My life has been indescribably enriched by public lands, and one of the most beautiful on earth is fast losing its wildness: . Tragically, the very organization charged with protecting Point Reyes, the national park, is hastening its demise.聽

Located in the densely populated San Francisco Bay Area, Point Reyes is a refuge and wilderness destination for locals and visitors from around the world. An internationally recognized biodiversity hotspot, Point Reyes stretches across thousands of acres of sandy dunes, rocky beaches, coastal grasslands, and expansive marine habitats. It鈥檚 home to elephant seals, bobcats, otters, owls, and over 100 rare, threatened, or endangered species of animals and plants. Perhaps most beloved by the park鈥檚 2.2 million annual visitors is the magnificent Tule elk, a species found only in California. Brought back from near-extinction and reintroduced into the park in 1978, they have come to represent all that is splendid and wild at Point Reyes.

Created in 1962 by Congress and signed into law by President John F. Kennedy, Point Reyes National Seashore鈥斺�攚as established to 鈥渢o conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations,鈥� according to .

Fifty-nine years later, that isn鈥檛 happening at Point Reyes. Not by a long shot.

For decades, beef and dairy ranching have been allowed on this national treasure leases and special permits, despite the environmental consequences: wildlife injuries and deaths, watersheds fouled by manure runoff, and methane-belching cattle that fuel the climate crisis. In addition, 340 miles of barbed wire fences have fragmented habitat, impacted animal crossings, and deterred the general public from exploring . Then, late last year, the Trump administration upped the ante and put forth a controversial to cement ranching operations at Point Reyes, giving commercial beef and dairy companies even greater control over a public park and its wildlife. The plan was developed and introduced under the Trump administration, but has been supported by pro-ranch democratic congressman Jared Huffman, who cosponsored a controversial bill (HR-6687) with anti-public-lands congressman Rob Bishop to upend the NEPA process back in 2018. from around the country are lobbying the new administration to reconsider the path forward for Point Reyes.

The National Park Service鈥檚 plan for Point Reyes would further degrade this natural sanctuary by permitting commercial row crops, additional types of farm animals (chickens, hogs, sheep, goats), mobile slaughter facilities, and the killing of native Tule elk to give cattle more grass to eat. All of it subsidized by the American taxpayer.

is expected in late spring. If approved, the proposal will turn this national seashore into a national disgrace.聽

I am not alone in my opposition to move forward with a plan that is so indifferent to our biodiversity and climate crises. More than 90 percent of all received by the Park Service opposed the plan, while only two聽percent supported ranching in the park. Conservation organizations across the country to the implementation of this egregious plan.聽

Along with the Biden administration committing to protect 30 percent more of our land and water by 2030, let鈥檚 start by righting the wrongs on lands we have already committed to protect and restore for future generations. The great environmentalist and my late, dear friend Huey Johnson said it best: 鈥淧arks and cattle don鈥檛 mix. The land was bought and generously paid for by the American people. It鈥檚 time for the park to truly be a park.鈥澛�

Yvon Chouinard聽is the founder of聽Patagonia and聽board member of the .

The post Yvon Chouinard Says We Need to Protect Point Reyes appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

A responsible company owes a return not only to stockholders but to something that has come to be called stakeholders, entities dependent on or beholden to the company, but also on which the company depends. In addition to stockholders, there are four key stakeholders: employees, customers, communities, and nature.

Stockholders still get first dibs and last, but their return relies on the cooperative productivity of the other groups.

The responsible company owes its employees light-handed, attentive management; openness about the numbers; encouragement to co-operate, across divisional lines when necessary, and to continuously improve processes; freedom to organize workflow with minimal delays or interference from higher-ups; and a penalty-free whistle to blow against wrongdoing.

The responsible company owes its customers safe, high-quality products and services; this applies to both basic and high-end goods. Goods should be well-made, durable, and easily repaired. Whatever comes to the end of its useful life needs to be recycled or repurposed into something new. Marketing claims, especially those of health and environmental benefits, should be made responsibly.

The community includes suppliers, who have now become critical to reducing the social and environmental impacts of products. It is challenging for companies, with subcontracting so prevalent, to know, much less understand, their supply chain and its workings. But to know who does what and where enables a company to work with its suppliers more intelligently and productively鈥攁nd to improve the working conditions and environmental stewardship that underlie its products.

Community also includes, of course, locality. Your company needs to take responsibility for wherever your people gather for work, including satellite locations where you have stores, warehouses, or factories. Obligation to the community includes paying a fair share of taxes and a healthy dose of philanthropy, in money and in-kind contributions of products or services. Many companies now allow their local units a say in local giving.

Community also includes trade associations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), standards-setting organizations, non-profits, and other citizens' organizations that may have an interest or something to say about what your company does. Advocacy groups like Greenpeace and PETA may confront you about your practices, as may individual citizen activists through social media like Facebook and Twitter. Friendly or not, those who engage with you are part of your community in its broadest sense and deserve your attention.

Nature decides our fate but has no voice of her own, or not one that we can hear. We can't sit with her at the table and ask her what she needs to get her work done or what she cares about most. In the face of nature's silence, we have to honor the Precautionary Principle, now embedded into law in the European Union and other countries, that in the absence of scientific certainty, the burden of proof that a new product or technology is safe now falls on business. The Precautionary Principle requires us to reverse our habit, prevalent since the Industrial Revolution, to act now and deal with the consequences later.

Here are the key issues that face the responsible company in relation to its stakeholders during the next 50 years.

Stockholders: Accounting will become more complex. As ever, companies will do whatever they have to do to maintain financial health, cut the owners their checks, and meet payroll. Increasingly, however, companies will also have to measure and assign value to our social and environmental impacts or face the cruel surprise of a sudden rise in the price of carbon or drop in the availability of fresh water. The Nature Conservancy is working with Dow Chemicals to assign value to what ecosystems contribute to the economy. In 2011, moreover, Puma commissioned PriceWaterhouseCoopers to help develop an “Environmental Profit and Loss” statement to account for the full impact of the brand on ecosystems. The consultancy firm hopes to create a model robust enough to be adopted by other companies.

Governments are also changing what they count. The United Nations has endorsed the principles of the “triple bottom line,” or 3P (profit, people, planet), for government accounting. In 2010, Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, announced a major project to work with emerging and developing countries to quantify their natural capital, roughly estimated at a value of $44 trillion worldwide.

