Part II: Rewilding Yourself to Save the Planet

Part II of the introduction to the book manuscript I'm working on.

Photo by Jon Flobrant on Unsplash

(Part I of this introduction is available here)

The River of Rewilding

The Source: Kris Tompkins and the “Do Boys”

This book tries to provide you with the tools to rewild your mind while demonstrating the profound impacts that a rewilded mind can have on the world. We are in a moment of flux, and I want readers to finish this book with a newfound desire to both climb a tree and bend the future towards the wild. It’s a big ask, which is why the river of rewilding we’ll explore has so many bends and tributaries.

Like many rivers, the source of this book can be found in the mountains–though in our case, it’s people who found their power and voice in the mountains we’re interested in. Indeed, I started this chapter with a quote from Kris Tompkins because she’s the primary inspiration for this book along with “Do Boys” Yvon Chouinard, Douglas Tompkins, and Rick Ridgeway.

By way of introduction, Yvon Chouinard, would found Patagonia, a company that has inspired generations of businesses and outdoor enthusiasts to protect our home planet. Kris Tompkins led Patagonia as CEO for 18 or its first 25 years where she worked closely with Yvon, managing the company for the many months each year that he was off adventuring, and then harnessing and operationalizing the best of his ideas. In 1993, she left Patagonia to marry Doug Tompkins, Yvon’s best friend and another Do Boy.

Doug founded the North Face in the early 1960s, sold it for $50,000 in 1968, and used the proceeds to travel to Patagonia with Yvon and a few others to make Mountain of Storms, a documentary about climbing Fitz Roy, the iconic mountain that graces the logo of Patagonia. As Yvon and Doug drove down from California to Patagonia, Doug’s first wife, Susie, began building Plain Jane, a clothing company that would evolve into Esprit, one of the most distinctive and popular clothing brands in the late 1970s and 1980s. In 1991, Doug sold his share of Esprit for approximately $300 million, moved to the real Patagonia in Chile, and left corporate America for good (Franklin 112). When Kris married Doug and joined him two years later, they began one of the most audacious and successful private conservation and rewilding experiments ever.

A third Do Boy, Rick Ridgeway, estimates that he spent more than five years sleeping in tents in remote parts of the world. An adventurer, writer, and skilled mountaineer, he joined Patagonia in the early 2000s as its first Vice President of Sustainability and became the driving force behind many of their sustainability initiatives, including the creation of Freedom to Roam program that protected migration corridors for wildlife, and the founding of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, the first and most successful industry coalition committed to reducing social and environmental harms from the supply chain. (I work for Worldly, the for-profit spin-off from the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, now known as Cascale).

In an introductory essay to a book about his father, the great mid-century environmentalist and longtime Sierra Club Executive Director David Brower, Kenneth Brower divided mountaineers into three groups. The first group are climbers who scratch out a living and existence in the Sierras and Grand Tetons, bouncing from climb to climb and job to job for a lifetime. A second and larger group are those who grow out of a mountaineering life on the edge and move on to a life phase that bears no resemblance to their days in the mountains. (Though not a climber, I’ve long feared becoming someone who used to do cool things). The third and smallest group channels the mountains to change the world. Brower had his father in mind, of course, but also others like:

[t]he mountaineer-photographer Galen Rowell, the mountain-gear entrepreneur Yvon Chouinard, the wildlands philanthropist Douglas Tompkins, the park creator Kristine McDivitt Tompkins, the hospital builder Edmund Hillary, the prophet Moses, are people who bring something transformative down from the mountains and go on to do great things. (Brower 4-5)

It’s no surprise that his short list includes Kris, Yvon, and Doug. I think that all three of them, and everyone else on this list, brought a rewilded and powerful mind back from the wilderness. These rewilded minds drew from both a deep well of lived experience in nature and the writings of ecological thinkers and philosophers from the past and present. This foundation enabled them to presciently see and then act on what needed to be done, both in business and for nature–often well ahead of, but inevitably aligned with, the conclusions of future business and ecological scholars.

