Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

Despite thinking evil is more powerful than good, Chouinard doesn’t believe people are evil. Rather, he thinks most of the “evil” people do results from either failing to trace the consequences of their actions past themselves or being unwilling to be responsible for those consequences. This “lack of imagination,” as he calls it, is even enshrined in law in the limited liability corporation (LLC). In the 18th and 19th centuries, the railroads and other big companies designed LLCs to cap the amount of damage they were liable for because it was too large to be insured. This effectively insulated people from their actions: “Limited liability corporations are institutions created explicitly to separate humans from the effects of their actions—making them, by definition, inhuman and inhumane” (481).

There are financial motives for not tracing problems to their original cause. For example, a fraction of cancer research dollars goes to investigating the environmental causes of cancer, which have caused the risk of breast cancer, for example, to increase from 5% in the 1940s to 13% in 2016. Under the current system, there is profit in finding the cure, not in addressing the root cause: “the large cancer organizations whose boards are made up of the CEOs of chemical and pharmaceutical companies that have a vested interest in keeping the research focused on drug therapies and away from pollution” (487).

Both people and companies must be clear-eyed in assessing their impact on the environment to pursue meaningful environmental remediation.

To be a credible corporate steward of environmentalism, Patagonia needs to practice what it preaches. Patagonia’s environmental assessment program investigates the environmental impacts of production to identify what the company can make greener. It has found that the greener options, while more expensive if measured by cost that omits environmental damage, are always more profitable than their counterparts. Because fabric manufacture is unavoidably unsustainable, Patagonia’s end goal is to eliminate the need for new materials and make “clothing that can be recycled infinitely into similar or equal products” (498). In the meantime, the company operates a repair center to limit the demand for more of its clothes. Through its Worn Wear program, it also teaches its retail employees to perform basic repairs to reduce the environmental footprint of shipping and to reduce turnaround for customers.

On the manufacturing side, Patagonia works with its contractors to establish better conditions for factory workers. In its offices, Patagonia saves money and reduces its environmental footprint by eliminating things like plastic garbage bags and Styrofoam cups and installing solar panels.

Patagonia also encourages its employees in their own activism and matches their donations to social and environmental groups. This encouragement generates results, such as the (employee-driven) designation of almost two million acres of wilderness in Nevada in 2004.

The US government encourages the opposite. It subsidizes the unsustainable logging industry even though wood makes inferior buildings (in Europe most buildings are made with other materials for this reason). By subsidizing oil, it artificially lowers the true cost of gasoline, encouraging consumer use of fuel-inefficient cars. As such, it’s up to consumers to realize both that they’re part of the problem and that they can be part of the solution by voting with their dollar.

Despite Patagonia’s environmental efforts, the products it makes still pollute. Until it can find a way to eliminate that pollution, it does penance through a self-imposed tax. In the 1980s it started by committing 2% of its profits to nonprofit grassroots environmental groups, eventually going to 10%, the maximum allowed as a tax deduction. In 1996 it changed its tax to 1% of sales, meaning that it had to give even in years when it lost money. These donations have produced significant results. For example, in 1990 Patagonia gave two organizations—Ecotrust and Na’na’kila—the biggest grants it’s given. This money resulted in the preservation of almost a million acres of old growth forest in the Kitlope area of British Columbia that had been under threat of clear cutting. Despite successes such as this, there is more demand than Patagonia can satisfy with its tax: It has to turn down three out of four groups that ask for support.

Exercising civil democracy through activism is a crucial aspect of influencing government and corporations. Activists have secured innumerable environmental wins, from falconers saving the peregrine falcon from near extinction to the defeat of the Keystone XL pipeline by a heterogenous cohort of citizens. Specifically, small, grassroots activist groups are more effective than cumbersome, bureaucratic nonprofits or government because of their passion and commitment. This is the reason Patagonia gives 1% of its sales to this type of grassroots organization instead of larger nonprofits. It’s also the reason Patagonia hosts a Tools for Grassroots Activists conference every year and a half. These small groups are often unequipped to confront big business or government, so Patagonia teaches the business and marketing skills the organizations need to survive.

Many new Patagonia employees question why the company gives to environmental causes seemingly at the exclusion of social ones. The company wants to address the root of the problem, not its symptoms. Environmental degradation affects poor people the most and often causes them to further exploit nature to survive. By seeking to mitigate environmental crises, Patagonia hopes to ease the pressure these crises put on the poor.