Public companies that work hard and effectively to improve their social and environmental performance will need to be protected by new laws that forbid attack by minority stockholders, who in more jurisdictions have the right to sue a company for investing in social and environmental performance at the short-term expense of stock value. At present, environmental and social improvements may be scrapped easily when a company, public or private, is sold or inherited. Several states, including California, have created a new legal class called the “benefit corporation” that allows companies to have a social or environmental mission written into their charter. Benefit-corporation status also gives a company the legal right to pursue high social and environmental standards that can benefit the company in the long term but reduce short-term earnings. An organization called B Labs grants “B Corporation” accreditation to companies that meet its standards as well as works to expand legal recognition.

Exployees: There has been a 50-year trend toward automation, moving jobs offshore, improvement in wages in developing countries, and a flattening of wages in advanced countries. The next 50 years will be marked by pressure to restore the living wage. It was assumed as late as the 1960s that the annual pay of one wage earner (usually male) should support his family. The new, more modest, goal has a worker paid one-half of what it takes to support a family of four.

To meet this goal will require further increases in productivity, most of which will come from automation, which further depresses employment rates. More workers will be better paid, yet more people will be out of work, unless there is a corresponding rise in labor-intensive, local jobs in agriculture and boutique, handicraft industries, or a shorter work week.

Finally, more companies are likely to follow entrepreneur Jack Stack's advice to offer equity to a broad base of employees to increase their engagement with their jobs.

Customers: As everything becomes more expensive, customers will become choosier and buy less. They will increasingly demand to know whether products qualify as healthy and humane. And broad, innovative applications of those 400-plus social and environmental indexes will help customers choose products made by companies that pay fairly and work to tangibly reduce their environmental damage.

Communities: As travel and shipping become more expensive over the next 50 years, we are likely to see at least the partial restoration of a company's sense of locality. This can help make local communities stronger and more resilient, and more active in the effort to attract and keep beneficial employers.

Responsible businesses will have to work more closely with NGOs and interest groups to reduce environmental harm and improve working conditions throughout the supply chain. Trade associations and third-party verification organizations will become more important as more companies benchmark their social and environmental standards, work to raise the bar, and have their efforts to meet them monitored and verified by independent parties. Above all, companies will have to work as true partners with their suppliers, in a climate of trust. Profit will come not from taking advantage of one another, but from efficiencies gained by understanding each other's problems and meeting each other's needs.

Nature: As customers learn more about the consequences of ravaging the natural world at our current pace, they will pressure companies to do far more, more quickly, to reduce the damage they cause. Rising cost will constitute its own pressure on companies to adopt more responsible practices. Expenses will rise for natural resources (especially energy and water) and for waste disposal. Companies, not individuals, generate 75 percent of the trash that reaches the landfill or incinerator. Packaging, for which the producer is responsible, is disposed of almost instantly by the consumer and comprises a third of all waste.

The need to use less energy and generate less waste will in turn require companies to conduct life cycle analyses (LCA) of their products. The LCA teaches a company how to reduce the environmental impact of its products from their origins as raw materials (derived from water, the soil, or underground) through their manufacture, useful life, and eventual disposal. Finally, companies will have to track environmental performance through all business reporting systems.

It is essential to decouple the definition of economic health from economic growth in the use of materials and energy. It is not pie in the sky to say so. Germany, Japan, and China, among other governments, have announced their intention to create “circular economies” that promote reduction, reuse, and recycling of materials. Japan passed a law in 2000 to increase resource productivity by 60 percent, increase recycling by 40 to 50 percent, and reduce waste disposal by 60 percent by 2010. As of 2008, it was on track, according to World Watch's 2011 report.

The U.S. needs to follow suit and create its own circular economy. This would require eliminating government subsidies and tax breaks for industrial agriculture, oil and gas production, and other non-renewable resources, so that prices would reflect true costs. The U.S. Treasury, for example, pays $2 billion a year to support the price of chemically intensive conventional cotton grown in California and Texas.

In a post-consumerist society, it's critical that we stop using the gross domestic product (GDP) as a barometer of social health. As economist Joseph Stiglitz puts it, we need to expand the idea of GDP to include non-economic factors. In October 2010, The U.K., following the lead of Bhutan, Canada, and France, adopted (with some nervousness on the part of its Conservative government) a “happiness index” that defines quality of life more broadly than does GDP. The U.K. index includes metrics on job satisfaction and economic security, satisfying relations with friends and relatives, having a say on local and national issues, health, education, environmental health, personal security, and volunteer activities.

Were we to grow less distracted by our consumerism and consumption, and to spend more time with friends and family, or work with people we want to help, or learn something we have always wanted to be able to do, wouldn't that make up for missing yet another sale at the mall? The pursuit of national wealth through trade of increasingly useless things has for a few decades kept us in more clothes than we need but has nothing to do with the pursuit of happiness. And it simply no longer works.

It is financially unsustainable for the world economy to require three percent annual growth, which corresponds to the three percent growth a company must now maintain to outpace inflation and prevent job loss. Yet the economy in advanced societies no longer creates sufficient well-paid jobs; the speed of automation outpaces that of job creation. All rich countries face high levels of debt because fewer well-paid workers pay the taxes to sustain outlays for health care, education, and the military.

Excerpted from Yvon Chouinard and Vincent Stanley's (Patagonia Inc).

The post It’s Not Just About the Money appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

Where to start?

The answer depends on your role in your company. If you're not the CEO or don't have the power to establish a “corporate sustainability program,” you can start anywhere. Check over the lists to see what you, in your particular company role, can do. It is a myth that taking better care of people and nature is at odds with business excellence. But what if your boss believes that? Concentrate on money-saving steps. No boss worth her stock options will stop you from saving the company money.

Or say you are a CEO. You want to go green. At least get greener. But as CEO you don't have the power this book's other readers might think you have. You have a board to answer to, nervous stockholders whose politics and level of environmental knowledge vary, a business climate that befuddles every tealeaf used in forecasting. You may rely on a CFO or COO who is convinced that climate change is a hoax, or damn well should be. How do you get him or her going? How do you bring along your people?

