I think he is mostly a genius, but not everyone agrees- "Yvon Chouinard is seventy-seven, has a cell phone but hardly ever turns it on. He does not use e-mail and disdains the proliferation of devices. He considers Apple to be a manufacturer of toys. On his own in Moose, he can fish all day. He does not require an audience, although he likes to have someone around to outfish. Chouinard spent this past summer as he often does, wandering around the northern Rockies, visiting old friends, and fishing the prime trout streams of the greater Yellowstone region. Since he got into the gear business, more than fifty years ago, he has frequently disappeared for months, sometimes for half the year, to climb, kayak, surf, ski, fish, and ramble around the planets wilder precincts, whose preservation he has dedicated the better part of his life to. His one house is in Jackson, that has boomed as a skiing and recreation town, as a national-park gateway, and as a tax haven for rich people attracted by Wyomings absence of a state income tax. Though probably eligible for residence, Chouinard would never consider such a thing. Oh, God, no, he says. I happily pay my taxes. When Hillary Clinton mentioned the value of compromise on TV, he said, rolling his eyes, Its the work of the Devil. He and Patagonia have fiercely opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Im on Obamas *hit list, he said. Ive become an isolationist, actually. Anything of any seriousness that happens has to happen on a local level. I think were seeing the end of empire, the end of globalism. It cant hold. People will revert: protecting your family, protecting your village. Like the Dark Ages. I honestly believe that. He added, Trump is the perfect person to take us to the apocalypse. Patagonia in 1991 was in the midst of a recession, and it found itself overextended. Bankruptcy loomed. Chouinards accountants took him to meet a representative of the Mafia, who offered a loan with an interest rate of eighteen per cent. In the end, the Chouinards borrowed from a friend and from some Argentines who wanted to get their money out of the country. The company laid off twenty per cent of its workforce. It was hard, Chouinard said. I realized we were just growing for the sake of growing, which is bull*hit. The Chouinards undertook an environmental audit of their products and operations. For a few years, theyd 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 alongfor the sake of the employees, for the sake of the planet. Chouinard may walk the walk, as far as not buying thingshis own Patagonia gear tends to date back to the last centurybut his customers are often the kinds of people who can afford as many jackets as they want. He has made the outdoors more comfortable, and more glamorous. He celebrates the spread of an ecological consciousness but laments the disappearance of danger and novelty, and the way that the wilderness has become a hobby, or even a vocation. He disdains ski areas (Theyre golf courses), the idea of professional climbing (I just dont like the whole paid-climber thing), and the proliferation of extreme sports as programming and marketing (Red Bulls in the snuff-film business). In the introduction of Chouinards 2005 book, Let My People Go Surfing, published this month, he writes, Ive been a businessman for almost sixty years. Its as difficult for me to say those words as it is for someone to admit being an alcoholic or a lawyer. Ive never respected the profession. He was first (and perhaps in his own mind remains foremost) a climber, a renowned pioneer of rock and ice routes around the world, and one of the luminaries of the great generation of American postwar outdoor adventurers. Then a blacksmith: he designed, and made by hand, a host of ingenious new climbing tools, and for a time was the leading manufacturer of climbing equipment in North America. Next, itinerant thrill-seeker: the relatively meagre proceeds from equipment sales allowed him to continue to pursue an intrepid life of risky recreation in the outdoors. Finally, eco-warrior: his travels and travails in supposedly wild places awakened him to their ongoing devastation, and he made it his mission, as a man selling consumer goods that he acknowledged people dont need, to try to counteract humanitys regrettable propensity to soil its own nest. Concerned about the degradation of rock, they stopped making pitons and instead came out with aluminum chocks that you could wedge into and remove from cracks without leaving any gear or scars behind. Their first catalogue, in 1972, opened with a clean-climbing manifesto, a rockheads version of leave-no-trace. Chouinard and Tompkins were the founding members of a loose band of adventurers known as the Do Boys, a coinage they derived, with some self-mockery, from the Japanese translation of action sports as do sports. Besides Tompkins and Chouinard, the Do Boys included Rick Ridgeway, an accomplished mountaineer (now a vice-president at Patagonia, in charge of public engagement), and Tom Brokaw, the journalist, especially valued by the mountain men for his anecdotal knack. In 1981, Chouinard and Ridgeway were part of a