To get at just how this transformation occurs, we need to paddle through several sections of the river of rewilding. The first section of the book explores the cognitive science behind the benefits of nature, the philosophies that inspired Kris and the Do Boys, and how they swam against the dominant business currents of the late 20th century to demonstrate that businesses focused on doing good can thrive. The second section looks at how we rewild landscapes, and the impact this work has on ecosystems and the people who live there. The third section focuses on how we can rewild ourselves, our gardens, and our children. The fourth and final section talks about how all of these themes and trends can come together to create a better and more wild future.

Section 1: Getting Onto the River

Why Humans Need Nature - we’ll start with an overview of the science that establishes the physical and physiological benefits of spending time in nature. While these benefits are self-evident to many of us who spend time in nature, the amount of time that we spend outside as a society continues to decrease. This chapter draws on the robust literature to talk about both the physical services that the natural world provides to make our society possible (we couldn’t clothe and feed eight billion people without ecosystem services) but also the spiritual and psychological benefits of the wild. The head and heart agree: screens and virtual reality are no substitute for the real thing.

The Headwaters of Environmental Ethics - We’ll move from the science of the brain to the theories and thinkers who shape what we think about and how we interpret the world. These thinkers spent lifetimes immersed in the natural world, and there’s much to be learned from their collective wisdom as we start down the path of rewilding our minds.

We’ll learn about people I view as having rewilded minds, ranging from early naturalist Alexander von Humbolt and Romantic poet William Wordsworth to transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau to recent and well-known American environmentalists like Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, and David Brower. Because of their profound influence on Kris Tompkins and the Do Boys, we will also review the work of Deep Ecologists and other contemporary thinkers like Arne Naess and Jerry Mander.

The Rapids: Business for Good - Rewilding our minds is critical, but the harsh reality is that the majority of our time is spent at work, often indoors. If we want to rewild the world, we need to inject the benefits of preserving the natural world into the way business is done. The best way to do that is to update the norms and expectations for businesses, which brings us back to Kris Tompkins, Yvon Chouinard, and Patagonia.

To say that Patagonia was swimming against the normative business currents of its times is an understatement. Indeed, Patagonia was founded and grew up during the 50 year reign of Milton Friedman, the University of Chicago Professor, muse to the Reaganite 1980s, and Nobel Laureate.

In September 1970, Friedman published an essay in the New York Times titled A Friedman doctrine–The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits. (Friedman). The essay was so popular that the 50 year anniversary of its publication was commemorated with collaqua, essays, and retrospectives. In his conclusion, Friedman summarizes his position, and one that would inspire a generation of business leaders to inflict an incredible amount of needless suffering, by quoting his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, “there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages, in open and free competition without deception or fraud” (Friedman).

Careful observers like Dr. Suess understood that, taken to its logical extreme, this approach would lead to an economy dominated by businessmen like the Once-ler in The Lorax (1971), who, for those who don’t remember, kept on BIGGERING and BIGGERING and BIGGERING his business until the very last truffula tree was cut down and all the swamee-swans and humming-fish were exiled and replaced with gluppity glup (Seuss 49).

To see the deleterious effects of this approach to business ethics, we’ll look at the career and impact of Jack Welch, the longtime GE CEO who was viewed as the CEO of the Century until the house of cards he built came tumbling down. Jack Welch and his acolytes approach was defined by: 1) Downsizing, including layoffs without cause of need, offshoring, and union busting; 2) Deal making, moving mergers and acquisitions from a niche part of business to a core part of operations, with an unending cycle of purchases, consolidations, and sales; and 3) Financialization, which shifted profits and value from investing in physical products and the research and development needed to create and improve them, to securities and other increasingly exotic means of making money without producing anything of value in the world of atoms and real things (Gelles).

Patagonia, on the other hand, was “in business to save our home planet.” Its values were captured in a 1991 note to the Board from Jerry Mander, whose philosophical work we’ll review in the chapter on environmental ethics. He wrote:

We begin with the premise that all life on Earth is facing a critical time, during which survivability will be the issue that increasingly dominates public concern. Where survivability is not the issue, the quality of human experience of life may be, as well as the decline in health of the natural world as reflected in the loss of biodiversity, cultural diversity, and the planet’s life support systems.