The best answer is to follow Daniel Goleman's creed: Know your impact, favor improvement, share what you learn. As a method, these work in sequence: You have to know impacts before you can favor improvements before you can share what you've learned.

You can undertake your greening in three steps.

First, engage your team, with as broad participation as possible, to find out the worst things your company does, what costs you the most in reputation and profit, and what will be the easiest to correct. The easiest problems for your company to correct may seem complex and difficult to another, depending on the company's values and traits, and whether its cultural bias is for innovation or safety.

Address first what you suspect you know already: tease it out. What nags at you most whenever you hear about it (or see its consequences)? What is it you think you can do something about鈥攖hat your company will be good at getting done? Ask your team to ask themselves the same questions.

Step two: Get together with your people to name your priorities for improvement, then winnow the list. Decide what you'll do first, how much time and money you'll spend on it, and how many people will be involved. Define what intiial success will look like. Write that down on one page you can circulate among your team. Once you've figured out what improvements you want to make, where you can draw on your company's greatest strengths, take the fewest risks, save the most money, and create the most opportunity, go for it.

As you learn, share what you learn with as many people as possible in your organization, even if you don't think you (or they) have the time. Then share what you learn with stakeholders: suppliers, your trade association, key customers, even the key competitors you call on when you need to form a united front to get something done. Take advantage of the trust you earn, and you will earn more of it, especially if you are credible and tell the truth about your mistakes and failures; get going a little snowball of support.

Finally, using the trust you've deepened, the knowledge you've gained, and the confidence and pride that have built throughout the organization and among stakeholders, ask yourself: What does your company now know that enables you to take a next step that may have been out of reach before but suddenly lies within sight?

Keep going. Here's what will happen.

The company will get smarter, and more people will start to care deeply about creating a better-quality business through improving its social and environmental performance. In so doing, your people will have to pay better attention to all the business fundamentals鈥攁nd this boost in applied intelligence will result in a more fluid, less wasteful organization. You will spot money leaks you could not see before, and you will gain the confidence to recognize and go after opportunities that a company bound by traditional corporate see-no-evil politesse cannot begin to address. Success motivates people, including your strays.

Doing good creates better business.

We know this from experience, both from our own years in business and from talking to others. Wal-Mart first had to learn how many millions of dollars it could save by eliminating unnecessary packaging for deodorant before it could adopt a long-term goal of zero waste. The company had to see how much environmental harm it could avoid and money it could save in single-stroke decisions before becoming more systematically responsible.

You may expect internal resistance at first, of course, depending on what you try to do, especially early on. The poet William Stafford once wrote that no poem should begin with a first line the reader can argue with. It distracts the person you want to reach. Get your people nodding in full agreement a few times before you say something that challenges the half-sleep of received wisdom.

A social and environmental initiative might start with something that unarguably needs doing. As they gain experience, your colleagues will become more aware of more nuanced, harder-to-spot social and environmental impacts, and of opportunities to reduce them. They will start to share a language and a cultural bias that favors improvement. Once an apparal manager at Wal-Mart hears the buzz on how much money the company has saved by eliminating packaging in one department, and how much more can be saved by similar measures, she will feel implicit permission to devote some time from her busy day to minimize packaging in her own part of the business. Managers often cling to the safety of familiar practices until they see their colleagues (and competitors within the company) dare to imagine, then implement, better practices. Courage can be contagious. So is success.

You'll need the support, early on, of company heroes at various levels in the hierarchy who are held in respect for their wisdom or competence or both. These heroes may not be among the company's most predictable advocates for social and environmental improvement鈥攖he 20 percent of us who sing in that choir. Expect and embrace surprising sources of collaboration, especially from thoughtful, often relgiiously motivated or stewardship-inspired conservatives, and for the collaborative process to change the company and everyone involved.

We underscore how critical it is for you to share what you learn as often and with as many as you can. Transparent social and environmental improvements will gradually increase your base of committed support within the company, from the margins (or the heights) to the center; any entrenched traditionalists gradually shuffle to the side, go elsewhere, or retire.

As your company comes to know more, and becomes confident enough to work collaboratively with outside partners to reduce environmental and social impacts, it will adopt that work permanently as a part of doing business. It becomes irresistible.

Excerpted from Yvon Chouinard and Vincent Stanley's (Patagonia Inc).

The post How to Make Your Company More Environmentally Friendly appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead described how we experience nature's “creative advance” as perpetual novelty. But nature generates its changes at a much slower pace than we now allow her and in more complex ways than we can easily recognize. We need to be more aware of what we do to the planet, do much less harm鈥攁nd do it far more slowly.

We harm nature by what we add to it, how we alter it, and what we take away. We have added a number of chemicals that nature didn't have to absorb before the 19th century, and that we didn't have to deal with as health issues. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) identified 62,000 industrial chemicals in 1979, without screening or proscribing their use. Only a few hundred have even been tested. You carry in your own body traces of 200 chemicals unknown to your ancestors, some of them toxic in large amounts, others slow-acting carcinogens in small amounts. And a chemical present in your blood might have no affect on its own, but prove dangerous in combination with another. Untested interactions among the various chemicals released into nature can form up to three billion combinations.

Because we know so little, itc is difficult to track our disease back to their environmental source. Certain diseases have become prevalent in affluent countries at much higher rates than in the less developed world, and they may reflect a reduced physical resilience. These include inflammatory autoimmune disorders like asthma, allergies, lupus, and multiple sclerosis. Nonsmokers who reach middle age can now expect to have levels of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a precursor to emphysema, equal to that of smokers. Breast cancer rates for women have tripled during the past 30 years, and only five to 10 percent of breast cancers are considered hereditary.

Scientists are slow to link specific cancers to specific environmental causes, such as high-voltage wires, PCBs in the river, your cell phone. Few cancer catalysts have been studied as closely or confirmed as positively as cigarette smokes. But some environmentally caused illnesses can be traced: mercury poisoning, for instance, has been proven to result from eating too many large predatory fish, such as tuna and swordfish.

We have added significantly, through runoff from sewage and fertilizer, to the nitrogen and phosphorus in the water supply; the extra nutrients create algae blooms that choke off oxygen and kill fish. Half of the lakes in Asia, Europe, and North America suffer from this process, called eutrophication, as does much of the Gulf of Mexico.

We have altered nature.

