With 10 Million Acres in Patagonia, a National Park System Is Born<br />Months before, Tompkins Conservation, an umbrella group of conservation initiatives the couple directed, proposed a deal to the Chilean government: It would donate more than one million acres of their preserved<br />and restored territory to Chile if the government committed additional lands and designated new parks to create a Patagonian national park network.<br />It was a partnership, Ms. Tompkins said in an interview, "a real model to do large-scale conservation<br />and create national parks in a public-private way." The resulting 10 million-acre Patagonia National Park system is more than three times the size of the Yosemite and Yellowstone parks combined.<br />In the valley below, not far from the town of Cochrane, President Michelle Bachelet announced the creation of a vast national park system in Chile stretching<br />from Hornopirén, 715 miles south of the capital, Santiago, to Cape Horn, the southern tip of South America, where Chile splinters into fjords and canals.<br />The Bachelet administration ended up contributing nine million acres, more than the couple<br />had proposed, creating five new national parks and expanding an additional three.<br />Tompkins said that There is something about the expanse of Patagonia, a kind of haunting soulfulness to it that affects you physically,<br />or the planet," Ms. Bachelet said in an interview. that good not only for Chile, but f<br />The park is the brainchild of Kristine McDivitt Tompkins<br />and her husband, Douglas Tompkins, who founded The North Face and Esprit clothing companies, and starting in 1991, put $345 million — much of his fortune — buying large swaths of Patagonia.
