More than 50 years after establishing Patagonia because nobody else was selling the kind of pitons he wanted, company founder Yvon Chouinard has tried to stick to his green, eco-conscious principles, according to The Guardian. As such, Patagonia garments are made with 100 percent organic cotton, and 10 percent of profits or 1 percent of sales, whichever is greater, goes to environmental charities.
And although the company isn’t perfect or fully sustainable, it’s trying. “There is no such thing as sustainability,” he told the Guardian. “The best we can do is cause the least amount of harm.” That is a matter of being “responsible,” which means treating nature not as something to be exploited. He expects the same from others.
At age 80, Chouinard’s desire to break the rules and provoke shows no signs of slowing. Recently he was at the Tribeca Film Festival to premiere Patagonia’s Artifishal, a documentary on the danger to wild salmon of fish hatcheries and open-net fish farms. Along with a group of indigenous North American tribes and grassroots organizations is currently suing the Trump administration for its efforts to shrink the size of ancestral lands in Utah, The Guardian reports. The threat of climate change looms extra-large in the businessman’s mind. “We simply can’t pussyfoot around anymore,” he said. “We have to just say … anybody who is denying climate change is evil.”
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