The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, up by 19 percent since 1959, has now reached its highest level in 600,000 years and continues to grow, making hot air hotter, cold air colder, and increasing the ferocity of storms. Arctic winter ice deceases nine percent each decade, and every winter more of western Antarctica's ice shelves calve into the ocean. The Larsen B Ice Shelf alone was the size of Rhode Island and took only 35 days to collapse.

We have borrowed from nature what we can't pay back.

In 1960, humanity consumed about half of the planet's potential resource capacity. By 1987, we exceeded it. Twenty-five years later we are using the resource capacity of one and a half planets, though the pattern of consumption is unequal. Europe, proportionate to its population, consumed the equivalent resources of three planets; North Americans, seven. The consumers are unevenly distributed, and so is the consumption, though China and India, the world's most populous countries, now have sizeable, growing, appetitive middle classes.

Biologists agree that we're in the midst of the planet's sixth extinction crisis (the fifth was that of the dinosaurs). A 2009 study in Nature named biodiversity as the “planetary boundary” that humans have violated more than any other, among nine identified “Earth-system processes and associated thresholds, which, if crossed, could generate unacceptable environmental change.” Their proposed threshold for extinction was 10 species per million per year. We are losing species now at the rate of 100 per million per year, or 1,000 times (not a typo) the normal rate. Thirty percent of amphibians and 21 percent of mammals are among the most imminently vulnerable, including the polar bear, rhinoceros, tiger, giraffe, and gorilla. Twelve percent of bird species are threatened with extinction, as are 73 percent of flowering plants, 27 percent of corals, and 50 percent of fungi and protists.

Water withdrawals from lakes and rivers have doubled since 1960. As more of the earth's major rivers鈥攐n which huge populations depend鈥攆ail to reach the sea, the ocean's coastal eutrophic, or dead, zones expand. The dammed Colorado River is now rarely allowed to flow into the Gulf of California and its former delta is a toxic swamp. By 2025, no Chinese river will meet the ocean all year long, which will devastate wetlands, and decimate bird and fishlife. China's rivers will no longer be lifelines for her people.

Worldwide, wetlands diminish and disappear year by year, as do coral reefs and mangroves; major fisheries are collapsing. Loss of rainforst continues in poorer countries. Conventional plowing and planting without crop rotation has led to significant loss of topsoil鈥攁t the rate of one inch a year in the American Midwest. It takes 500 years for an inch of topsoil to form naturally.

The human consequences of ecological overreach are magnified in poor countries and in countries like China and India, which have large poor populations: shrinking resoources only aggravate the basic challenges of inadequate food, water and sanitation.

In short, the world is becoming a desert. Globalization, a man-made but not humanly controlled process, is largely responsible for the current speed at which life turns to sand. Globalization moves with great speed to identify, then harvest resources for human needs but crawls slowly to repair the devastation it has left in its wake. It is fast but stupid, brutal, and imprecise; to cull a tree, it takes out a forest.

Those who watch the forest be cut and raise their voice against it cannot be heard when the company that did the cutting does not belong to the community. And there is little community representatives can do. When local politics becomes subservient to distant economic power, the concept of citizenship, of its duties and possibilities, loses its meaning. The human commons loses its value; it too becomes a desert.

Because Yvon has his roots in climbing and surfing, as does our company, we can't leave undiscussed the loss of wilderness or wildness, which is as much a spiritual concept as a definition of place. By naturalist Margaret Murie's definition, wilderness is where the hand of man does not linger.

As men and women we are part of nature. If we were to have no experience of wild nature, or no way to know of it, we would lose entirely our sense of human scale. We derive our sense of awe from our ability to feel nature's force. We better know ourselves when we come face to face with the magnificence of the unknown. Emerson, Thoreau, and other transcendentalists learned and taught these lessons in New England in the 1830s though 1860s. They showed us that we can learn directly from nature about who we are and how to live.

After an accident left him sightless in a darkened room for eight months, John Muir, a native of Scotland, began his long walking journeys, first from Indiana to Florida, then famously to Yosemite. During his wandering years, Muir carried a tin cup, a handful of tea, a loaf of bread, and a copy of Emerson. (The two men were to meet one day in 1871 in Yosemite.) Muir's writings on the geology and botany of the Sierras gained him fame, respect, and economic independence. Perhaps his greatest achievement was to persuade Teddy Roosevelt to abandon the comforts of Yosemite's government camp and go off with him to sleep in bedrolls directly under the stars. That night might be regarded as the birth of the conservation movement: Muir talked Roosevelt into creating Yosemite National Park.

It might surprise some to know that, in 1971, Roosevelt's political descendant Richard Nixon, on signing the Endangered Species Act, said:

This is the environmental awakening. It makes a new sensitivity of the American spirit and a new maturity of American public life. It is working a revolution in values, as commitment to responsible partnership with nature replaces cavalier assumptions that we can play God with our surroundings and survive. It is leading to broad reforms in action, as individuals, corporations, government, and civic groups mobilize to conserve resources, to control pollution, to anticipate and prevent emerging environmental problems, to manage the land more wisely, and to preserve wilderness.

If the United States is the birthplace of conservation, of the very idea of wilderness as its own value, of nature as a teacher, we have not kept stride with the rest of the world. Forty years after Nixon gave that speech, we are still the leading practitioners of the kind of high-growth, material-intensive capitalism that is to blame for the destruction of nature. The respected Environmental Performance Index (EPI) in 2010 ranked the world's five top countries as Iceland, Switzerland, Costa Rica, Sweden, and Norway. Germany, the U.K., Franch, and Japan are all in the top 20. The U.S. has fallen to the 61st position.

This decline reflects American's growing environmental apathy. In a 2011 poll, Pew Research Center reported that only 40 percent of Americans considered protecting the environment a high priority, down from 63 percent 10 years earlier.

Will this continue? In the 1960 book Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System, an analysis of juvenile delinquency in an overorganized world Paul Goodman predicted the youth movement that would rise up in the decade that followed. The civil rights and women's rights movements also arose in response to conditions that looked unshakably stable and hegemonic at the time.

Any situation keenly out of balance eventually reveals itself to large numbers of people as absurd. So it will be with our own current social and environmental disequilibrium. The authors hope that those born in the 1980s and coming into their own now will, all their lives, pursue meaningful work and do the right thing, which is to say be responsible to other people and to nature. The authors hope they reject the official story told by governments and corporations that a healthy economy relies on the suppression of social, ecological, and individual health.