The root causes of this situation include basic values embodied in our economic system, including the values of the corporate world. Primary among the problematic corporate values are the primacy of expansion and short-term profit over such other considerations as quality, sustainability, environmental and human health, and successful communities.

The fundamental goal of this corporation is to operate in such a manner that we are fully aware of the above conditions, and attempt to reorder the hierarchy of corporate values, while producing products that enhance both human and environmental conditions (emphasis added).

How did Patagonia come to this view? In particular, we’ll look at both the role that Yvon Chouinard and Kris Tompkins played in actualizing this philosophy and the downstream impacts of this philosophy on the business community. From an early decision to ditch its piton business despite accounting for almost all corporate revenue because pitons were destroying the mountains to a more recent one to enter the food business, we will discuss how Patagonia’s core values push the boundaries of what business can–and should–be about.

Section 2: Rewilding the Land and Rivers: Preservation, Restoration, and Connection

We’ll leave ourselves and the private sector behind to explore examples of rewilding the physical world, starting with ecosystem preservation (it’s easier to preserve something that exists than work to recreate it), and then moving on to the restoration of ecosystems and the work needed to connect these tracts of land on behalf of the animals that need space to roam.

Preserving Jungles with Agroforestry - As has been the case my entire life, the Amazon rainforest is under siege. I first learned about the Amazon rainforest in a 1980s Natural History Museum display that chronicled its destruction. I can still picture the red lights flashing and the sections of diorama forest falling into the shadows. It still makes me shudder.

Today, cattle grazing causes approximately 80% of Amazonian deforestation (World Wildlife Federation), with soybean farming for animal feed driving the remaining deforestation. Because jungle soil is relatively nutrient poor, areas used for animal grazing or traditional farming must be deserted after a few years, which perpetuates the cycle of deforestation.

One way to break this cycle is to reinvigorate the soils adjacent to the forest that are already being farmed. The most effective way to accomplish this is agroforestry. In this chapter, we’ll travel to the Amazon rainforest to learn about how agroforestry practices are being introduced; the opportunities they provide to farmers, the land, and animals; and the challenges with scaling this work to additional areas of the Amazon and beyond.

The chapter will conclude with a look into other types of agricultural practices that are rewilding lands and restoring habitats, including small-scale actions like prairie strips.

[I hope to visit Brazil to research this chapter.]

Restoring Rivers - Throughout the first half of the 20th century, many of the great American rivers out West were dammed. Preventing additional dams was an animating focus of the conservation movement in the United States throughout the 1950s and 1960s; David Brower and the Sierra Club’s greatest victories were preventing would-be dams. Preventing and/or removing dams has also been a critical issue for Kris and Doug Tompkins, who famously helped spur a grassroots campaign against the proposed HidroAysén dam in Patagonia in the early 2000s by uniting the people behind the slogan of “Patagonia Sin Represas”.

Preventing dams is easier than removing them, though in recent years some dams are coming down, allowing rivers to run free for the first time in generations. In this chapter, we’ll journey to the spot of the largest dam removal in the United States on the Elwha River, which is located on the Olympic Peninsula just a few hours away from my house in Seattle.

At the turn of the 20^th Century, more than 400,000 salmon from every Pacific species (Chinook, Coho, Sockeye, Chum, and Pink) as well as steelhead and bull trout traveled up to 70 miles up the Elwha River to their spawning grounds. Back then, 100 pound salmon were commonplace, and more than 130 species relied on the salmon directly or indirectly, including black bears, cougars, eagles, deer, sea otters, and orcas. Wherever these salmon were discarded by predators, their carcasses restored nutrients in the soil.

