Two months ago my friend of nearly 50 years, Doug Tompkins, died of hypothermia after his kayak capsized in a very cold lake in southern Chile during the last adventure of an audacious existence. His well-reported death ended a life lived large, deep and meaningfully. He experienced and accomplished as much in life as anyone and cared about and gave to this world even more. He will be remembered for his environmental legacy in South America, as is only fitting, an inheritance that will persist beyond the memory of man.
The loss of a cherished friend is a different matter than the loss of a public figure, no matter how justly admired and honored, even when the two are the same person. Anyone curious about Doug and/or the environment of Earth can Google his name, Deep Ecology, Conservacion Patagonica or Tompkins Conservation and find enough information, inspiration and urgency to make the most devout capitalist understand and perhaps embrace the values and integrity that led this self-made (Doug never graduated from high school) multi-millionaire co-founder of The North Face and Esprit to abandon the comforts of bourgeoisie materialism for the challenges of environmental activism.
As a friend, Doug had a huge affect on my life, starting with the first of many long, deep conversations about knowing one’s self and living according to that knowledge rather than by an imposed expectation, cultural norm or material standard. In the winter of 1967, after a full day of skiing on Sun Valley’s Bald Mountain, we had an early dinner and drove through the night of that first conversation to Reno, where I lived. He dropped me off before continuing to San Francisco to his family and fledgling business, The North Face in North Beach down the street from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore. North Beach at that time was a central meeting ground for, among other things, those individuals and social forces that would become the 1967 Summer of Love. The morning after that all night conversation I began the process of removing myself from graduate school. By the Summer of Love I was living in Berkeley and working in San Francisco before heading back to the mountains where I belong and have remained, and Doug’s friendship was instrumental in those organic, healthy changes.
There were many other drives, conversations, adventures, challenges, lessons and camaraderie shared with Doug over the years. For the past two months I’ve been revisiting some of them, thinking of Doug. There are books to be written about the life and times and legacy of Doug Tompkins, but part of it comes down to this: Doug was a relentless advocate for Deep Ecology, particularly the first plank of its platform: “The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: inherent worth, intrinsic value, inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.” He lived by these values and had a grand life and a great time in the process, and all his friends and the Earth itself are better off for his presence. We should all heed those values and have a great time in the process.