It's a competitive world: Will Iceland win?

Excerpted from Yvon Chouinard and Vincent Stanley's (Patagonia Inc).

The post The End of Nature: How Did Things Get This Bad? appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

I’VE BEEN A BUSINESSMAN for almost 50 years. It’s as difficult for me to say those words as it is for someone to admit to being an alcoholic or a lawyer.

Yvon Chouinard

ULTIMATE PATAGONIAC: Yvon Chouinard, 66, at Boulder Town, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming

Yvon Chouinard

THE NEXT GENERATION: Chouinard with wife Malinda and son Fletcher, at Yosemite National Park, circa 1975

Yvon Chouinard

Camping in the Tetons circa 1958

Yvon Chouinard

Rappelling at Stoney Point in the early fifties

Yvon Chouinard

CASTMASTER: Chouinard at his Jackson Hole, Wyoming, home, ready for a day of fly-fishing

Yvon Chouinard

ANGLER OF REPOSE: Working a favorite spot on a tributary of the Snake River in Grand Teton National Park

I’ve never respected the profession. It’s business that has to take the majority of the blame for being the enemy of nature, for destroying native cultures, for taking from the poor and giving to the rich, and for poisoning the earth with the effluent from its factories. Yet business can produce food, cure disease, control population, employ people, and generally enrich our lives. And it can do these good things and make a profit without losing its soul.

My company, Ventura, California–based Patagonia Inc., maker of technical outdoor apparel and gear, is an ongoing experiment. Founded in 1973, it exists to challenge conventional wisdom and present a new style of responsible enterprise. We believe the accepted model of capitalism, which necessitates endless growth and deserves the blame for the destruction of nature, must be displaced. Patagonia and its thousand employees have the means and the will to prove to the rest of the corporate world that doing the right thing makes for good, financially sound business.

One of my favorite sayings about entrepreneurship is “If you want to understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent.” The delinquent is saying with his actions, “This sucks. I’m going to do my own thing.” Since I had never wanted to be a businessman, I needed a few good reasons to be one. One thing I did not want to change, even if we got serious: Work had to be enjoyable on a daily basis. We all had to come to work on the balls of our feet and go up the stairs two steps at a time. We needed to be surrounded by friends who could dress whatever way they wanted, even be barefoot. We all needed flextime to surf the waves when they were good or ski the powder after a big snowstorm or stay home and take care of a sick child. We needed to blur the distinction between work and play and family.

Breaking the rules and making my own system work is the creative part of management that’s particularly satisfying for me. But I don’t jump into things without doing my homework. In the late seventies, when Patagonia was really starting to grow some legs, I read every business book I could find, searching for a philosophy that would work for us. I was especially interested in books on Japanese and Scandinavian styles of management, because I wanted to find a role model for the company; the American way of doing business offered only one of many possible routes.

In growing our young company, however, we still used many traditional practices—increasing the number of products, opening new dealers and new stores of our own, developing new foreign markets—and soon we were in serious danger of outgrowing our breeches. By the late eighties we were expanding at a rate that, if sustained, would have made us a billion-dollar company in another decade. To reach that theoretical mark, we would have to begin selling to mass merchants or department stores. This challenged the fundamental design principles we had established for ourselves as the makers of the best products, compromised our commitment to the environment, and began to raise serious questions about the future. Can a company that wants to make the best outdoor clothing in the world be the size of Nike? Can we meet the bottom line without giving up our goals of good stewardship and long-term sustainability? Can we have it all?

It would take 20 years, and the near collapse of our company, to find the answers.

MY LIFELONG ADVENTURE IN BUSINESS took root in Southern California. My family had moved from Lisbon, Maine, to Burbank, California, in 1946, when I was eight, because my mother, the real adventurer among us, thought the drier climate would help my father’s asthma. My father was a tough French Canadian who worked as a journeyman plasterer, carpenter, electrician, and plumber, and I had an older brother and two older sisters.

It was in California that I would discover climbing, at age 15, in the outskirts of Los Angeles, after helping found the Southern California Falconry Club in the early fifties. One of the adult members, Don Prentice, taught us how to rappel down to the falcon aeries on cliffs, showing us how to wrap manila rope (stolen from the telephone company) around our hips and over our shoulders to control the descent. Through high school and into my years as a student at Valley Junior College, in Valley Glen, California, I started hanging with young members of the Sierra Club—a group that included Royal Robbins, who would go on to start his own successful clothing company, and Tom Frost, an aeronautical engineer who would become my business partner from 1966 to 1975—and climbing the sandstone cliffs of Stoney Point, at the west end of the San Fernando Valley, and at Tahquitz Rock, near Palm Springs.

By the time I was 18, my climbing buddies and I had migrated to the big walls of Yosemite. Because we were pioneering long routes requiring hundreds of piton placements, I bought an old forge and taught myself blacksmithing so I could make my own hard-steel pitons. (The softer European kind didn’t work well in Yosemite’s uneven granite cracks.) During the sixties, I worked on my equipment in the winter months, spent April through July on the walls of Yosemite, and during the heat of summer headed out for the Alps and the high mountains of Wyoming and Canada—all interspersed with surf trips down to Baja and mainland Mexico. I supported myself by selling homemade gear out of the back of my car, supplementing my meager income by diving into trash cans and redeeming bottles for cash.

By 1971, two important things had happened: I’d met and married Malinda Pennoyer, an art student at Fresno State who spent summers working as a cabin maid in Yosemite and who would go on to become my partner in all aspects of the Patagonia business; and I had produced my first clothing: knickers and double-seated climbing shorts made from superheavy corduroy produced by an old mill in Lancashire, England. Back then, “active sportswear” consisted of your basic gray sweatshirt and pants, and standard issue for Yosemite climbing was tan cutoff chinos and white dress shirts bought from the thrift store. Though I just wanted more durable and comfortable climbing clothes for myself and my friends, I soon realized I had stumbled onto an entirely untapped market.

In the early seventies, my company, Chouinard Equipment, took over an abandoned meatpacking plant in Ventura and began to renovate its old offices as a retail store. Customers were responding to our “hand-forged” clothing, and we sold more and more items, including Chamonix guide sweaters, classic Mediterranean sailor shirts, canvas pants and shirts, and a technical line of rainwear—a predecessor of Gore-Tex—called Foamback. The apparel was such a success we decided it needed its own name to distinguish it from Chouinard Equipment’s hardware line.

