Earth is now our only shareholder
patagonia.com
patagonia.com
Let us hope that more companies follow the path of Bosch and Patagonia.
Many early climbers made their own gear, or bought from a climber who did. But Chouinard (with Tom Frost) really got into it, and improved or invented a bunch of things (e.g. Hexcentrics, the modern ice axe, and then camalots!) that made clean climbing possible and safe(er). Chouinard equipment was from the future.
But then the 80's happened, and the diy hippie scene gave way to the lawyers. Some people (novices, window washers, and other untrained people) died when they failed to secure their harness and fell, and the lawsuits looked likely to sink them. You'll notice the colour warnings and liability label around the double-back buckle these days -- that's from these suits. But, ever classy, he declared bankruptcy, sold the hard assets to the employees, and walked away. The logo and his name was consumed by the lawsuits, so the new Black Diamond logo was born. This image[0] shows two Chouinard logos, and then the BD logo. My old harness has the left logo, and I still have an old fimo earring I made to match. No offence meant to the BD people, but their logo will always be wrong to my eye.
The wiki does an ok job with the basics[1], but it doesn't catch the mood of it. I started climbing in the 80s, coming up in the Yosemite school. We were absolutely scandalized that someone could try and sue when climbing went wrong -- especially for mis-use of the gear. Self-authority was central to the scene. Smarter people than me also knew there would be all sorts of secondary problems, and the battles over access in the next decades often had liability concerns at their core. It was the end of an era.
[0] https://www.gearx.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/shirt2-300x195.jpg
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Diamond_Equipment#HistoryThey create amazing products that last long and you get fond of
Patagonia themselves dislike this association, going so far as to refuse to make clothing for many of these people.
https://gizmodo.com/patagonia-will-stop-selling-those-horrib...
Also, my personal endorsement: I love my Patagonia fleece vest. I got mine used on Ebay 7 years ago and it has held up that long.
The lunch spots could have been ads for Patagonia sweater-vests and Allbirds shoes.
Perhaps they can research a way to make performance fabrics that are better for the earth.
Allbirds has been a real pioneer in this space, and they've shown that you can use natural, sustainable materials and produce a product just as good as the others.
Post-capitalist Desire is now a book with the 5 surviving lectures, and the reading list for the planned course.
We've now got like 1/2755 billionaires actually putting up some kind of resistance to the cyclically consumptive desires of capital. Great.
The (former) shareholders will continue to lead luxurious lives. Patagonia will continue to contribute to wasteful fashion and the global oversupply of clothing products.
If any net-good is caused by this PR campaign, I will consider it a coincidence.
I think you need to reevaluate whether it is truly a spade you are calling a spade or whether your feelings about an entire industry lead you to denigrate every actor, including those imperfect actors who actually show leadership in the industry. Again, what standard do you need to see met in order to be satisfied?
Here are some less extreme examples:
- Make Patagonia 100% non-profit
- Make Patagonia 100% employee owned (equitably)
- Invest all profits in (any) clothing repair centers and services around the world
OK, this is just wrong.
"Fast fashion" has a meaning -- it's about duplicating high fashion or celebrity fashion cheaply and quickly and mass-marketing it with a lot of turnover.
That's not what Patagonia is doing, either by its actions or by its advertising. They have sold a line of fleeces, baggy surf shorts, and rain shells for decades now. The designs improve and refine and slowly morph, but they are largely the same.
I still wear a Patagonia purple ultralight rain shell that I bought in the 1990s. It's very similar to [https://www.patagonia.com/product/mens-houdini-windbreaker-j...].
These items have long life (both as durable clothing articles, and as purchasable items in the catalog) and aren't really mimicking runway/celebrity trends at all. They are the opposite of fast fashion, along several axes. A significant part of their website is devoted to promoting older clothes, and selling used clothes, e.g. https://www.patagonia.com/stories/worn-wear/, and https://www.patagonia.com/stories/dont-buy-this-jacket-black... .
But there's a big prisoner's dilemma emerging over it, especially as globalism appears to be breaking down between the West and Russia/China. When trade and diplomacy erode to the point of a cold war between the two factions, there's nothing that can be used as leverage to prevent the other parties from cheating on climate agreements.
The West can try to tackle climate change in its own countries, but if the actions it takes puts them at a economic/military disadvantage to Russia/China, then it might do far more harm to the future of a free, non-totalitarian world than climate change could.
How would that affect healthcare, education, manufacturing, whatever? I'm guessing that the amount of avoidable deaths that would be caused just because you can't get a chip that you need for a medical diagnostic device would soon be rivaling potential climate change deaths.
Climate change needs to be tackled and globalization isn't my favorite thing in the world, but I don't think this is the right way.
