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

by Yvon Chouinard

Modern industrial forestry provides some of the best examples of nonsustainable agriculture. Modern forestry is considered agriculture, the reason why the U.S. Forest Service is under the Department of Agriculture and not the Department of the Interior. Our forests are treated as crops to be harvested, then replanted or allowed to regenerate on their own, to be cut again and replanted ad infinitum, a so-called renewable resource. Clear-cutting is the most cost-effective method of harvest, and it gets rid of the undesirable undergrowth and low-value trees like the hemlock and alder. Then the land can be burned over and replanted with a monocrop like Douglas fir. The trouble is, nature doesn’t like monocrops. Clear-cutting, with its attendant road building (subsidized by the Forest Service), causes erosion, which silts up the rivers and destroys the salmon runs. The second-growth trees produce lower-quality wood and are more susceptible to diseases, such as the virus that is threatening Douglas fir farms in the Northwest. A third crop requires massive amounts of fertilizers, and it is doubtful that a fourth crop could even be grown—hardly the definition of a renewable resource. Much of what I know about achieving any measure of sustainability in an economic activity, I learned in trying to grow my own garden. The land where I live happens to be part of the 90 percent of the earth where you can’t do agriculture except for some limited grazing. My soil is a heavy, impenetrable...

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