A few years earlier, in 1968, several friends (including Doug Tompkins, founder of The North Face) and I had taken a six-month road trip to the tip of South America, surfing the west coast of the Americas down to Lima, Peru, skiing volcanoes in Chile, and climbing 11,073-foot Fitz Roy, in Argentina’s Patagonia. To most people, especially then, Patagonia was a name like Timbuktu or Shangri-La—far off, interesting, not quite on the map. It seemed like just the right idea for our clothing. To reinforce the tie to the real Patagonia, in 1973 we created a logo with a stormy sky, jagged peaks based on the Fitz Roy skyline, and a blue Southern Ocean.

We debuted our pile sweater—the precursor to our Synchilla fleece—in 1973; it was made from a polyester fabric intended for toilet-seat covers. Then we launched our first polypropylene underwear, in 1980, and became the first company to preach the virtues of layering. This new type of high-performance “system” amounted to blockbuster success: From the mid-eighties to 1990, sales skyrocketed from $20 million to $100 million. Most companies would relish such rapid growth, but for us it was nearly disastrous.

BY 1991, I HAD TRANSFORMED from a modest smithy and adventurer in business with a few friends—including Kris McDivitt (now Kris Tompkins), our CEO and general manager on and off for 15 years, between 1979 and 1994—into the guy in charge of a multi-million-dollar corporation with 650 employees. But with a big company came big problems.

In the late eighties, Chouinard Equipment became the target of several lawsuits. None involved faulty equipment or climbers. We were sued by a window washer, a plumber, a stagehand, and someone who broke his ankle in a tug-of-war contest using our climbing rope. The basis of each suit was improper warning—that we had failed to properly warn these customers about the dangers inherent in using our equipment for uses we could not predict. Then came a more serious suit, from the family of a lawyer who was killed when he incorrectly tied into one of our harnesses in a beginner climbing class.

The litigators thought that Chouinard Equipment and Patagonia were the same company and that, since Patagonia was doing so well, they could milk the corporation. Our insurance company refused to fight any of the suits, because of the costs involved, and settled out of court. Our premiums went up 2,000 percent in one year. Eventually, Chouinard Equipment filed for Chapter 11, a move that gave the employees time to gather capital for a buyout. They successfully purchased the assets, moved the company to Salt Lake City, and built their own company, Black Diamond Equipment Ltd., which to this day continues to make the world’s best climbing and backcountry-ski gear.

Still other issues loomed. The general interest in outdoor sports and adventure was exploding in the U.S. and overseas, and we were riding the growth. We expanded internationally, opening retail stores in Chamonix and Tokyo. At the beginning of the nineties, we added another 100 employees, and projected continued annual growth of 40 percent, a rate we’d been experiencing for the past several years. But we made some classic mistakes. We failed to provide the proper training for the new company leaders, and the strain of managing a company with eight autonomous product divisions and three channels of distribution exceeded management’s skills. We never developed the mechanisms to encourage them to work together in ways that kept the overall business objectives in sight.

Several planning efforts had to be aborted; no one could solve the Rubik’s Cube of matching market-specific product development with such a complex distribution mix. Organization charts looked like the Sunday crossword puzzle and were issued almost as frequently. The company was restructured five times in five years; no plan worked better than the last one. I personally love change, but I was driving everyone crazy by constantly trying new ideas without a clear direction for where we were trying to go.

We desperately needed some help, so in early 1990 Malinda and I, along with our CEO, Pat O’Donnell, and CFO, Bill Bussiere, made arrangements to meet with Michael Kami, a well-regarded consultant who had run strategic planning for IBM and helped turn Harley-Davidson around in the eighties. The next thing we knew, we were boarding a Florida-bound plane to see him.

Kami was a small man in his late sixties with a squeaky, Swiss-German-accented voice, a full beard, and a lot of restless energy. We met on his enormous yacht, and he wore a captain’s cap and an open shirt with epaulets.

Before he could help us, he said, he wanted to know why we were in business. I told him I’d always had a dream that when I had enough money, I’d sail off to the South Seas looking for the perfect wave and the ultimate bonefish flat. We told him the reason we hadn’t sold out and retired was that we were pessimistic about the fate of the world and felt a responsibility to use our resources to do something about it. We told him about our tithing program—our pledge to donate 10 percent of our profits to environmental causes—and how we had given away a million dollars just in the past year to more than 200 organizations, and that our bottom-line reason for staying in the business was to make money we could give away.

Kami thought for a while and then said, “I think that’s bullshit. If you’re really serious about giving money away, you’d sell the company for a hundred million or so, keep a couple million for yourselves, and put the rest in a foundation. That way you could invest the principal and give away six or eight million dollars every year. And, if you sold to the right buyer, they would probably continue your tithing program because it’s good advertising.”

My managers protested.

“What are you worried about?” Kami said, turning to them. “You’re young. You’ll find other jobs!”

I said I was worried about what would happen to the company if I sold out.

“So maybe you’re kidding yourself,” he said, “about why you’re in business.”

It was as if the Zen master had hit us over the head with a stick, but instead of finding enlightenment, we walked away more confused than ever.

I WAS STILL WONDERING why I was really in business when, in 1991, after all those years of 30 to 50 percent compound annual growth, Patagonia hit the wall. The country had entered a recession, and the growth we had always planned on, and bought inventory for, stopped.

Our sales crunch actually came not from a decline from the previous year but from a “mere” 20 percent increase; still, it nearly did us in. Dealers canceled orders, and inventory began to build. Neither the mail-order nor the international division could meet its forecasts, and both returned inventory as well. We cut back production as much as we could for spring and fall. We froze hiring and nonessential travel. We dropped new products and discontinued marginal sellers. On July 31, 1991, Black Wednesday, we let 120 employees go—20 percent of the workforce. That was certainly the darkest day of Patagonia’s history.

Our own company had exceeded its resources and limitations; we had become dependent, like the world’s economy, on growth we could not sustain. We were forced to rethink our priorities and institute new practices. First step: I took a dozen of my top managers to Argentina, to the windswept mountains of Patagonia, for a walkabout. In the course of roaming around those wildlands, we asked ourselves, once again, why we were in business and what kind of business we wanted to build.

