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

by Yvon Chouinard

A successful, long-lived, and productive company like Patagonia could be compared, on the most basic level, with a healthy environment, simply in the fact that both are composed of various elements that must function together in some kind of balance in order for the whole system to work. If we fill the earth’s atmosphere with excess carbon dioxide and that causes a global rise in temperature, it also affects the oceans, forests, prairies, and everything and everyone living in those places. Correspondingly, if I were to change drastically one department at Patagonia without considering the effects on the rest of the company, the result would be chaos. No businessman in his right mind would, for example, intentionally cripple his accounting department without thought of the consequences to the rest of the company. Yet that’s exactly what’s being done to the environment; entire ecosystems are being destroyed or “converted” without consideration to the overall health of the planet. Unfortunately, most of the environmental damage being done by business is the result of large corporations that aren’t operating under the philosophy of sustainability, either for themselves or for the environment. They’re applying their own short-term business principles to a natural system that can operate only in the long term.