Non-fiction Review: A Wild Idea, by Jonathan Franklin

I've known at least since our trip to Patagonia in 2020 about Doug Tompkins and the preservation of huge chunks of that land. This book offers a fuller story.

 

Title: A Wild Idea
Author: Jonathan Franklin. Read by George Newbern
Publisher: Harper Audio, 2021. 10.5 hours. Original Hardback by Harper One, 2021, 384 pages.

Publisher's Blurb:
In 1991, Doug Tompkins left his luxury life in San Francisco and flew 6,500 miles south to a shack in Patagonia that his friends nicknamed Hobbit House. Mounted on wooden skids that allowed oxen to drag it through the cow fields, Hobbit House had for refrigerator a metal box chilled from the icy cold winds off the glacier. Rainwater dripped from a rooftop barrel into the rustic kitchen. Earlier tenants include a sheepherder with little more than his dogs and a rifle. Instead of the Golden Gate Bridge, Tompkins now stared at Volcano Michinmahuida, blanketed in snow and prowled by mountain lions the size of small tigers.

Shielded by wilderness, waterfalls and tucked into a remote forest with three times the rainfall of Seattle, Tompkins plotted his counterattack against corporate capitalism. As founder of Esprit and The North Face he had "made things nobody needed." Now he declared it was time to "pay my rent for living on this planet." Could he undo the environmental damage produced by his prodigious clothes manufacturing? Could he launch a new brand, one that promoted environmental conservation, preservation and restoration?

In Patagonia, Tompkins adored his pioneer existence. All his belongings fit in a single duffel bag. When hungry, he fished from his front yard and harvested vegetables from a greenhouse. Tompkins kayaked along the rivers, ice-climbed glaciers, and waited until the ocean storms reached a frothy peak to pilot his wood-hulled crab boat into the raging waves of the Pacific. Within a hundred miles there were virtually no roads and his old farm was accessible to the occasional fishing boat and a battered airstrip.

Flying his small plane for hundreds of hours, he explored. The average plot of land is 10,000 acres and the price per acre is as little as US$25. It was all for sale and about to be destroyed by clearcut logging. Zooming over treetops and around mountain peaks, Tompkins flew inside tight canyons and gaped at the singular beauty: active volcanoes, gliding condors, forests never logged, rivers never dammed—all so undisturbed, so exquisitely designed, without a single flaw. Could he protect this wild beauty? Place a frame around this perfect creation? For the ensuing quarter century that dream, that obsession became his life.

Only in death did it become his legacy.

My Review:
What the blurb leaves out is at least the first half of the book--the early years, when Tompkins was building his fortune and founding The North Face and Esprit with various partners. This part of the book does establish both his personal life as a climber and adventurer (and a pretty crappy husband and father, as may often be the case with the mostly men who are obsessed with either or both) and the way he built his fortune. A fortune made largely at the expense of the planet (Esprit might be called "fast fashion;" selling clothes that aren't meant to last or be kept for long) at long last led to an examination of what he was doing, and in the end to mostly dropping out of the life and into Patagonia.

The man Franklin describes in those years is not, frankly, a very likable man. But when he turned that same obsessive personality to saving Patagonia and creating national parks in Chile and Argentina, things get better. He was still obviously a difficult man, though his second wife, Kris, achieved a partnership with him that the blurb, and most of the reviews, completely ignores. 

I completely admire what the couple accomplished (and make no mistake: it was Kris who finally made the preservation of much of that land happen, and the transfers to the government with due protections; Franklin is clear that Kris was better at handling people than Doug was). I don't entirely admire the man, as portrayed by Franklin. Like many driven people, he doesn't seem to have seen much beyond his own big ideas. But the Idea that drove his last years was one for which we can all be grateful.

I think Franklin did a great job of giving us a more complete picture of Tompkins than most of the stories I'd read about him, and the book is a fitting tribute.

My Recommendation:
Definitely a worthwhile read, and gives food for thought about what actions--large and small--may be done to either preserve or destroy the wild. Through trial and error he did find a way to stop the destruction of one of the most amazing landscapes on Earth.

In February of 2020 my husband, brother-in-law, and I visited Patagonia (and Antarctica), including some of the places Tompkins loved and preserved. It was the last trip my husband made, before his death in an accident only weeks after returning home (this made reading of Tompkins' death and the aftermath very difficult for me, something I didn't think about going in). Here are a few of my husband's photos from Patagonia National Park, created and preserved by Kris and Doug Tompkins.

West Winds campground. Tompkins even insisted on controlling the design of all the signs.

High Lakes Trail (Lagos Altos)

Heading up there.

Looking back down into the Chacabuco river valley

Guanaco

Visitors' Center, built (like the signs) of native stones

 

FTC Disclosure: I checked A Wild Idea out of my library, and received nothing from the writer or publisher for my honest review.  The opinions expressed are my own and those of no one else.  I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."  
 

 

©Rebecca M. Douglass, 2024 As always, please ask permission to use any photos or text. Link-backs appreciated.
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