Yours is quite a common argument, but ultimately it is justified by a sense of entitlement of having the technology that is now assumed to be necessary and inevitable. The reality is that we as a civilization have jumped too far, too fast, we don't actually need those things to survive, and we will need to be comfortable temporarily sacrificing certain luxuries to attain a long-lasting sustainable path forward.
If you mean the average hacker news reader, you may be right. If you're talking about the average person on this planet, you're very far off. The type of global reform that makes a high earning tech worker's smart phone double in price will also have millions of people pushed back into poverty or outright starvation. The hypothetical political, economical or technological tools for reducing luxury consumption while at the same time having no net effect on survivability for the global poor, are entirely imaginary. You can say that we went too far when we discovered artificial fertilizer, which allowed the planet to support 2x its human population, but it's a bit late to put that genie back in the bottle now.
That said, doing nothing is a pretty good recipe for displacing and starving people as well, we just have much less information on exactly how and when that disaster will manifest itself.
I don't see any reason to believe this, nor any justification of that statement in the rest of your comment. Is it really so hard to believe that some of those at the top can lose a little bit of luxury, and the rest of the world can gain access to progressive economics, at the same time?
> it's a bit late to put that genie back in the bottle now
If we don't, the physical principle of conservation of mass will do it for us. We are demonstrably running out of the materials we need to continue down this path, both specifically with respect to artificial fertilizer as well as more generally with the finite resources available within reach given current and near-future technologies. Which approach do you think will cause less suffering: preparing for a dearth of resources that we can see coming before it happens, or waiting until people are dying of starvation en masse to start thinking about it?
I hope you're right but am convinced you're wrong. There's no straightforward regulation that we can put into place that affects only the affluent layers. The most successful global regulation to date, that I can think of, is the elimination of CFCs, which was enabled because of readily available replacements. The replacements for fossil fuels are not even close, requires replacing the majority of existing infrastructure, and the cream on top is that climate activists are persisting in phasing OUT nuclear, when we need it the most.
> Which approach do you think will cause less suffering: preparing for a dearth of resources that we can see coming before it happens, or waiting until people are dying of starvation en masse to start thinking about it?
I think the former option does not exist in practice. Why? Because when you have a significant drop in standard-of-living over a short period of time, people turn to populism and will reject the paradigm that forces them to have worse lives than their parents, even if it's to their own or others' detriment in the medium-long term. Perhaps not the affluent classes, but certainly the working- and middle classes (that by the way have already been significantly eroded in the western world over the last decades).
The third option is technological advancements - in practice, finding non-fossil replacements at a cost that societies can bear. This is what, imo, the wealthy and climate-conscious nations should spend their time and resources on, to pave the way for others to follow when the solutions have become cheaper. The US can play a big role in this, but so can affluent, socially conscious and technologically strong smaller countries. Most of them, however, are living in complete denial and are instead intentionally crippling themselves to prove a point that developing countries don't give 2 shits about.
Eh? Wealth tax.
> phasing OUT nuclear
I don't agree that we should aggressively phase out nuclear, but it doesn't look like we need to build any new nuclear, just keep the ones we have and phase them out once we can replace their capacity.
> Because when you have a significant drop in standard-of-living over a short period of time, people turn to populism and will reject the paradigm that forces them to have worse lives than their parents
I agree, that mostly this is a cultural problem. People need to be convinced that it is worth it to accept a change like that. Before people read even more catastrophe into my writing, I guess I need to be explicit that I am not advocating for mind control.
> finding non-fossil replacements
I hope that the "wealthy and climate-conscious nations" can walk and chew bubblegum at the same time. We can do multiple things at once. Scaling back and investing in research is the way, I hope.
I'm not ready (or qualified) to go into an in-depth analysis, but the implementation of redistribution programs has historically been unsuccessful, often to the point of having the opposite effect. The rich hide wealth and evade taxes, massive political corruption, and not to mention that the taxes never go to what they're supposed to after-the-fact anyway. If these programs worked I would be all for them.
> but it doesn't look like we need to build any new nuclear
Depends on where you are, and what you base the future projections on. We're gonna need a LOT more electricity for an electric vehicle fleet and synthesizing alternative fuels, at the same time most grids and nuclear plants are falling apart because they were built in the 50s. Electrification is our only chance of replacing fossil fuels without global disaster, imo.
> Scaling back and investing in research is the way, I hope.
Well, look at Germany. They got hooked on Russian gas and reopened their coal plants, simply because they scaled back (on nuclear). You desperately need prosperity to make ambitious infrastructure projects. It's not realistic to first cripple yourself and then expect to become a world leader in a novel technology. When you're in a crisis, you're gonna default to the familiar and proven.
Maybe dialing it back 10% and not 100% cold turkey?