Quotes from Douglas Tompkins

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.

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

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

Deskilling devices - they make us dumber. We're immersed in a system that now requires the use of a cell phone just to get around, just to function, and so the logic of that cell phone has been imposed on us.

If you just hold your cell phone for 30 seconds and think backwards through its production, you have the entire techno-industrial culture wrapped up there. You can't have that device without everything that goes with it.

The Canadian power line is going to industrialize Patagonia, and it is going to discount the one economic card the region has to play, which is the tourism.

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.

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.

It doesn't seem to be worth wasting a lot of energy on attempting to rewrite the past.

People have to free their imaginations and realize everyone can do something, on a large or a small scale, depending on their ability. Those who can do a lot because of their position and potential should jump right in there.

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.

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

I don't have a cell phone because I know how horrible it is. Using your cell phone is like putting your head in a microwave every day.

Conservation is not without its critics and opposition. There are a lot of special interests that don't want to see land set aside.

National Parks are the gold standard for conservation.

Once we establish an architectural style in each park, we stick with it religiously and comprehensively so that it comes out as a gestalt.

I know all of the antiques stores in Buenos Aires. I've been in every one of them, picking things out.

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.

For those of us (those that have the desire to explore the world unknown) that grew up going out into the wilds of the world...we got into our souls a sense of beauty.