team that was caught in an avalanche on a peak called Gongga Shan, in China. One climber was killed, the rest badly hurtand lucky. Chouinard, taking into account his kids, his risk appetite, and his encroaching distaste for these bigger expeditionary attempts, began to dial it back as a climber. The companys causes have proliferated. Steelhead trout, dams, pesticides. Organic cotton, humanely sourced wool and down. Since 1985, under its one-per-cent program, it has given away more than seventy-five million dollars to some thirty-four hundred environmental organizations. Patagonia, a founder of the Fair Labor Association, discovered, further down its supply chain, that many of its textile mills, principally in Taiwan, engaged in human trafficking. Even though Patagonia was one of the smaller customers, it led a movement, in conjunction with other clients, N.G.O.s, and governments, to reform them. No other brand was monitoring its mills, Doug Freeman, the chief operating officer, said. He estimated that the companys attention to manufacturing its goods responsibly adds twenty to thirty per cent to the cost of production. Meanwhile, Chouinard had become an adviser and scold to big business. It started out with the Walton family, Chouinard told me. Rob Walton had been talking to a conservationist and a kayaking buddy of Chouinards, Jib Ellison. They sent a directive to their C.E.O. to green Walmart. He was clueless. He sent all his top managers out to find out what that means. Walmart executives paid a couple of visits to Ventura, and Chouinard went to their headquarters, in Bentonville, Arkansas, to give a talk. Rick Ridgeway spent a couple of years advising them. Patagonia helped launch something called the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, a consortium of big retailers, like Walmart, Macys, and the Gap, which, among other things, is now devising a system to give a sustainability grade to every purchasable product. But Ive become cynical about whether we can have any influence, Chouinard said. Everyones just greenwashing. The revolution isnt going to happen with corporations. The elephant in the room is growth. Growth is the culprit. I met his children at the Chouinards house, for dinner. Fletcher, who is forty-one, shapes boards for Patagonias growing surf business. Claire, thirty-eight, works in the design department. It helps that were working here, Fletcher said. Were not just owners, or board members. We have normal salaries. We werent brought up to give a (*)(*)(*)(*) about money. Actually, I think we were raised to be slightly embarrassed about it. Claire said, If the company became something I didnt believe in or approve of, I wouldnt want to be here. His friends Doug and Kris Tompkins spent decades assembling land in Chile and Argentina, in an unprecedented, and not uncontroversial, effort to create vast nature preserves and national parks. The governments there have supplemented the Tompkinses gift of 2.2 million acres with commitments of as much as twelve million more. This is equivalent, in area, to six Yellowstones. No human has ever done anything like this, Chouinard told me. Look at this, Chouinard said, as we raced through rolling seed-potato farmland on the Idaho side of the Tetons. Its gorgeous. But its all toxic. Pesticides. People cant drink water out of their wells. In Ashton, you cant drink the water. Its like Flint, Michigan, except at least here the water company told everybody. He went on, Thats why Im getting into food. He was referring to Patagonia Provisions, a new venture to source and sell sustainable foodhis latest fixation. Hes big on canned fish. Organic cotton: You can insist on it, but do people care? If were going to have a revolution, its going to be in food. We rolled up to the goat ranch of Mark Harbaugh, an Idaho native and excommunicated Mormon who is the global sales manager of the fly-fishing division at Patagonia. He sends his goats into the foothills to eat noxious weeds, on a Bureau of Land Management contract. (He trains the goats to eat thistle by spraying the weeds with salt.) The companys fly-fishing line has boomedit has tripled in volume since 2012. As Chouinard steered us through the sublime vistas of Montana, enumerating extinctions and threats, one felt not depressedor even, as one often is, in the presence of ecological jeremiads, exasperatedbut, rather, almost inexplicably exhilarated. Maybe it was the trench humor, the dark comedy of the climber in dire straits. Whenever Chouinard says, Were *ucked, he laughs. In Alaska, on the Susitna River. We gave a grant of twenty-five thousand dollars to a filmmaker who was making a film called Supersalmon. The film comes out, the guy shows it around, and the governor, just like that, he kills the dam. You dont get many clear-cut victories like that. But sometimes all it takes is one person. I just teach women and kids, hed told me. I dont teach guys. Too frustrating. They dont listen. You tell them to cast, take two steps, then cast again, but either they take no steps or they take ten. From: - http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/19/patagonias-philosopher-king -
