Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman--Including 10 More Years of Business Unusual

by Yvon Chouinard

Then I began to see rapid changes in the world, and more and more I came home with stories of environmental and social devastation. In Africa, forests and grassland were disappearing as the populations grew. Global warming was melting glaciers that had been part of the continent’s climbing history. The emergence of AIDS and Ebola coincided with the clear-cutting of forests and the wholesale pursuit of bush meat, such as infected chimpanzees and fruit bats. On a kayaking trip to the Russian Far East, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, I found that the Russians had destroyed much of their country trying to keep up with the United States in the arms race. Their oil, mineral, and timber extraction had devastated the land, and failed industrial efforts had contaminated cities and farmlands. They were eating their seed corn. Closer to home, I saw the relentless paving over of Southern California’s remaining coastline and hillsides. In Wyoming, where I had spent summers for thirty years, I saw fewer wild animals each year, caught smaller fish, and suffered through weeks of debilitating, record-setting ninety-degree heat. But most environmental devastation the eye doesn’t see. I learned more by reading about the rapid loss of topsoil and groundwater, about the clear-cutting of tropical forests and the growing list of endangered plant and animal and bird species, and about people in the once-pristine Arctic who are now being warned not to eat local mammals and fish because of...

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