Oh My Flying Dolphins

@forallcurious That’s real impact… When success turns into protection instead of profit, it becomes legacy. True wealth isn’t ownership it’s preservation.

🚨: The founder of The North Face bought more than 800,000 hectares in Patagonia to preserve natural beauty and habitat.

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.

After he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, Albert Camus wrote a letter of thanks to his favorite childhood teacher, whom he'd never forgotten. It's beautiful.

So when are they going to ask Franklin Graham and Paula White to stay out of politics?

This

Long unofficially banned from appearing on state TV, incoming Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Magyar appears on a channel to which he was previously not allowed only to announce an end of "North Korean" style Orban media monopoly.

The accused assailant is a British immigrant who became a U.S. citizen in 2022, meaning he got his green card in 2017 or earlier. The idea that Biden or his policies had anything to do with this is purely inflammatory political messaging divorced from any facts.

We don’t allow mining in Yellowstone. We don’t allow mining in Glacier. We don’t allow mining in Yosemite. We don’t allow mining in Zion. We don't allow mining in Acadia. We don't allow mining in Grand Teton. We shouldn’t allow mining in the Boundary Waters.

I think we should all be able to agree that old growth trees like this should be protected, not cut down to make expensive furniture.

For all those still feeling the moon joy—Artemis II was brought to you by public schools and publicly funded science. Copy that! 👩‍🚀🚀💕 *All four astronauts went to public schools!

We're making some huge progress with George Clooney. His skin will take another couple of weeks to heal but look at his body language now. He's out walking and everything.

they’re protesting two senators who voted against this war *and* don’t belong to the party in power. geniuses.

One of LBJ's favorite songs during his often-unhappy self-imposed Texas retirement was the anti-Vietnam War Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water": "When you're weary, feeling small, when tears are in your eyes... And friends just can't be found..."

A perfect image of the Trump era: A grandmother has to work at DoorDash in order to get by, while the president decorates his office in gold accent pieces.

The symmetry of this turn in the air.

For those who think America cannot recover from the damage Trump has wrought, Hungary should provide some hope.

@TimothyDSnyder @pkhinkle we have the collective liberty of individuals in our representative Republic Simply means the goal was for us IS to remain engaged .. differ disagree and then debate that is democracy do what you can please folks Be the demos [the people] who own the representation we lead

As the Hungarian example confirms, and the Polish one before that, the key to large turnout in actual practice is prior long-term, grass-roots organizational labor that helps people to understand how their single vote is a dignified part of a larger transformation.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”