Sometimes, Patagonia realizes it is better equipped than any organization to tackle a particular problem. Chouinard and a restoration ecologist recognized the need to change Americans’ attitudes about hydropower and advocate for the removal of destructive dams. Working with filmmakers who knew the topic, Patagonia produced the 2014 documentary DamNation. The movie exposed the myth that hydropower is green and showed that dam removal can “restore endangered wildlife, reduce methane emissions, build coastal resiliency, and eliminate public safety hazards” (538). It generated a petition to remove dams on the Snake River in Washington and provided the final motivation for politicians in Helsinki, Finland, to remove a dam on a river that flows through the city.

Reducing harm, as Patagonia does, doesn’t equate to doing good; clothing manufacture pollutes no matter how it’s done, and furthermore the company’s harm reduction could have been offset by its growth. The company is left with the question of whether it’s possible to operate in a way that would have a net benefit on people and the planet.

This self-examination led Chouinard to found a food company, Patagonia Provisions, in 2013 to become an industry leader in food as he had in clothing. Agriculture demands a lot of the world’s resources—30% of habitable land and 70% of fresh water—and is environmentally destructive as practiced as it is in the United States. Furthermore, the amount of food produced must increase 50% from 2016 production to meet global demand, but the current methods of industrial agriculture are unsustainable. Industrial agriculture destroys topsoil, pollutes air and water, and squeezes the small farmer. Despite the fact that natural farming produces more food per acre, industrial agriculture continues because of government subsidies and because the depletion of soil from these methods has made farmers dependent on them to keep producing food.

Switching to alternative techniques such as crop rotation and composting can restore soil in two years. Farming with healthy soil costs less than with unhealthy soil because it requires less water and yields more crops during drought. It also sequesters carbon dioxide: By a conservative estimate, a global switch to these regenerative techniques would sequester total annual emissions of carbon dioxide. All of Patagonia Provision’s providers employ these regenerative methods that actually enhance rather than degrade ecosystems. For example, their salmon is fished in a way that avoids bycatch and has a minimal carbon footprint. The buffalo used for their jerky improve the soil’s carbon-sequestration capacity by grinding it and eating the grass, which then regrows using more carbon. Finally, Patagonia is developing ways to use Kernza grains in food. Kernza is an ancient perennial similar to a low-gluten wheat grain that requires fewer pesticides and less labor than other grains. Its deep, dense roots make it drought resistant and also fix soil and its nutrients, preventing erosion. With Provisions, Patagonia hopes to effect the net benefit on the environment that it cannot with clothing.

Yvon and Malinda stayed in business with the hope that they could effect more change through the company’s influence than they could on their own. They did influence change, but to have a more direct influence, Patagonia started a venture capital firm called Tin Shed Ventures that invests in environmentally responsible for-profit startups.

The environmental trend Patagonia helped originate in business has inspired real change but also greenwashing, the practice of exaggerating or fabricating environmentally friendly policies. To combat corporate greenwashing, Chouinard and Craig Mathews, the owner of a fly-fishing shop, started the organization 1% for the Planet. The organization invites other companies to join Patagonia in donating 1% of their sales to grassroots environmental nonprofits. In exchange, the organization provides a list of vetted organizations and allows the use of its logo, which companies use to signal their true commitment to the environment. The logo allows consumers to distinguish between companies that pledge only an unspecified percentage of sales and those that commit to a firm 1% of sales.

The business world is like the natural world in that in the long term, only that which can suitably adapt to a changing environment will survive. This will be even more true as mounting environmental crises increase the rate of change. However, conventional businesses are treated only as disposable entities to grow and sell for profit, not as stewards for future generations. This mindset also governs the consumer world, in which we buy and discard things at an unsustainable rate. With the average American reading only at an eighth-grade level and half of the country not believing in evolution, the country isn’t educated enough to ask the government to change our current unsustainable paradigm.

The hopelessness of the situation is the exact reason we should step forward to create a different future rather than turn away, ignoring the problem. Chouinard believes that as individuals we must adhere to the principles of restraint, quality, and simplicity. If we refrain from buying superfluous products and instead invest in simple, quality ones, we will mitigate our damage to the environment. Simple is often better: For example, the carpenter on the Shackleton expedition in Antarctica only took three simple hand tools—all he needed to build another boat if he needed to. Mastery comes from working toward simplicity and brings greater satisfaction; as Chouinard says, “The more you know, the less you need” (589). He recommends we work to know more rather than to develop increasingly complex technologies in order to reverse the destructive path we’re currently on.