world’s most successful national-park-oriented philanthropists. Tompkins was previously CEO of Patagonia, where she worked from 1973 until 1993. Her global leadership roles in conservation include chairing National Geographic Society’s Last Wild Places campaign. She was the first conservationist to be awarded the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy and in 2018 was named the United Nations’ Global Patron for Protected Areas. Tompkins’s 2020 TED Talk, “Let's Make the World Wild Again,” has over two million views.