PUMALIN PARK, Chile -- Both made their fortunes in trendy West Coast-based apparel: she with the Patagonia label, he as co-founder of the Esprit line.

And both jettisoned the boardrooms and fashion shows to devote accumulated millions to a singular, and contentious, cause: preserving the wilderness of this continent's southern cone, from the rain forests and arid steppes of Patagonia to the wetlands and savannas of northeastern Argentina.

"I come from California, where there is still great beauty, but California has been absolutely overrun," Kristine Tompkins said in the couple's cozy gray-shingled home on Renihue fjord, along the Pacific coast. It is about 700 miles south of Santiago, the Chilean capital.

Kris Tompkins is more diplomatic than her outspoken husband, Douglas Tompkins, a counterculture veteran who walked away from Esprit with a reported $150 million in 1990, split with his then-wife and business partner and remade himself in South America as a patron of preservation. Here, in a region with no tradition of private citizens buying land for conservation, he has been alternately reviled and acclaimed.

Not known for modesty, Mr. Tompkins sees himself in the tradition of the Rockefellers and other "eco-philanthropists" who faced down developers and bought lands that eventually were incorporated into U.S. national parks.

"Parks generate tremendous local opposition at first -- it's a given," said Mr. Tompkins. "Then, after a while, once the thing gets established, the locals are the most fierce defenders. Sometimes it takes 20 years."

Many tycoons have been drawn to the mountains, plains and coasts of Patagonia, a region that straddles southern Chile and Argentina. CNN's Ted Turner, financier George Soros and Italy's wealthy Benetton Group have purchased expansive tracts. But the Tompkinses live on their land, preaching ecology and serving as lightning rods for nationalistic ire and paranoia.

"I know in my heart that land and issues about land and land usage strike at the very depth of our hearts," Kris Tompkins, 55, says of the local controversy that has shadowed their efforts.

Using several foundations and investing more than $150 million, the couple have bought more than 2 million acres of varied terrain in South America. They have accumulated parts of volcanoes, glaciers and 1,000-year-old stands of alerce trees, a larch species that Chile declared national monuments in 1976.

A fleet of Cessna planes ferries these eco-barons about their domain, with Doug Tompkins, a longtime pilot, surveying his lands with the same fervor once employed in designing Esprit emporia. He repeatedly berates the "techno-industrial society," despite the aircraft, satellite phone, computers and other gadgets that surround him.

His Pumalin Park project here in southern Chile, Mr. Tompkins' signature effort (named after pumas, the local cougars), sprawls over 762,000 acres, as extensive as Yosemite National Park. It also slices this narrow nation in two, a fact that irritates Chileans.

What may be noblesse oblige comes across to many as arrogant, even imperious. Chileans have accused Mr. Tompkins of being a CIA agent, Israeli spy, cultist and clandestine gold miner. Others don't want an American telling them what to do, even if they agree with his intent. Many see him as inflexible -- he opposes roads or power lines through Pumalin, for instance.

"Tompkins generates resistance and some support because his positions are so fundamentalist," says conservative Chilean Sen. Antonio Horvath, who argues that the U.S. public would never accept foreign land purchases that cut an entire state in half. "I can't imagine a situation where people traveling from Washington or New York to Miami, for instance, would be obliged to do it only by ferry or air."

For Mr. Tompkins, saving the land is all. He professes concern for those who work in the forests, pastures or seas, but insists that the "salmoneros," gauchos, lumbermen, shepherds and others displaced by his environmental scheme must find other employment, perhaps in ecotourism. That attitude has alienated many.

"I think a lot of what Senor Tompkins has done to preserve the land is admirable, but we can't all live off the beauty," said Yvonne Catin Romero, 25, a neighbor who ferries tourists on her boat in Renihue fjord but also raises salmon, an industry Mr. Tompkins abhors as polluting. "Salmon is important for many people's livelihood here."

The road to Patagonia

Son of a New York antiques dealer, Mr. Tompkins, 63, dropped out of prep school on the East Coast to explore the West, before founding the North Face outdoor equipment label in 1964.

He first visited Patagonia as an aspiring Olympic ski racer in the early 1960s. He and buddy Yvon Chouinard (who later founded the Patagonia label) drove a van from California to Tierra del Fuego in 1968, surfing the Peruvian coast, skiing the Andes and blazing a new route up Mount Fitzroy, whose spires were adopted as the Patagonia logo.

The next year, Mr. Tompkins co-founded Esprit with his then-wife Susie Russell. The San Francisco-based firm was a runaway hit before the much-publicized discord between husband and wife.

Abandoning the business with fortune in hand, Mr. Tompkins became a missionary of the "deep ecology" movement pioneered by Arne Naess of Norway, who argues that only a "deep" transformation of society can head off ecological ruin.

Mr. Tompkins first purchased land in Chile in 1990 after scouting Canada, Alaska and other locales. "The clouds were all just hanging around," he recalled. "That was just incredible that day. I thought, 'This is the place.'"

The Tompkinses, who had known each other for more than 20 years through mutual acquaintances, wed in 1994.

A fourth-generation Californian, Kris Tompkins worked in Chouinard's mountaineering shop during college and became general manager, then chief executive as the firm expanded into clothing. When she moved to Chile, she sold her stock back to Chouinard and used the proceeds to found Conservacion Patagonica.

"I hope everybody has the experience of going to a place and somehow just instinctively you know that it's your place, it's where you belong," she said. "And in my personal experience, the Patagonia region is mine."

Perhaps the couple's most persistent adversary has been the fast-expanding farmed-salmon industry, a $1 billion-plus concern that is a major source of wealth for southern Chile. Wastes from the salmon pens along the shoreline are generating "dead zones" on the ocean floor, he and others argue.

Chilean salmon executives, major exporters to the United States, say their procedures are in accord with international standards.

"We are not going to be intimidated by imperialist boasts or frivolities of the millionaire gringo," Carlos Vial, president of SalmonChile, the principal trade group, told reporters last year after Mr. Tompkins proposed a moratorium. "We are not going to accept a sub-nation in our own region with rules dictated by a fanatic."

Growing list of battles

At the moment, Mr. Tompkins is fighting a Spanish firm's plans for a $4 billion hydroelectric plant in Patagonia to serve energy-starved Chile.

Mr. Tompkins probably has as many admirers as he does detractors. The Chilean government, once hostile, last year bestowed national sanctuary status on Pumalin Park, which is visited by about 10,000 tourists a year and considered a success.

Besides Pumalin, which remains in a private trust, the Tompkinses have helped create Corcovado National Park and Monte Leon National Park, site of a penguin rookery along the coast of Argentine Patagonia. In dozens of other conservation undertakings, the couple have chipped in with cash, advice or both.

These days, much of Doug Tompkins energy is expended across the Andes Mountains, in northeastern Argentina, where he bought 600,000 acres of ranches, forests, farmland -- even a sawmill -- in threatened wetlands known as Esteros del Ibera. His plans include the reintroduction of species that were wiped out there, including the giant river otter, the giant anteater and the jaguar.

To the south, Kris Tompkins is taking the lead in the proposed Patagonia National Park, its centerpiece a sheep ranch of 173,000 acres purchased by her foundation for $10 million after a bitter battle with rival Chilean businessmen. The 20,000 sheep and 3,000 cows are being sold off.

The couple have enough going on to keep them busy for a long time. Both vow to live past 100.

"We're living our life here, and we like it," Kris Tompkins said. "Doing the work we believe in. Work that gets us up and out of bed every day."