Douglas Tompkins

Tompkins was born in Conneaut, Ohio, on March 20, 1943, the son of an antiques dealer and decorator. He spent the first few years of his life in New York City before his family moved to Millbrook, New York. He graduated from Indian Mountain School, a pre-prep school in Lakeville, Connecticut, in 1957. In his senior year at Pomfret School in Connecticut, Tompkins was expelled for various minor infractions. He returned to his hometown in Millbrook, but did not graduate from high school.

Tompkins spent the years between 1960 and 1962 ski racing and rock climbing in Colorado, Europe, and South America. In 1963, Tompkins founded the California Mountaineering Guide Service. It was during this time he met Susie Russell, a casino employee who gave him a lift while hitch-hiking to Lake Tahoe. They married in 1964 in San Francisco.

In 1968, Tompkins headed off on a six-month road-adventure trip from California to Patagonia, along with Yvon Chouinard, Dick Dorworth, and Chris Jones (calling themselves the "Fun Hogs"), who made the third ascent of Mount Fitz Roy in Patagonia in 1968. They put up a new route on Mount Fitzroy, and - together with filmmaker Lito Tejada-Flores, who also made the ascent - made an adventure film, Mountain of Storms, about their experience. The 2010 film 180 Degrees South: Conquerors of the Useless describes a modern-day recreation of this journey and also highlights the conservation work on which Tompkins had been working.

Tompkins also became a skilled whitewater kayaker, claiming first descents of rivers in California, Africa, and South America. In addition, he was a skilled bush pilot.

Through the Foundation for Deep Ecology, Tompkins published a series of large-format, activist photograph books on environmental issues, including:

Clearcut: The Tragedy of Industrial Forestry (ed. Bill Devall, 1993, ISBN 0871564947)

Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture (ed. Andrew Kimbrell, 2002, ISBN 1559639407)

Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West (eds. George Weurthner and Mollie Yoneko Madison, 2002, ISBN 1559639423)

Wildfire: A Century of Failed Forest Policy (ed. George Weurthner, 2006, ISBN 159726069X)

In addition, The Foundation for Deep Ecology had a long history as a grant-maker in categories such as Biodiversity and Wilderness, Ecological Agriculture, and Megatechnology and Economic Globalization, although in-house publishing is now its main focus.

Tompkins also was involved in several large environmental campaigns in Chile and Argentina, such as the "Patagonia Sin Represas" campaign, which opposed the construction of dams on two of the largest and wildest rivers in the Patagonia region of Chile.