All of this changed in 1910, when work began on the Elwha Dam. It was completed in 1913 and provided electricity to saw mills in booming Port Angeles. Yet one dam couldn’t meet local needs, and in 1927 the Glines Canyon Dam was completed several miles upstream. These dams reduced the spawning area of the Elwha for salmon from 70 miles to just 5 miles, and in doing so threw off the natural balance of the entire ecosystem. By the turn of the 21^st century, only 3,000 salmon per year returned to the Elwha.

The Elwha received a lifeline from Congress in 1992 when it approved the funding to demolish both dams; in 2011, the Elwha came down, with the Glines Canyon Dam following in 2014. At a cost of over $300 million, it was the largest dam removal project in history. (National Park Service) The dam removals were the end of a sad chapter and the beginning of a more interesting one we’ll explore here. A chapter in which local people, tribes, and businesses got together to restore the Elwha to its former glory, prompting many species to return.

Restoring Land - In this chapter, we’ll explore what happens when a landscape is rewilded and brought closer to a state of equilibrium. We’ll start with a 1995 example of rewilding, the grey wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park. The wolves brought the elk herds to a more sustainable level, which allowed the willow and aspen trees to regrow, thereby restabilizing the riverbanks and providing habitat for songbirds. Colonies of beavers returned as well, which helped restore the water table and provide cold water for fish. (Farquhar).

The wolves of Yellowstone are but one example of rewilding, which can happen anywhere. In 2004 Kris Tompkins purchased a 69,000-hectare farm known as Estancia Valle Chacabuco in the grasslands of Chile that was severely degraded from overgrazing. (Tompkins Conservation) Tompkins and her team began by removing the fences that preventing the guanacos, a close relative to the llama that’s native to the area, from migrating, followed by a pitched campaign to remove non-native plants that was aided by volunteers from Patagonia the company. (Franklin 222). The Chacabuco Valley is now the heart of the Patagonia National Park in Chile, which is home to 10% of the global population of huemul deer, more than 30 collard pumas, an increasing number of rheas alon with Andean Condors and other native animals. (Tompkins Conservation)

Connecting Wilderness Areas and Human Communities - Animals need space to roam. This includes us human animals. In fact, there is evidence that people today travel far less than our ancestors, who traveled across continents by foot (Graeber and Wengrow 173).

Other animals have not undergone the types of cultural transformations experienced by humans over the past few hundred years, and they still need to roam. This roaming is important for a variety of reasons. Many animals roam in search of a mate. Not only is procreation critical (duh), but having individuals from distinctive areas breed helps promote genetic diversity, which keeps the overall population healthy. When a subset of animals from a species becomes isolated, it can lead to inbreeding, birth defects, and less overall resilience to disease. Second, when animals migrate, they restore balance to ecosystems by transferring plants, seeds, pollen, and smaller animals. This animates the carbon cycle, drawing more carbon out of the atmosphere. Protecting and restoring wild animals increases natural carbon capture and storage, and can therefore serve a critical role in offsetting industrial emissions. (Schmitz et al.)

In recent decades, humans have been creating infrastructure that facilitates animal migrations by allowing these animals to bypass all of the human infrastructure (read: roads and fences) that are in their way. While the number of human-designed wildlife corridors is increasing, there is more work to be done in a rewilding world.

To understand the impact of this animal corridor development, we’ll travel to one of the oldest and most successful sets of animal corridors across the Trans-Canada Highway inside the Banff National Park in the Canadian Rockies.

[This summer, I plan to travel to Banff, with an eye towards seeing and reporting on what I learn about this animal crossing.]

There are some areas like the Gran Chaco where wildlife corridors must all cross international borders. In the case of the Gran Chaco, corridors will need to be developed across Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil to enable jaguars to migrate and breed freely. Enabling jaguar travel is critical. Recent research listed jaguars as one of twenty species that, if reintroduced and allowed to repopulate parts of their traditional ranges through ecosystem connectivity efforts, could add 11 million square acres of habitat containing intact large mammal groups, a 54% increase. (Vynne et al.) If we’re going to reach the global goal of protecting 30% of land, fresh water, and oceans by 2030, we should do so in a way that matches the needs of animals.

