Tompkins, 72, passed away on December 8, 2015, died of hypothermia after a kayak accident at a lake in the south of Chile. Photo / AFP

In 1985, Douglas Tompkins was the millionaire co-founder of two successful clothing companies, the North Face and Esprit. He was courted by magazine editors and politicians, revered by the San Francisco hippie elite. Girls' fashion - incredibly, for a man who dressed every day in the same old polo and blue jeans - turned on his company's marketing campaigns.

By 1990, he gave it all up and moved to the end of the world.

Tompkins died yesterday after a kayaking accident in Chile sent him to the hospital with fatal hypothermia. He was 72. Tompkins will be better remembered in the United States as the guy who brought domed tents to hippie hikers and brightly patterned "casual wear" to the Reagan-era teenage masses.

But in Chile's Patagonia, where he spent the last two decades of his life, he is the man who tried to buy paradise, not to exploit it, as so many millionaires like him had done throughout history, but to preserve it.

"We only have one shot at this," Tompkins told the Guardian in 2009. "We need to pay our dues to live on this earth; we need to pay the rent and I'm doing that with the work we are carrying out here in Patagonia."

Tompkins went from a board room in San Francisco to the front lines of the battle between conservation and development in the most remote region of Chile.

The New York Times says he is survived by his wife, Kristine, daughters Quincey Tompkins Imhoff and Summer Tompkins Walker, mother, Faith, and brother, John.

He hoped people would remember him, he told the Chilean magazine Paula last month, by the pristine landscapes he never left a mark on.

- Washington Post, Bloomberg