Rain Perry

Welcome to A Habit of Hope — a weekly practice of optimism and joy. We get inspired, there’s music, and — at the bottom of the essay — use a set of tools for community and accountability.

Greetings from Southern California. You’ve seen the pictures of Los Angeles — the scope of the devastation is unimaginable. Up here in Ventura County we’ve had a couple fires start but thankfully they were quickly knocked down. Our power is back on after several days; neighbors just down the road are still in the dark. It’s a regular thing now that when there are high wind warnings. Edison shuts off the power prophylactically. We are all on alert.

It’s soooo dry. It hasn’t rained in Southern California since last May. Last year we got a ton of precipitation, which is so lucky because our reservoirs and groundwater basins are currently full. (Ignore the political lies about the water situation. Picture turning on all the taps and hoses in your house at the same time and you can understand why some hydrants had no water pressure in LA.)

Rather than give any attention to folks who would use a tragedy to gain political points, I prefer to do what Mr. Rogers said to do when things are scary: “look for the helpers.”

There are so many helpers in LA. I’ve seen videos of neighbors filling trashcans with water and hauling them across the street to wet down houses. I’ve read messages from dozens of friends offering a place to stay, a place to take a pet, a place to charge phones. There are the linemen and women working in hazardous conditions, day and night, often without much appreciation from frustrated residents, to get the power back on.

And then there are the firefighters - OMG, they are heroes. And the pilots. Check out this water drop. As someone posted: “nothing but net.”

But let’s pull back now and look at this situation from a much higher altitude. Because, though brush fires in California are a natural part of the ecosystem, what’s different now is that with the climate getting hotter, the frequency and impact of fires is vastly more severe. And that requires help of a whole different kind. Who are the helpers at the planetary level?

We all know about Al Gore and Greta Thunberg. But do you know about Kris Tompkins? This petite woman plans to save the Earth.

Kris McDivitt Tompkins grew up between Venezuela (where her father was in the oil business) and her grandfather’s ranch in my husband’s hometown of Santa Paula, CA. After college in Idaho as a ski racer, she came back to Ventura County to join friends Yvon and Malinda Chouinard working in the shipping department of their small specialized climbing gear company Chouinard Equipment. She moved up quickly. Chouinard was the dreamer and she was the planner, and together they transformed the company into the global outdoor clothing powerhouse that is Patagonia, with Kris serving as the company’s first CEO.

I first met Kris at a political fundraiser at her house, but I mostly knew her as the stepsister of a friend and a larger-than-life figure, a local legend. I knew that she and her husband Doug Tompkins, co-founder of The North Face and ESPRIT, had pooled their vast resources and bought a bunch of land in Chile, and were working with the government to turn it into national parks. I heard a story that they were at one time seen as a national security threat because they were the largest private landholder in Chile and one of the largest in the world.

Their audacious vision was to use their own money to restore huge swaths of land and commit to eventually turning it over to Chile, if the government would commit to preserving many times that amount of land in return. So Tompkins Conservation bought up two million acres of backcountry and former estancias, stripped them of barbed wire and emptied them of cattle and sheep, and rewilded them into the dominion of guanacos and pumas and condors.

After years of negotiations, their efforts came to fruition in the pristine mountains, valleys, glaciers, rustic lodges, and stunning hiking trails that are Parque Pumalin, Patagonia National Park and more — fifteen in all.

You can learn about Kris and Doug’s epic work and their epic love for each other in the wonderful documentary Wild Life by filmmakers Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (Free Solo, The Rescue). I knew Kris a little, but wow — seeing it all on screen was awe-inspiring.

In 2015, tragedy struck when Doug was killed in a boating accident, and Kris was faced with continuing on alone. She knew she had a real decision to make: be swamped by grief or get to work. So she got to work. Much like Yvon Chouinard, Doug was the big dreamer and Kris was the practical one. She streamlined the organization and committed to a whole new phase of habitat restoration and reintroduction of species in Chile and Argentina in order to build fully functioning ecosystems.

I have gotten to know Kris as a friend over the past few years, and here are a few things about her: She’s tiny. She’s funny. She’s always moving. And she is utterly focused, balancing an incomprehensible number of projects and funding and partners and plans — driven, as she explains in this lovely interview, by despair that “we as humans are on a collision course,” filled with determination to be “on the team that fights against that trend.” The day after the 2024 election, she was bereft. But then, again, she got back to work. You know that line in Hamilton about “why do you write like you’re running out of time?” That’s Kris at age 74, making phone calls like she’s running out of time.

Because here’s the thing: preserving all that land for its own sake was never the plan. People love to interview her about her accomplishments, as if she saved all that nature and the job is now complete. But restoration is not enough. We can’t just create pockets of natural life — they have to be connected in order for the the natural world to function properly. International wildlife corridors are the next big mission of Tompkins Conservation.

But there’s more. In a speech at tiny Bart’s Books in Ojai, I recently heard Kris introduce a concept I hadn’t heard before: national parks as incubators of life. That’s when I understood that this woman is working at a level I can barely comprehend. Elon Musk is putting his billions into blasting select humans off a destroyed planet to Mars. Kris is doggedly making sure that if things really go to shit here, the national parks just might serve as incubators to restore life on Earth.

Whew.

So I am beyond proud to make Kris McDivitt Tompkins our Person of the Week.

Music

This week, I’m sharing my ode to my beleaguered, beloved state of California, written as a response to our state song “I Love You California.”

Here’s “California I Love You.”

Join me for “A Habit of Hope” Zoom

Ready to join with other folks for a zoom gathering to reinforce our habit of hope? I’d love to have you!

The next session is this coming Monday, January 13, at 5 pm PST for about an hour. Here’s how to do it:

1. Email me to let me know you want the zoom link.

2. Read this draft of a little planner I’m developing that explains my concept of a habit of hope. We’ll discuss three things: “serenity,” “grief,” and “service.” So just start thinking about those three ideas and we’ll simply go around the circle.

In-Person Gathering

We will be gathering soon in person as well, to do creative stuff together. More on that soon!

And again, thank you, so much, for subscribing, and please feel free to pass this on. And if you’re interested in my work as a performer and songwriter, come explore further this website!

xo Rain