When we returned, we put together our first board of directors, made up of trusted friends and advisers, including author and deep ecologist Jerry Mander. At one of our board meetings, when we were struggling to put our mission into words, Jerry skipped lunch and went off by himself. He returned with a perfectly crafted article that outlined “an ‘ecology’ of values that can mitigate the environmental and social crisis of our time.” Those words became the basis for Patagonia’s philosophies, clear and specific principles that expressed our thinking as it applied to different parts of the company: design, production, distribution, images, human resources, finance, management, and the environment.

I had long practiced my M.B.A. theory of management—management by absence—while I wear-tested our clothing and equipment in the most extreme conditions of the Himalayas and South America. It fueled new and exciting ideas for products, new markets, or new materials, but it also fueled my growing awareness of the environmental and social devastation going on around the world. Rather than bailing out in disgust, I saw an opportunity to create an entirely new kind of company. I wanted to make sure every employee at Patagonia understood our business and environmental ethics, so I began to lead multi-day employee seminars in the philosophies, going by bus to Yosemite or the Marin Headlands, north of San Francisco, where we’d camp out and gather under the trees to talk.

I realize now that I was trying to instill in my company the lessons I’d already learned as an individual and a climber, surfer, kayaker, and fly-fisherman. I had always tried to live my own life fairly simply, and by 1991, knowing what I knew about the state of the environment, I had begun to eat lower on the food chain and reduce my consumption of material goods. Doing risk sports had taught me another important lesson: Never exceed your limits. You push the envelope, and you live for those moments when you’re right on the edge, but you don’t go over. You have to be true to yourself; you have to know your strengths and limitations and live within your means. The same is true for a business. The sooner a company tries to be what it is not—the sooner it tries to “have it all”—the sooner it will die.

HAVING THE PHILOSOPHIES IN WRITING, and the shared cultural experiences of our classes, played a critical role in the company’s turnaround, at the end of 1991. Within a few years we had eliminated several layers of management, consolidated inventories, and brought our sales channels under control—meaning that for the next decade and a half we would refocus on living up to our mission statement: “Make the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, and use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.”

But what good does having fixed philosophies do when everything in the business world is so dynamic? How does Patagonia follow its philosophies in light of the expanding Internet market, the effects of NAFTA and the WTO, dozens of technological leaps that significantly affect design and production, new and different employee demographics, and the ever-changing styles and lifestyles of customers?

The answer is that our philosophies aren’t rules—they’re guidelines. For example, our mission statement says nothing about making a profit. In fact, Malinda and I consider our bottom line the amount of good that a business has accomplished over one year. At Patagonia, profit is not the goal, because, as the Zen master would say, profits happen when “you do everything else right.” In many companies, the tail (finance) wags the dog (corporate decisions). We strive to balance the funding of environmental activities with the desire to continue in business for the next 100 years.

Our financial decision-making reflected our environmental ethics. Back in the mid-nineties, to cite just one instance, we changed the packaging of our thermal underwear. We were using a thick, wraparound cardboard header inside a heavy Ziploc plastic bag. Instead, we decided to hang up the heavier long underwear like regular clothing and simply bundle our lighter underwear with a rubber band. The first year after the change, we saved 12 tons of material from winding up in a landfill, saved $150,000 in packaging, and boosted sales by 25 percent—largely because the product wasn’t hidden in a wrapper and people could feel the material and appreciate its quality.

Because we are a privately held company, we could make these kinds of decisions without worrying about the demands of shareholders. This allowed us to grow at a natural rate. When our customers told us they were frustrated by not being able to buy our products because of constant out-of-stock situations, we made more. We have not created artificial demand for our goods by advertising in Vanity Fair or GQ, or on buses in inner cities, hoping to get kids to buy black down jackets from us instead of The North Face or Timberland. We want customers who need our product, not just desire it.

Of course, we also want—and need—to make money, but we believe that’s best accomplished by remaining nimble and efficient. One of our goals has been to have no debt. A company with little debt, or with “cash in the kitty,” can take advantage of opportunities as they come up or invest in a startup without having to go further in debt or find outside investors. One of our most recent examples is a Japanese fabric mill we’re working with to help us switch all of our polyester items, like our Capilene underwear, to 100 percent recycled material—something we probably couldn’t have done if we carried a lot of debt. Managing our finances this way helps the company remain in yarak, a falconry term derived from Persian and meaning “superalert, hungry but not weak, and ready to hunt.”

This kind of independent thinking applies to our management philosophy as well. In fact, our employees are so independent, we’ve been told by psychologists, that they would be considered unemployable in a typical company. We don’t want drones who will simply follow directions. We want the kind of employees who will question the wisdom of something they regard as a bad decision but, once they buy into something, will work like demons to produce something of the highest possible quality—whether a shirt, a catalog, a store display, or a computer program. How you get these highly individualistic people to align and work for a common cause is the art of management at Patagonia.

Part of the key is strong communication. We have no private offices at our Ventura headquarters; everyone works in open rooms with no doors or separations. What we lose in “quiet thinking space” is more than made up for with better communication and an egalitarian atmosphere. Managers try to lead by example. We don’t have special parking places; the best spots are reserved for fuel-efficient cars, no matter who owns them. Malinda and I pay for our own lunches in the cafeteria, so that we don’t send a message that it’s OK to take from the company. And we have an open-book policy; financial details are available with all employees to promote full transparency.

A familial company like ours runs on trust rather than authoritarian rule. Maybe a few people take advantage of our flextime and our “let my people go surfing” policy, but none of our best employees would want to work in a company that didn’t have that trust. They understand that my M.B.A. style of management is as much a sign of my trust in them as my desire to be out of the office.

Because style is so important, I often use climbing mountains as an illustration. You can solo-climb Everest without using oxygen or you can pay guides and Sherpas to carry your loads, put ladders across crevasses, lay in 6,000 feet of fixed ropes, and have one Sherpa pulling you and another pushing you. Rich, high-powered plastic surgeons and CEOs who attempt to climb Everest this way are so fixated on the target—the summit—that they compromise on the process. The goal of climbing big, dangerous mountains should be to attain some sort of spiritual and personal growth, but this won’t happen if you compromise away the entire process.

