My siblings and I grew up on our great-grandfather's farm in California. It was a landscape of our family and our home.
When it was clear that nobody in our generation wanted to take on the heavy burden of ranching, the ranch was sold to a neighbor. The anchor of our lives was cut, and we felt adrift in the absence of that land.
For the first time, I came to understand that something valuable can be best understood not by its presence, but by its absence. It was impossible to know then just how powerful the absence of those things we love would have an impact far into my future.
For 23 years, my working life was with Yvon Chouinard. I started when he was designing and manufacturing technical rock and ice climbing equipment in a tin shed near the railroad tracks in Ventura. And when Yvon decided to start making clothes for climbers and call this business Patagonia, I became one of the first six employees, later becoming CEO and helping build a company where creating the best products and doing good by the world was more than just a tagline.
Doug Tompkins, who would become my husband years later, was an old friend and climbing companion of Yvon's and also an entrepreneur. He cofounded The North Face and Esprit company.
All three of these businesses were created by people who had grown up through the '60s, shaped by the civil rights, antiwar, feminist and peace movements. And those values were picked up in those years and carried throughout the values of these companies.
By the end of the 1980s, Doug decided to leave business altogether and commit the last third of his life to what he called "paying his rent for living on the planet." At nearly the same time, when I hit 40, I was ready to do something completely new with my life.
The day after retiring from the Patagonia company, I flew 6,000 miles to Patagonia the place and joined Doug as he started what was the first conservation project of that third of his life. There we were, refugees from the corporate world, holed up in a cabin on the coast in southern Chile, surrounded by primaeval rainforest where alerce trees can live for thousands of years.
We were in the middle of a great wilderness that forms one of the only two gaps in the Pan-American highway, between Fairbanks, Alaska, and Cape Horn. A radical change to our daily lives spurred on as we had begun to recognize how beauty and diversity were being destroyed pretty much everywhere.
The last wild protected places on earth were still wild mostly because the relentless front lines of development simply hadn't arrived there yet. Doug and I were in one of the most remote parts on earth, and still around the edges of Pumalín Park, our first conservation effort, industrial aquaculture was growing like a malignancy.
