Unfolding Maps

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#20: Rewilding the World – with Kristine Tompkins

She was a successful CEO of the clothing manufacturer Patagonia and played a decisive role in building the company. And then left everything behind to move to the wilderness of the actual Patagonia in Chile. For nature conservation – and for love.


Our guest in this episode is Kristine Tompkins, an environmentalist and the president of Tompkins Conservation. She has been working tirelessly for three decades to protect the environment. And what she and her late husband Doug Tompkins have achieved is truly amazing.


Like Kristine, Doug himself was very successful in the outdoor clothing market in his first life, co-founding the brands "The North Face" and "Esprit".

When Kristine and him eventually sold their shares, they began to buy up private land in Chile and Argentina, to restore it at great effort, to combine it into protected areas, and to finally hand it over to the government as national parks to protect this land forever.


Thanks to the work of Kristine and Doug, new national parks with an area larger than that of the whole of Switzerland have been established in Chile alone. The couple is considered as some of the most successful national park-oriented philanthropists in history.


Currently, Kristine – as President of Tompkins Conservation – is overseeing a number of projects in Chile and Argentina aimed at creating even more national parks and reserves and halting the extinction of species by reintroducing native species that are threatened or locally extinct – such as the jaguar.

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6/1/2022

#31: A World in Crisis (and what to do about it) – with Jared Diamond

What can we learn from the tribes in the rainforest of New Guinea? What are the greatest dangers facing humanity and the earth today, and how can they be overcome? These are some of the many questions we address in this conversation with a leading scientist that has been voted one of the world's top ten intellectuals by various British and American magazines and who researches and writes on just about everything that makes up human existence – think "universal genius": Jared Diamond.He studied physiology at Harvard and Cambridge and became a leading expert on the gallbladder. He is also an ornithologist, anthropologist, sociologist, evolutionary biologist, ecologist, and environmental historian with expertise in archaeology, genetics, and human disease epidemiology. He is also a professor of geography in Los Angeles.And then he is also one of the most successful authors of popular science nonfiction. His works have been translated into some forty languages, and for the world bestseller "Guns, Germs, and Steel. The Fates of Human Societies" he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1998. His other books include "Collapse. How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed", "The World until Yesterday" and his most recent work "Upheaval – How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change".For all that, Jared Diamond is not only a master of lab work and literature research, but he is and has been on the road himself all over the world (over thirty times in New Guinea alone), he is fluent in over a dozen languages ... So: more than enough material for a wide-ranging conversation about a unique scientific career – and about the world we live in.