Yvon Chouinard stofnaði útivistarvörufyrirtækið Patagonia, varð milljarðamæringur, og gaf fyrirtækið svo í heilu lagi til sjálfseignarstofnunar sem styður við vernd náttúru og lífríkis um allan heim, þar á meðal hér á Íslandi.
Yvon kom fyrst til Íslands 1960 og hefur heimsótt landið margoft síðan. Síðast kom hann sumarið 2022, þegar hann var 84 ára og heimsótti þá meðal annars Guðna forseta til að ræða skaðann sem opið sjókvíaeldi á laxi veldur á hinum einstaka villta laxastofni landsins og umhverfinu almennt.
Yvon Chouinard er maður sem lætur verkin tala.
Við mælum með áhugaverðri umfjöllun National Geographic um Chouinard.
This may sound surprising, even hypocritical, from the founder of a company with consistent annual sales of a billion dollars. But Chouinard has long insisted he did not start Patagonia to turn a profit. “I have a living,” he told the New Yorker in 1977, “and that’s all I want out of it.” Nearly half a century later, in September 2022, he backed up that claim, stunning the business world by announcing he was giving away the three-billion-dollar company, with 2 percent of its shares going to a trust that helps guide Patagonia’s social good mission and the other 98 percent to a newly created nonprofit, the Holdfast Collective, which uses the funds to advocate for environmental causes. “Earth,” Chouinard wrote on Patagonia’s website, “is now our only shareholder.”
“After you’re making enough money to support yourself, what’s the reason to stay in business?” he asks with a shrug. “Is it a responsibility for the employees that are still there to make more money or to do something good? We are doing good work and good things with our profits. That’s the real reason to keep going. It’s not an ego thing. I’ll be dead in a few years anyway.”
Chouinard’s decision to donate the company stemmed in part from his inclusion on a Forbes list of billionaires. He’d never seen himself that way, and the perception rankled. Without Patagonia, he could live like the man he felt himself to be—an octogenarian cowboy on a Western ranch with $60,000 a year, driving a 1987 Toyota Corolla and wearing frayed flannel.
For Patagonia, there are, of course, benefits to doing well as a business, admits Kris Tompkins, Patagonia’s transformative first CEO and one of Chouinard’s closest confidantes. “We want to be a successful company, because if you’re not, nobody will listen to you. But he would be as happy living under a bridge, or out of a van surfing God knows where, as being a wealthy man. That is the genius of Yvon.”
… Minimizing waste has been central to the mission, with Patagonia aiming to produce items that can last for a lifetime—or be fixed if they break, an anomaly in an era of planned obsolescence. He intends to maximize resources, not profits.
His approach comes from a conviction that “Patagonia is not a sustainable company,” he says. “There’s no such thing. I look at our philanthropy as not charity but as the cost of doing business, of using nonrenewable resources. Once you recognize that, you want to do something.”
Chouinard constantly references his pessimism. He is convinced, for instance, that the climate crisis cannot be solved until people find their spiritual connection with nature, as he did on Wyoming’s peaks and Yosemite’s walls. He believes public companies will never choose true sustainability over shareholder gains. But he counters that doubt with an idealism about what an individual can do with the right resources at their disposal—in his case, one of the world’s biggest outdoor brands. “When people say they believe in climate change but don’t do anything, they don’t really believe in it,” Chouinard says, ticking off explanations for inaction, from feelings of powerlessness to the supposed promise of technological salvation. “But the consequences are so grim, you can’t help but get involved.”
He’s more active in Patagonia’s operations now, he says, than when he divested himself from it two years ago. That’s because he needs to make sure the company can function in perpetuity if it’s going to have any chance of fulfilling his audacious mission statement: “to save our home planet.”