Mr. Douglas Tomkins, founder of two clothing companies, North Face and Esprit, says he “made way too much money” in these businesses. “Before I was a businessman, I was a mountaineer, and I came to know and love some of the world's wildest, most beautiful remaining places.” In 1990, he says, “I sold all my business interests, immersed myself in the literature of deep ecology[,] … and have for the last twelve years spent virtually all my resources – time and money – to protect wild nature.”

Tomkins has purchased about 800,000 acres of land in Chile to form a nature reserve protecting, among many other natural wonders, about 35 percent of Chile's remaining alerce, a gigantic tree that can live for four thousand years. The wilderness forests could have been harvested for pulp. Some of the land, once clear-cut, might have been farmed to provide fresh produce for winter consumption in the United States. Fjords there might have served as sites for salmon aquaculture. According to Adriana Delpiano, Chile's Minister of National Property, “Chile already has 2.5 million acres of national parks, and we don't need any more.” She and others complain that Tomkin's nature reserve ties up too much resource-rich “land that could be used for development.”

An Economic Rationale for Preservation

In the United States, the conflict between preservation and development is an old story. For more than a century, preservationists have offered ethical and spiritual rather than economic arguments for protecting natural areas.