Lisa Groot

the luckiest girl you know, not always great with directions

[The Washington Post @washingtonpost]

The coronavirus vaccine reduced the risk of major cardiovascular events linked to covid-19 — strokes, heart attacks, and hospitalization from heart disease — by about 40 percent, according to new research. https://t.co/cQjvi8EMpX

[PixByPedro @PedDronio]

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

[Lisa Groot @LisaGroot312]

@LeeKuanYimby Rage bait, he doesn’t even go here.

[Lisa Groot @LisaGroot312]

@BTSHobiBrit @xKayyKrueger @Ky1eKatarn Thank you!!!!

[Lisa Groot @LisaGroot312]

@alexpotato @OrevaZSN Wait I loved them! Click and Clack something, yes?

[Lisa Groot @LisaGroot312]

@StuLoren Actual wealth 🥂

[Lisa Groot @LisaGroot312]

@chicagobars @USPS @OIGUSPS do you know anyone in the Chicago operations dept who can help us out?

[Lisa Groot @LisaGroot312]

@sth314 @CWBChicago D’Anthony Thedford. Saved you the click!

[Lisa Groot @LisaGroot312]

@NiseiLounge Paying with crypto

[Lisa Groot @LisaGroot312]

@KrisHabermehl Appreciate the update, thank you!

[Jo @JoJoFromJerz]

We really needed some good news for a change, didn’t we? 🥹

[Lisa Groot @LisaGroot312]

@felitraxx @Eric_Erins … or Fox & Obel?

[c 🍒 @cynthiajpeg]

Chicago Marie Illinois, ima need you to make up your mind on this weather girl

[Lisa Groot @LisaGroot312]

@phonybone Hungry Brain on Belmont, just south of Western

[Lisa Groot @LisaGroot312]

@Chicago_Sully Which site did you use to find your W tix?

[Lisa Groot @LisaGroot312]

@Libs_OfChicago Agree! Or even an official day, maybe Pete Kastanes Day?

[Baseball’s Greatest Moments @BBGreatMoments]

This is the still the craziest thing I’ve ever seen on a baseball diamond.

[James Kirchick @jkirchick]

Very proud of my husband for forgoing his severance package to speak out about the desecration he witnessed of the “Trump” Kennedy Center. @theatlantic

https://t.co/la2j7yxkmF

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Doug Tompkins co-founded The North Face in 1966. He sold his share a few years later for $50,000. The real money came later, from a clothing brand called Esprit that he built with his first wife. He walked away from fashion in his forties and spent the rest of his life buying up wild land in South America and giving it away as national parks.

He died in 2015. His kayak flipped on a freezing Chilean lake while he was paddling with friends, including Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia (the clothing company). Doug spent almost two hours in near-freezing water before he was pulled out. The hypothermia killed him. He was 72.

The 800,000 hectares everyone keeps posting (about 2 million acres) is just the land Doug and his wife personally handed over. Kris took over after he died. She had been the CEO of Patagonia, the same clothing brand Yvon founded, named after the very region the couple was busy protecting. In 2018 Kris handed a million acres of their own land to the government of Chile. It is still the biggest land gift any private group has ever made to a country. Chile thanked them by upgrading nine million more acres of nearby state land to national park status.

Add it all up and you get about 15 million acres now protected across Chile and Argentina. More land than all of Switzerland. Thirteen new national parks have been created, with several more expanded. A 1,700-mile road called the "Route of Parks" connects them, running from the middle of Chile down to the bottom tip of South America. More than 90% of Chile's protected land is now in Patagonia.

Buying the land was just step one. They also brought in biologists to put the missing animals back. Jaguars are back in Argentina's wetlands after 70 years gone. So are giant otters, small native deer, and Andean condors (the huge South American vultures with wingspans up to 10 feet).

The latest piece is being finalized this spring. Chile is about to declare Cape Froward, at the very southern tip of the continent, the country's 47th national park. The land came from another 314,000 acres (about the size of Grand Teton) that Kris's foundation transferred to the Chilean government in late 2025.

Doug got the project off the ground. Kris closed the biggest pieces after he was gone. More than three decades of work, four hundred million dollars of their own money, and roughly 15 million acres now protected as national parkland.