Not all animal crossings are in areas that seem as remote to us as Banff or the Gran Chaco. For example, a mountain lion, P-22, famously crossed Highway 101 on his way to Griffith Park in the heart of Los Angeles, where he lived for over a decade, unable to move into another patch of wilderness. Many mountain lions are not as lucky; more than 600 were killed by vehicles in California from 2016-2023. The story of P-22 captured catalyzed fund raising for the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, which is expected to open in 2026 and will cross a 10 lane expanse of Highway 101 in the Agoura Hills region of Santa Monica Mountains and be the largest wildlife crossing in the world (Karlamangla).

Man-made wildlife corridors only need to be established in areas where human and wild animals transportation modalities collide, of course. The rewilding efforts described in this book will fail unless the communities in closest contact with a rewilded planet are integrated into the decision making process and believe that they are benefiting from living in an increasingly wild area. Every time a place is rewilded and the range of an animal–especially a large, charismatic and carnivorous one like a jaguar or a wolf–is extended, conflicts with livestock and humans are inevitable. To put it into perspective, in 2015, livestock made up 64% of mammalian biomass, humans were next at 34%, and wild animals were far behind at one 4% of biomass. (Ritchie, Wild Mammals)

Given this imbalance, the conclusion of this chapter will pivot to some of the successful ways that communities are engaging with the wild and wildlife they live beside, including:

• Ecotourism that stretches across the globe from Costa Rica and Belize to Kenya, Nepal and Vietnam;

• Organizations like the National Wildlife Federation that are working to reduce conflicts between wild animals and human communities, with a focus on ranchers in the Great Plains;

• Community Forest initiatives that give local communities a voice in the management of wild spaces; and

• The conversion of hunters into game wardens, birding guides, and wildlife trackers in countries like Belize.

Community engagement in and benefits from rewilding can create a virtuous cycle in which additional people and groups want to rewild their areas because they see the benefits accruing to their neighbors and countrymen who have taken steps to rewild their areas.

Section 3: Rewilding Ourselves

Rewilding Your Yard - The easiest and most impactful collective action we can take for biodiversity and nature is to replace the monotonous and lifeless sea of grass that dominates American yards and replace it with a diverse array of native plants. Native plants provide crucial habitat and food sources for bees, moths, butterflies, birds, and a host of other creatures depending on where you live. As your yard has more native plants and animals, it will become a more inviting place for the humans in your house, including kids, who universally delight in catching small creatures like worms and potato bugs.

Our yards might be individually small, but collectively they are massive in size, resource use, and opportunity cost. There are more than 40 million acres of lawn in the United States–or enough to cover Colorado. We use 10 times more chemical pesticide per acre of lawn than farmers use on crops (U.S Fish and Wildlife Service) and devote 15 percent or much more of our urban freshwater to lawn care (United States Environmental Protection Agency).

If just a quarter of those front yard grass acres were devoted to native plants that replenished the soils and fed native animals. That’d restore native plants to an area five times the size of Yellowstone National Park.

In late 2024 and equally inspired by these facts and frustrated with the results of the US Presidential Election, I tore the bamboo out from a strip of my backyard and replaced it with native plants that will hopefully survive the winter. In the spring, I’ll work with a master gardener to plan and plant a more robust set of native plants in a corner of my yard that is currently devoted to weeds, a useless shed, and concrete slabs. Throughout this chapter, we’ll explore the work of master gardeners, the joys and challenges that come with getting your hands in the dirt for the first time, the changes in the animals that visit our backyard, and how working in the yard helped rewild me and my kids (or at least I’ll write about the impact it has on us).

Rewilding Childhood - Once I decided to write this book, I began the process of rewilding myself and instilling a deeper love of nature in my children. Lazing around the house and looking for something to read over winter break, my fourth grader Max picked up Rick Ridgeway’s memoir, Life Lived Wild. After reading a few excerpts, he decided that he needed to become a mountaineer as well. I couldn’t blame him, of course, as one of Rick’s lectures is what prompted me to learn more about the Do Boys and write this book. His little brother, who has been climbing since he could walk, was an easy sell to join the budding mountaineers. My wife signed up for a trek in Nepal. And that is how our little family of five found ourselves on the summit of Little Si, a 1500 ft mountain just outside Seattle, on a cold and foggy January day. The next week, we summited a slightly higher peak, with their little sister scream-crying all the way, we were on our way.

