Douglas Tompkins

“If you take guys like Exequiel Bustillo, the architect who designed the early park infrastructure in Argentina, or the great American architects, these guys had a vision that thrust the national park idea into the public eye.”

“As we get sucked more and more into the technosphere, we become less and less capable of understanding it because it becomes a technological milieu that we're in.”

“Resource efficiency is the wrong metric. We should use nature as the measure, using nature's wisdom as a template for our economic systems.”

“Look at how fast technology is developing.”

“I learned from my parents that you have to get pleasure out of what you're doing, or don't do it.”

“When we began working on Parque Pumalin, rumours flew that we were establishing a nuclear waste site for the United States or, oddly for Episcopalians, which we both are, setting up a Jewish state. It would be funny if these theories weren't being taken very seriously.”

“It's very complicated when you are reorganizing territories under different ministries. We have to get them all together and transfer jurisdictions. It's a bureaucratic slalom course we have to ski through, but it can be done.”

“I'm sort of half-Chilean at this point anyway, half-Argentine. This is where I have been living and working for a long time now.”

“National parks are the best expression of social equity that there is. It's like paying our rent for living on the planet.”

“Capitalism may have all sorts of things that are good, but ultimately, it's bad for everyone.”

“I tell myself to hurry up, that I have to do everything before death catches me.”

“There are emotional relationships in any business.”

“Despite my great disappointment in American foreign policy, I am very proud of the American tradition of wild land conservation. It is the best tradition and example of land conservation in the world. It goes back a long way.”

“We need to pay our dues to live on this earth; we need to pay the rent, and I'm doing that with the work we are carrying out here in Patagonia.”

“Fashion is one of the most intellectually vacuous industries. We had to manufacture desires to get people to buy our products. We were selling people countless things that they didn't need.”

“I'm short on celebrations and long on getting to work.”

“I have even begun to think that I am caring for Argentina and Chile perhaps more than Argentines and Chileans. I feel like I'm sort of a de facto citizen, because I am looking after their national patrimony - which is the land - very carefully.”

“If you want to destroy the planet, you can kiss social justice goodbye. The earth comes first.”

“The byproduct of the main thrust to protect the biodiversity of a given place is that you get especially young people out to the parks, because it will be future generations that will have to value these landscapes and these ecosystems and make sure that nobody is changing the law.”

“I don't think capitalism can survive.”