2023 Ken Burns American Heritage Prize Recipient:
Kristine McDivitt Tompkins

Kristine McDivitt Tompkins is the president and co-founder of Tompkins Conservation, an American conservationist, and former CEO of Patagonia, Inc. For three decades, she has been committed to protecting and restoring wild beauty and biodiversity by creating national parks, restoring wildlife, inspiring activism, and fostering economic vitality as a result of conservation.

Kristine and her late husband, Douglas Tompkins, have protected approximately 14.8 million acres of parklands in Chile and Argentina through Tompkins Conservation and its partners, making them among the most successful national park-oriented philanthropists in history.

Through Tompkins Conservation and its offspring organizations, Rewilding Argentina and Rewilding Chile, she has helped to create or expand 15 national parks, including two marine national parks, in Argentina and Chile, and works to bring back species that have gone locally or nationally extinct, such as the jaguar, red-and-green macaw, and giant river otters in Northeast Argentina, as well as Darwin’s rheas and extremely endangered huemul deer in Chile.

Kristine served as Patron for Protected Areas for the UN Environmental Programme from 2018-2022. The recipient of numerous honors, she was the first conservationist to be awarded the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy. Her 2020 TED Talk "Let's Make the World Wild Again" has been viewed over two million times.