This chapter will track the rewilding of my kids throughout the time it takes me to write this book and intersperse it with the increasingly robust academic literature on the cognitive, social, and physiological benefits of rewilding childhood.

Rewilding Myself - This chapter will try to document the process of self-rewilding I undertook to research and write this book. For the last decade, I’ve worried about falling into Kenneth Brower’s second category of people who used to be something more interesting. This chapter will focus on the steps I’m taking to rewild myself and move closer to that third group of mountaineers who are able to channel the power of nature for good.

I’m not exactly sure how I’ll do this, but as of now I plan to retrace parts of the journey that the writer John McPhee, David Brower, and mining evangelist Charles Park took to the area of Glacier Peak Wilderness in the North Cascades that was almost turned into an open pit copper mine. I’ll also try to locate some of the clearcut areas that turned my stomach in the Washington section of Clearcut: The Tragedy of Industrial Forestry (Devall), the coffee table book that Doug Tompkins conceived of and funded. In a full circle moment, David Brower, who exposed Americans to the glory of nature with his Sierra Club book series, helped Doug Tompkins select the final photos to appear in the volume. The results are stomach churning.

Section 4: Conclusion. Rewilding the Future

The tributaries of the river of rewilding will join back together today, at the confluence of 2025. Going back to the ethical headwaters, we’ll show how the science has caught up with what the poets and mountaineers who are deeply connected to the natural world know intuitively; humans are integrated into the broader web of life, and we cannot preserve the future and live full, healthy, and meaningful lives unless we reconnect with nature.

In this final section, we’ll look at how the global rewilding movement, business for good, and the rise of global environmental regulations have come together to create a win-win opportunity for us to rewild the lands and ourselves in a way that reduces emissions and brings our society back into balance.

The science is clear: rewilding can be a core part of delivering the climate commitments established by the Paris Agreement in 2015, which seeks to hold “the increase in global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and, critically, strive “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.” (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change). As you may recall from above, protecting or restoring the habitats of nine species could capture 6.41 billion tons of carbon/year (Schmitz et al. 324).

Despite the US pulling out of the Paris Agreement, every other country is still in. And the big news is that, over the last decade, the Paris Agreement has been adopted by global, regional, national, and sub-national regulatory agencies that have oversight of public businesses. These regulations are legally committing businesses to adhere to the decarbonization goals of the Paris Agreement. In general, businesses are seeking to meet these commitments by: 1) accounting for their emissions; 2) implementing business changes to reduce their impacts; and 3) offsetting the remaining emissions. While the most effective way to reduce emissions is through making changes to business operations and business models, it’s not a path to net-zero. Most companies will need to offset their remaining emissions.

This will create a tremendous pool of corporate capital in search of carbon offsets, which is exactly where rewilding can come into play. I’ll lay out a vision for how this corporate capital can be most effectively allocated to critical rewilding projects. The infrastructure for this work is already being created through groups like the Biodiversity Credit Alliance and The Taskforce on Nature-Related Financial Disclosures. While these institutions are critical, the best they can do it to set a global floor for action. If we need to go beyond this floor to where we need to be, it’ll require the businesses that each of us work for being steered to do more for the natural world. Regulations cannot do this, but the minds and commitments of passionate and rewilded individuals can–and will.

We’ll conclude with a vision for how each of us can support, contribute to, and benefit from this rewilding work in our daily lives.

As we finish our paddle down the river together, I hope that you’ll continue downstream on your own journey of rewilding and agree with my assessment that real change starts with rewilding your mind, for there are rivers just waiting to be explored, even if you live in a city like I do, as long as you know where to look for them.

____

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