He doesn’t think politics and politicians are capable of dealing with real environmental issues. But he made sure his company–Patagonia–lived up to his ideals. This long profile of Yvon Chouinard is inspiring and thought-provoking. But also depressing because voices like his are never let into the mainstream:
The Chouinards undertook an environmental audit of their products and operations. For a few years, they’d been tithing ten per cent of their profit to grassroots environmental organizations. Now they enshrined a self-imposed “earth tax” of one per cent of their sales: a bigger number. “The capitalist ideal is you grow a company and focus on making it as profitable as possible. Then, when you cash out, you become a philanthropist,” Chouinard said. “We believe a company has a responsibility to do that all along—for the sake of the employees, for the sake of the planet.”
Eventually, they went so far as to openly discourage their customers from buying their products, as in the notorious 2011 advertising campaign that read “Don’t Buy This Jacket.” It went on, “The environmental cost of everything we make is astonishing.” Manufacturing and shipping just one of the jackets in question required a hundred and thirty-five litres of water and generated nearly twenty pounds of carbon dioxide. “Don’t buy what you don’t need.” (Some people at Patagonia had been considering declaring Black Friday a “no-buy day,” to make their point about consumption.)
Considering the upstream costs of EVERYTHING you buy or do is at the core of any approach to living that prioritizes nurturing and conserving the Earth, and trying to find balance between humanity and nature. It’s one of the reasons I went vegan, and why I almost never buy anything unless I have an absolute need (drives my wife crazy). But there is so much more I can do (I’m working on it!), and it is nice to read about an icon who promotes these ideals.
The Earthist Chronicles 