Chouinard is one classy dude. It's a shame that the US legal system ruined his climbing company. I still have a sentimental old ice harness with the proper diamond logo. It inspires me to see him still doing things his way.
Rock climbing has a history as a technical part of Alpinism. Over time, some people started to enjoy rock climbing more as a sport, and as an end unto itself, instead of just a sub-skill contributing to mountain ascents. Early 20c rock climbing started to break from the traditional siege mountaineering techniques: fixed ropes, jumars, hammered pins, hooks, etriers, nailed boots, etc. Post war, the availability of nylon, aluminium, chrome-steel, and synthetic rubber opened up the possibilities. Modern big-wall, ice, and clean rock styles developed. Chouinard was part of all these scenes, and big proponent of style. He made equipment, put up hard routes, and evangelized. He was one of many founders of modern "clean" style, using dynamic ropes and clean pro, leaving "nothing but footprints.
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.
It's a demonstrable fact that Carbon Dioxide as a % of the Earth's atmosphere is increasing, and virtually all serious models predict that it will have a significant impact on the planet's average temperature and other characteristics.
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.
De-globalization will slow down economy, human activities, resulting in less pollution, less production. As long as there are no world wars, or any war for that matter, I'm all for de-globalization.
You might not have a problem with your phone costing $2000 dollars in that case, but there's so much machinery, equipment, chips, materials and various other products that would massively increase in cost or simply couldn't be produced anywhere else.
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.
"De-growth" should be understood to mean we will have to give up some things in the name of the greater good.
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.
> 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
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.
> 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.
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 don't see any reason to believe this, nor any justification of that statement in the rest of your comment.
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.
> There's no straightforward regulation that we can put into place that affects only the affluent layers.
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.
Machinery, materials, medicines that save lives aren't luxuries and I don't think you can argue that needlesly letting a lot of people die is in any way a greater good.
Maybe dialing it back 10% and not 100% cold turkey?
The way scientists are hunting down methane leaks and CFC cheaters using satellites gives me hope. Even in the cold war, there were nuclear test bans enforced using monitoring technology.
The fact that we need satellites, whose manufacturing, launches, and operation produce insane amounts of GHGs, is disheartening and doesn't really justify the earth-sensing industry. Audits and enforcement can be achieved without satellites.
Not saying they are lying about what they are doing, only that they are conscious of what kind of message the PR sends, factored it into their sales forecasts, and are now profiting off of it. It's just business.
In general brand loyalty is a consumerist mindset, period. To the extent that Patagonia's actions engender a "rethinking" of "capitalism" they are still inhabiting a space which benefits from encouraging a consumer mindset, which as we know is one of the main cultural forces that continues to push us toward more and more growth, at the behest of the (individualist) consumer, and at the expense of nature.
Patagonia's ethics are complicated, as are those of any company who inhabits a system where profit is the dominant motive. Ultimately they are still producing articles primarily made of petrochemicals for one-time (and, occasionally, secondhand) consumption. They do good through advocacy and other initiatives, but one must consider the entire set of nth-order effects that participating in such a system entails, and if you do the accounting you would realize it is a net negative as far as climate impacts go.
This reminds me of Bosch. The majority of the company is owned by the Robert Bosch Stiftung [1] which gets the most of the profit (after reinvestments into the company) to fund educational projects in the sense of Robert Bosch. In my opinion it's a nice concept to use the profits for things that benefit us. There are still other people in charge of advisories but they don't profit from it.
Let us hope that more companies follow the path of Bosch and Patagonia.
Would you rather they not make this move? Comments like yours are unnecessarily exhausting. Are they perfect? No. If your standard is to criticize and tear down anyone doing anything less than perfect than you won’t ever be happy. Compared to almost everyone in this industry, this is a major move. How about we applaud it and hope others do the same rather than approach everything with a jaded eye because it doesn’t meet some impossible standard?
I'm calling a spade a spade. It's a huge PR move that aligns with the brand identity.
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.
Patagonia’s pricing and quality can hardly be considered fast fashion! If you think it is contributing to the global oversupply of clothing the what do you propose instead? No clothing unless it is $1000/item and lasts forever?
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?
Interesting interpretation. I was simply providing an example of what a bold sustainability move might look like, contrasting with the low-stakes PR move of shuffling around the ownership of a private corporation.
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
> Patagonia will continue to contribute to fast-fashion...
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.
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... .
I wish they'd use less plastic. It's hard to find anything from Patagonia that uses environmentally-friendly materials.
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.
I'm curious what they're going to do, long term, about their use of PFAS (the alleged forever chemicals) in waterproofing. Apparently they've been trying to reduce usage or find alternatives, but the alternatives aren't demonstrably better.
Honestly never was interested in Patagonia (associated them with Silicon Valley bro types). After learning about the company and its owner from the move they made yesterday I'll probably refresh my wardrobe with some of their products for the coming winter.
Not really, most of the “bros” I knew when I worked in SV I would describe as white or Indian men moderately interested in hiking biking and camping. Which makes sense, the Bay Area is stunning. Grab a beer or two afterwards. Have a nice time. (You might detect I’m kinda on the side of the bros here.)
And the reason the bros like it is because it's legitimately good quality and it looks good. You can wear it on the slopes and keep it on at après-ski, so to speak.
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.
It's really funny how much of a stereotype it was. I've heard it being referred to as Patagucci, and there was even a puffy vest vending machine in sfo for a year or so (uniqlo, not patagonia)
So you don't need actual product, just their idea. That is pure consumerism. I do recommend documentary series Century of Self (2002, BBC) from Alex Curtis that explain how it works.
Robustly Post-capitalist Desire (shadow title: Capitalist Realism), a Mark Fisher (author of well known k-punk blog, Exiting the Vampire Castle, & many more) lecture series that he suicided during part-way through. Accepts capitalism as utterly unavoidable, as something we have to keep working through, & find objectives through, and tries to imagine what desire & goals might look like in a world that is defined almost exclusively by making more money (slash paperclips), where the invisible hand runs on auto-pilot towards it's own ends.
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.
53 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 92.0 ms ] threadMany 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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32842357
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?
They source as ethically as possible. Their repair program is unmatched. They pay their workers well.
In this story, they did their utmost to ensure their company remains well run, while constantly supporting their goal of protecting nature.
So, what exactly is your point here? Of all the companies you could reasonably attack for propaganda - why this one?
In general brand loyalty is a consumerist mindset, period. To the extent that Patagonia's actions engender a "rethinking" of "capitalism" they are still inhabiting a space which benefits from encouraging a consumer mindset, which as we know is one of the main cultural forces that continues to push us toward more and more growth, at the behest of the (individualist) consumer, and at the expense of nature.
Patagonia's ethics are complicated, as are those of any company who inhabits a system where profit is the dominant motive. Ultimately they are still producing articles primarily made of petrochemicals for one-time (and, occasionally, secondhand) consumption. They do good through advocacy and other initiatives, but one must consider the entire set of nth-order effects that participating in such a system entails, and if you do the accounting you would realize it is a net negative as far as climate impacts go.
They create amazing products that last long and you get fond of
Let us hope that more companies follow the path of Bosch and Patagonia.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bosch_Stiftung
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... .
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.
The lunch spots could have been ads for Patagonia sweater-vests and Allbirds shoes.
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.
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.