How to save the wild? For a number of eco-friendly entrepeneurs, the answer is to buy and build.

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A person feels different—more alive—when standing alone someplace beautiful. That is what happened to Laurance Rockefeller, the venture capitalist son of John D. Rockefeller Jr. about a half-century ago when he first stepped onto the island of St. John. It was a stop-off on a Caribbean cruise trip, and he was so moved by the place that he bought up 5,000 acres only to turn around and give them right back, founding the Virgin Islands National Park in 1956. To give park visitors somewhere to sleep in comfort, he built the Caneel Bay Plantation next door.

Two actions you don’t often see carried out by the same individual are the building of hotels and the shielding of the wild from the big, wide-jaw bite of industry—from the bulldozer and the oil drill and the sort of overdevelopment you see on most white-sand beaches today. But right now Laurance Rockefeller’s story is being repeated by a handful of entrepreneurs-turned-conservationists, people who (unlikely as it sounds) are actually building resorts in order to save vast tracts of surrounding land.

Kris Tompkins was the CEO of the outdoor clothing company Patagonia when she decided to do the equivalent of a glacier jump in her career. “We grew up as sea racers, climbers, and being out of doors always, and we didn’t realize how much imperiled wildlife had become,” she recalls about herself and her husband, The North Face and Esprit founder Doug Tompkins. Kris retired from the clothing business at age 43, sold her Patagonia clothing shares, and used the money to found the Patagonia Land Trust. “We set out to do something meaningful with our lives, and in our case it was to buy land and preserve it.”

Together Kris and Doug, who split their time between Patagonia and Chile, have bought more than 2 million acres of forest, mountain range, and seacoast in Argentina and Chile and then given all the land—or close to it all—away to the governments of their adopted countries. Their motivation, Kris explains, is that the donated land will always be under “some form of permanent protection.”

Her first project for the Patagonia Land Trust was to purchase Monté Leon, 155,000 starkly beautiful, windswept acres of cliffs and coastline in Patagonia. In 2002 Tompkins donated Monté Leon to Argentina, creating the country’s first national coastal park. From the gift, however, she set aside 800 acres where a converted sheep rancher’s house now operates as a boutique hotel

Guests at Monté Leon can hike, horseback ride, fish for steelhead trout, or simply do what Kris does every time she’s there—“go to the beach and hang out with the penguins.” The park’s 25-mile shore is home to one of the Atlantic coast’s largest Magellanic penguin colonies.

“There are very few places on this earth now where you can go and just sit with wild nature and watch it in a relaxed way. That’s what we do,” she notes. On the other side of the cliffs, you can see guanacos (a llama look-alike), red foxes, pumas, armadillos, and endangered Darwin’s rheas, which resemble ostriches. Kris’s foundation has ripped out more than 400 miles of fencing from the land so the animals can roam freely.

The vision behind her buy-to-save strategy is as simple as her fence-free backyard is big. “I hope that people begin connecting with wildness,” she emphasizes, “with animals and forests that haven’t been cut down because I really do believe that people protect those things they love.”

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