WHEN IT COMES TO THE ENVIRONMENT, it’s probably no secret that I’m a total pessimist about the fate of the natural world. In my lifetime I’ve seen nothing but a constant deterioration of all of the processes that are essential to maintaining healthy life on Planet Earth. Most of the scientists and deep thinkers in the environmental field who I know personally are also pessimistic, and they believe that we are experiencing an extremely accelerated extinction of species—including, possibly, much of the human race.

In Edward O. Wilson’s 2002 book The Future of Life, he describes the time we live in as “nature’s last stand.” His “living planet index,” which measures the condition of the world’s forests and freshwater and marine ecosystems, puts humanity at an environmental bottleneck of our own making. The 21st century must become the Century of the Environment, Wilson insists. If government, the private sector, and science don’t begin to cooperate immediately to address issues of environmental degradation, the earth will lose its ability to regenerate. In other words, life as we know it is toast.

Thinking these dark thoughts doesn’t depress me; in fact, I’m a happy person. I’m a Buddhist about it all. I’ve accepted the fact that there is a beginning and an end to everything. Maybe the human species has run its course and it’s time for us to go away and leave room for other, one hopes, more intelligent and responsible life forms.

Then again, maybe there’s something we can do about it. Patagonia’s environmental efforts began in the seventies with simply trying to prevent physical damage to the rock walls of Yosemite. It was about clean climbing and making high-quality products that weren’t disposable. Later we started looking at minimizing the environmental harm associated with manufacturing our products.

One of the hardest things for a business to do is to investigate the environmental effects of its most successful product and, if it’s bad, change it or pull it off the shelves. We confronted this when we were looking into switching over to organic cotton, in the mid-nineties. Though we successfully made the transition, we still haven’t completely solved the problem. Even when cotton is grown without toxic chemicals, it still uses an inordinate amount of water and cannot be grown year after year without permanently depleting the soil. When a cotton garment is worn out, it is usually thrown away. We have to dig deeper and try to make products that close the loop—clothing that can be recycled infinitely into similar or equal products, which is something we continue to strive for.

Despite the challenges involved, we’ve found that every time we’ve elected to do the right thing, even when it costs twice as much, it’s turned out to be more profitable. This strengthens my confidence that we’re headed in the right direction. Our Environmental Assessment Program educates us, and with education we have choices. When we act positively on solving problems instead of trying to find a way around them, we’re farther along the path toward sustainability. Plus we’re constantly discovering more things we can do, both internally and externally.

Back in the early eighties, one of the maintenance employees asked if I knew how much it cost to line every wastebasket with a plastic bag: $1,200 a year. I said get rid of them, but he returned the next day to report that the janitorial service refused to clean unlined baskets if people threw away wet garbage like coffee grounds or food. So we gave each employee a personal trash can for recyclable paper and made everyone responsible for disposing of wet garbage in separate containers scattered throughout the offices.

No matter how diligent we are at Patagonia, everything we make causes some waste and pollution. So our next step is to pay for our sins until such a time that we hope to stop sinning. Since the early eighties we have donated $22 million in cash and in-kind donations to activist groups committed to environmental causes. In 1996, we pledged to give 1 percent of our total sales to environmental causes, meaning that whether we turned a profit or not, whether we had a great year or a bad one, we had to give. Last year this meant donations of $2.4 million. In 2001, we helped start 1% for the Planet, an alliance of 148 companies committed to giving at least 1 percent of their sales to saving the planet.

Our efforts, and those of others who work toward similar goals, are making an impact. The organic-food industry is growing at a rate of more than 20 percent a year. Worldwide demand for organic cotton has tripled in the nine years since we changed over. As this drives costs down, large companies like Nike buy organic cotton to blend in with their industrial cotton as a way to support the cause but not price themselves out of the market. Some of the fiber mills we work with, at our prodding, are actively researching ways to eliminate toxic materials like antinomy and methyl bromide in polyester.

If Patagonia can continue to be successful operating under the constraints of our environmental philosophy, then perhaps we can convince other companies that green business is good business, and they can gain the confidence to take a few steps in the right direction.

WHEN MALINDA AND I made the decision to stay in business, we faced a personal challenge: Could we run a company that does much good and very little harm? Could we turn the company into a model, capable of effecting reform that we as individuals would be unable to accomplish? Could we actually change the way others treat the natural world?

The Zen master would say if you want to change government, you have to aim at changing corporations, and if you want to change corporations, you first have to change the consumers. Whoa, wait a minute! The consumer? That’s me. You mean I’m the one who has to change?

The original definition of consumer is “one who destroys or expends by use; devours, spends wastefully.” It would take seven Earths to provide enough raw materials to allow the rest of the world to consume at the same rate Americans do. Ninety percent of what we buy in a mall ends up in the dump within 60 to 90 days. It’s no wonder we’re no longer called citizens but consumers. Our politicians and corporate leaders are fair reflections of who we’ve become.

When I look at my business, I realize one of the biggest challenges I have is combating complacency. If I say we’re running Patagonia as if it’s going to be here a hundred years from now, that doesn’t mean we have a hundred years to get there! Our success and longevity lie in our ability to change quickly. Continuous innovation requires maintaining a sense of urgency—a tall order, especially in Patagonia’s seemingly laid-back corporate culture. In fact, one of the biggest mandates I have for my managers is to instigate change. It’s the only way we’re going to survive in the long run.

The American dream is to own your own business and grow it as quickly as you can until you can cash out and retire to the golf courses of Leisure World. The business itself is really the product, and it doesn’t matter whether you’re selling shampoo or land mines. When the company becomes the fatted calf, it’s sold for a profit, and its resources and holdings are often ravaged and broken apart, disrupting family ties and the long-term health of local economies. The notion of businesses as disposable entities carries over to all other elements of society.

When you get away from the idea that a company is disposable, all future decisions in the company are affected. The owners and the officers see that, since the company will outlive them, they have responsibilities beyond the bottom line. Perhaps they will even see themselves as stewards of the earth.

Patagonia will never be completely socially responsible. It will never make a totally sustainable, nondamaging product. But it is committed to trying. We simply don’t have any other choice. As the late environmentalist David Brower once put it, “There’s no business to be done on a dead planet.”

The post Let My People Go Surfing appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.