Here at EBS, we celebrate all that the larger Outlaw Partners editorial department has accomplished–including 10 strong years of Mountain Outlaw magazine. Periodically, we like to share some of the best stories from that sister publication. Enjoy.
-EBS STAFF
By Emily Stifler Wolfe
With hands thick
and weathered from decades of rock climbing and blacksmithing, Yvon Chouinard
piles veggies onto a plate for lunch. Focused on the organic salad bar at
Patagonia’s Ventura, California, headquarters, he selects spinach, kale,
romaine, edamame, radishes, fennel, quinoa, cashews. By the end he’s got a bit
of everything. Literally.
In flip-flops, a
short-sleeved button-down and what he told me earlier are 20-year old pants
(all Patagonia), Chouinard shuffles over to the hot bar where an employee
serves us mashed sweet potatoes and black bean patties (“These are really
good,” he says, grinning.), and then to the checkout counter. As founder and
owner of the leading outdoor clothing and gear retailer Patagonia, Chouinard
pays for his food in the company’s subsidized cafeteria, just like everyone
else.
Seated at one of
the long tables, we hunch together to hear each other as employees pass us on
their way to eat outside. “What’s important is a varied diet,” he says, “as
many different things as you can get.” He’s referring to the unique nutrients
of each veggie on his own lunch plate, but also to eating foods like eggs from
free-range chickens, which themselves consume a wide range of plants and
insects.
Now 80, Chouinard
is all of 5 feet 4 inches tall but remains a giant in the world of rock
climbing and conservation. He established cutting-edge climbs in the U.S. and
Canada during the sport’s 1960s and ‘70s golden age and got his start in
business by forging steel climbing gear in the late 1950s, which he sold out of
the back of his car to fund outdoor adventures. Patagonia is now a
billion-dollar company that’s donated more than $100 million to grassroots
environmental causes. It has long been an innovator in apparel, visual
storytelling and activism. A diehard outdoorsman, Chouinard spends around half
his time fly fishing and surfing, and half at work. But he’s not sitting at a
desk trying to sell more clothes. He’s out to stop the climate crisis, and he
wants to do it through agriculture.
“We’re losing the
planet. We really are,” he told me earlier that morning in his office upstairs,
his voice gravelly. “And I’m not going to let it go without fighting,
so we have to try harder.”
Chouinard, who is
sometimes compared to conservation greats John Muir and David Brower before
him, has become increasingly vocal about the role of private business in
protecting the environment and public land. Maybe you’ve read how the company’s philanthropic giving has benefited
the bottom line, how it sued the Trump
administration for rescinding a million acres of southern Utah’s
Bears Ears National Monument, or how it backed Senatorial candidates including Montana Democrat Jon Tester, a
conservationist and public lands advocate. Both Chouinard and Patagonia will
likely become even louder as they try living up to the company’s new mission:
“We’re in business to save our home planet.”
For Patagonia, that means
going carbon neutral and non-extractive by 2025, getting deeper into politics,
and boosting support for conservation work — Chouinard estimates within five years they’ll be giving $50
million annually to grassroots environmental groups. And in 2012, he started
Patagonia Provisions, a separate division of the company that sells sustainably
produced and harvested foods like organic grains and responsibly caught salmon.
Its goal is to create a market for climate-friendly foods.
If this seems a far cry from
outdoor clothing, think again. Patagonia has woven
its interest in agriculture into textiles since switching to organic cotton in
the 1990s after new T-shirt shipments made staff sick at a Boston retail store.
Treated with formaldehyde like many garments, the shirts woke Chouinard to the
toxic nature of conventionally grown cotton. But, with little industry demand,
Patagonia had to create its own supply chain, something it’s since done with
hemp, wool, Yulex (a wetsuit fabric made from tree rubber instead of the
petroleum-based neoprene), and now food.
“Agriculture as it relates to food is one of the biggest contributors to climate change,” said Birgit Cameron, managing director for Patagonia Provisions. Indeed, agriculture and associated land-use account for a third of global greenhouse gas emissions and 70 percent of water consumption, according to research conducted by the World Bank. But, Cameron says, through regenerative organic agriculture, food may also offer solutions.
Yvon Chouinard at his ranch in Wyoming. Photo by Jeff Johnson / Courtesy of Patagonia
This style of
land management uses a combination of older farming techniques including crop
rotation, reduced tillage, cover crops and livestock integration. The practice
can increase yields, reduce costs, improve water and soil quality, and
sequester carbon. The idea is to have the water, nutrient and energy cycles mimic those occurring
in nature, says Dwayne Beck, research
manager at the Dakota Lakes Research Farm in Pierre, South Dakota,
and a leader in the field.
“If you don’t do that, then the ecosystem collapses.
You’re mining,” said Beck, also a Ph.D. professor in South Dakota State
University’s Agronomy, Horticulture and Plant Science Department.
The field is growing quickly and studies
show it could help solve some of the world’s most pressing problems, among them
hunger and climate change. Project Drawdown, a science-based proposal to roll back
greenhouse gas emissions within 30 years, rates regenerative agriculture as
number 11 in the top 100 existing solutions. Beck cautions we need more peer-reviewed science
to define which techniques are truly regenerative. Organic production, for
example, can be unhealthy for the environment and humans because it’s difficult
to accomplish without tillage, and organic pesticides aren’t regulated or
tested at the same level as commercial ones. Practice standards are also
needed, and those should be defined with input from consumers and farmers, Beck
says, not big business.
But none of that
is stopping Patagonia. “We know enough to run down this road as fast as we
can,” Cameron said. “If we wait for perfection, it’ll be too late.” This has
meant supporting producers, educating consumers and joining partners,
including the Rodale Institute, a research and educational nonprofit, and the soap company Dr. Bronner’s,
in creating an independent Regenerative Organic Certification. On the clothing
side, Patagonia this past year
started a pilot program with 166 farmers in India to grow organic cotton using
regenerative practices on two- to five-acre plots. The farmers also turned a
profit with their cover crop, turmeric. Next year, the pilot will include
around 475 farmers, proving that the industry can create jobs.
One of the
challenges for the regenerative agriculture movement will be large-scale
adoption, although there’s momentum there, too: In early 2019, General Mills,
one of the country’s largest food manufacturers and producer of Cheerios,
Annie’s and Yoplait, pledged to advance regenerative agricultural practices on
a million acres by 2030.
For Chouinard, Patagonia Provisions has shown that business is capable of doing more good than harm, for both the planet and for humanity. That’s why he wants to prove that the better something tastes — like a tiny wild strawberry compared to a big store-bought organic one — the more nutritious it is. People will pay for that, he says, and it’s the key to success.
During our time
together at the Patagonia headquarters, he brings nearly every conversation
back to food. I hear how he finally got worms in his home garden (filtering out
chlorine from his hose water), about the cancer-reducing properties in
wild-grazed bison meat, and about the effects of industrial agriculture on the
human microbiome and the environment. I even score his sourdough pancake
recipe. In Chouinard’s view, all these things are connected. We are all connected. But he knows
efforts like Patagonia’s would have to gain traction worldwide to make a
difference.
“Every business needs to change their mission statement to saving the planet,” he says. “I really believe we need a revolution, [and] the only revolution we’re likely to have is in agriculture. It solves a tremendous number of the world’s problems.”
Modifying business objectives may be a tall order in the
profit-driven world of modern capitalism but it’s critical,
and like all lasting change, Chouinard says, it can only start small.
A version of this story first appeared
in the Summer 2019 edition of Mountain Outlaw magazine