Kris was born and raised on a ranch in southern California, except for a three-year stint in Venezuela. At age 15, she met and befriended rock climbing legend and equipment manufacturer Yvon Chouinard; he gave her a summer job working for Chouinard Equipment, his climbing gear company. After finishing college in Idaho, where she ski-raced competitively, she started to work full time for what then became Patagonia, Inc. During her 20 years as CEO, Kris helped Yvon build Patagonia into a renowned “anti-corporation” and a leader in the outdoor apparel industry. Recognizing that manufacturing inherently causes pollution, Patagonia became a model of corporate responsibility, mitigating its ecological impacts and educating its customers about threats to the Earth. In 1993, Kris retired from Patagonia, married Doug, and moved to south Chile.

Many people ask why Doug and Kris choose to live and work in South America. Doug first came to Chile in 1961 to ski race; he returned numerous times in the following decades, gaining experience of the country’s wildest rivers and mountains. As he left the business world and looked around the planet for conservation opportunities, Chile stood out as a place with big potential. South Chile had growing threats to its wild character from forestry, mining, hydro dams, and industrial aquaculture. When Kris visited Patagonia, she fell in love with its vast grasslands, diverse landscapes, and bountiful wildlife.

For most of the 1990s, Doug and Kris focused on creating Pumalín Park, a public-access 800,000-acre nature reserve in the south of Chile’s Lakes Region. In 1997, conservation colleagues in Argentina introduced them to the biodiversity-rich Iberá wetlands in northeastern Argentina. While its subtropical, humid climate differed from Pumalín’s, its vibrant biodiversity made it an equally appealing opportunity to conserve critical habitat. In 2000, Kris founded Conservacion Patagonica to create national parks in Patagonia, the southernmost region of Chile and Argentina.