Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi
Disney+
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DON鈥橳 be fooled by the Grateful Dead concert near the beginning of Wild Life. This documentary isn鈥檛 about happy-go-lucky hippies who fell backwards into money, it is about three major outdoor apparel companies and the people who founded and controlled them. It is also the story of how two of those people, Doug and Kristine Tompkins, spent years engineering the largest private land donation in history, all to save diverse and degrading ecosystems.
Kristine (then McDivitt) met rock climber Yvon Chouinard in 1965 and went on to help him turn his blacksmithing business (making climbing gear) into a leading outdoor brand, Patagonia.
Chouinard conceived it as an 鈥渁nti-corporation鈥�, campaigning to preserve the environments its products let you explore. By the early 1990s, Chouinard, despairing of the garment industry鈥檚 green footprint, had started promoting advertising copy that .
That was when Kristine decided there had to be more to life, and she quit her role as Patagonia鈥檚 CEO. She wanted something 鈥渨ild鈥� and 鈥渙utrageous鈥�. By teaming up with and marrying Doug, she got it.
Doug and his first wife, Susie, were Kristine鈥檚 friends and corporate rivals. It was they who got Grateful Dead to play at the opening of their store, The North Face. They founded the clothing brand Esprit as well.
Some years on, a divorced Doug was out of the business, living in Chile and trying to buy into conservation. As Chile emerged from the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, the last thing it needed was for its land to be bought and (as many suspected) parcelled off by a US tycoon.
Doug and Kristine were married in 1993, and they had ideas for a public nature reserve. But the plan not only looked unfamiliar, it split Chile 鈥� a long, thin strip between the Andes and the coast 鈥� in two.
The country was slow to warm to their ideas, the film shows. But, over time, the couple acquired nearly a million hectares in Chile (and Argentina) that they hoped would become national parks.
Doug died in 2015 after a sea kayaking accident. His death, Kristine says, nearly finished her. Instead, she has expanded on the work they had started. She has triumphed. For every hectare Kristine has donated up to 2018, Chile has set aside 9 hectares. Seventeen wildlife parks have been created, covering nearly 6 million hectares (about five times the combined size of Yosemite and Yellowstone national parks).
Wild Life sets out to capture breathtaking shots of unfamiliar ecosystems, while building an intimate portrait of a remarkable couple through interviews and archive footage. The film is billed as a love story, and Kristine鈥檚 presence on camera, her passion and her continuing grief after Doug鈥檚 death are visceral.
None of the film-makers is in the business of asking difficult questions about capital鈥檚 role in conservation. But Kristine proves more than capable of asking them herself. She would be the first to highlight issues their work raises around private capital, wild land and the project鈥檚 stakeholders.
Ultimately, Wild Life succeeds because it treats the pair鈥檚 success as a conservation highlight. We aren鈥檛 going to save the world by buying it, but a corner has been rescued and filled with jaguars, red and green macaws and giant river otters. That should be both a provocation and a challenge. Has anyone got any better ideas?
Simon also recommends鈥�
John Muir
Scottish-born American preservationist and naturalist John Muir launched the environmental movement with this magisterial account of California鈥檚 western forests.
Martin MacInnes (Atlantic Books)
Martin MacInnes鈥檚 magnificent, grotesque second novel explores our anxious suspicion that humanity鈥檚 mere presence on Earth is destroying it.
Simon Ings is a novelist and science writer. Follow him on Instagram at @simon_ings
