By Paul Conlan
The recent progress report by Patagonia is a warning shot across the bows of not just the outdoor industry, but all of us consumers. Patagonia both has presented itself as an environmentally conscious company aiming at sustainability, and is seen by others as an ethical, sustainable choice in the outdoor gear space. Indeed, the founder of Patagonia, rock climbing pioneer Yvon Chouinard donated the company to a charitable trust so that the company could ‘future proof’ its sustainability goals.
Their recent progress report paints a different picture.
This is a stark claim from a brand that sells itself on its sustainability credentials. Of course, there’s some amount of marketing spin here – the report details the various ways in which Patagonia is trying to meet its sustainability targets. Indeed, we get 90 pages of all the things Patagonia is doing before the ‘big reveal’ that nearly 99% of their emissions come from the supply chain. This means that 99% of Patagonia’s emissions are not under the direct control of the company, so reducing these emissions is even more challenging, relying on suppliers decarbonising, and on electricity grids that support and store renewable energy.
My purpose here isn’t to drag Patagonia across the coals for not being sustainable. Instead, I want to use Patagonia’s challenges as a way to open a more systemic critique. If the billion-dollar, sustainability-oriented Patagonia can’t make sustainability work, perhaps it’s not the company that is failing, but the system the company is operating in. Anyone who has been around the internet for a few years is likely to have heard the slogan ‘no ethical consumption under capitalism’, and usually this is nothing more than a poorly thought-out slogan that doesn’t engage with the underlying political philosophies that might motivate such a stance. Nevertheless, even Patagonia sees capitalism as part of the problem, and they see themselves as “rethinking traditional capitalism” with their ownership model. Their model is still one of growth, however. After all, they are still a business – they need to sell things. Profit is still a goal, even if it isn’t the goal.
What if “rethinking traditional capitalism” isn’t radical enough?
Earlier this year, on this blog I wrote about our moral and epistemic responsibilities in the face of the climate crisis. One interim conclusion was that if we’re uncertain about what we should do, we should do nothing. As I put it
This is framed in terms of how to decide what choice we ought to make in uncertain conditions, but I think there is perhaps a broader moral to be drawn from the Patagonia report that echoes my conclusion above. Although Patagonia is trying hard, and is receiving positive press on the back of the sustainability report, it isn’t sufficient. The report is clear about that. As much as it does advertise the positive things Patagonia are doing, they are clear that they must do more in the face of climate crisis. In the previous blog post, presented what I called The Objection from Scale, the idea that no matter what I do, it’s a drop in the ocean compared to, for example, the pollution of a large company or nation, so I’m not obliged to do anything. In that post, I also suggested a response to the objection from scale , but I think the Patagonia Report motivates a related, but importantly different challenge for each of us.
If nothing Patagonia is doing is enough, and Patagonia has, if not unlimited resources, certainly far more resources (both financial and other sorts) than the average person, how can the average person be expected to make better choices than Patagonia?
The average person is not constrained in the same ways as Patagonia (or any corporation). We don’t need to think about ‘growth’ and profit. Yvon Chouniard, on giving away the company said “The Earth is our only shareholder.”, which seems like a lofty sentiment, but underlying this sentiment is the idea that Patagonia is bound to its shareholders just like every other company – they must grow in a way that serves their shareholders’ interests. This is ‘rethinking capitalism’. We aren’t constrained by shareholders in the same way. Our choices, while still constrained by our circumstances, don’t need to serve ‘shareholder growth’. What if the solution isn’t ‘rethinking capitalism’, and the focus on growth, but rather the average person, each of us, rejecting consumerism and not buying things.
What I’m suggesting here is ‘degrowth’. Arising primarily from the work of francophone social philosophers of the early 21st Century, degrowth (“décroissance”) is a strategy that advocates at the most extreme end, radical redistribution, not just of wealth, but power and resources, and tied to that a reduction in the size of the global economy. This redistribution is in service of the social and ecological wellbeing of society, with a related shift in our values away from profit toward care and solidarity. Since the first international degrowth conference in Paris, 2008, the idea has entered the wider academic world and into policy and public discourse. Degrowth suggests that we realign the priorities of our society to serve our wellbeing, and that acting in the service of growth and profit is not in service to our collective wellbeing. Degrowth as I have presented it isn’t just an economic or political strategy, it is a moral one. Doing nothing is a virtue.
Embracing degrowth means that each of us at an individual scale should reduce consumption and production, i.e. buy less and reject our role as consumers. This entails rejecting ‘growth’ as a goal in and of itself. We might think that Patagonia is doing just that with their corporate model, and indeed they flirted with this as an advertising strategy (see Figure 1) in 2011, but I suggest they cannot be thinking about degrowth seriously while ‘the earth is a shareholder’. By their own report, ‘rethinking’ capitalism isn’t doing enough. What if we took Patagonia seriously, and really didn’t buy that jacket? Or what if they took it seriously? What would that look like? It can’t be a company beholden to shareholders, even if it’s the Earth.
Perhaps a focus on ‘growth’, even careful growth is the problem. The traditional model is growth through selling more, or making more profit in some way as an end in itself. For Patagonia, much like profit, growth is still a goal, even if it isn’t the goal:
Growth is still an end, but Patagonia’s ‘rethought capitalism’ means that sustainability is also an end, and the two must coexist.
There is, I think, a tension here.
Even though Patagonia clearly care about their environmental impact, each new item they produce is part of a longer, unsustainable supply chain. So, every new fleece or backpack or jacket contributes to their environmental impact. Nothing they do is sustainable, and it couldn’t be. They’re part of a globalised trade and manufacturing network where consumers, us, are the end of the chain. Increasing this tension is the ‘fast fashion’ model, and planned obsolescence, where wardrobes are updated every season, and products are designed to degrade and become obsolete over time. Patagonia is better than most on this front, offering a repair service on their products and a recycling and reuse service which gives credit towards new gear, with a ‘gear for life’ approach. They are, however, still ultimately a fashion brand, and even careful growth requires that they sell more products to more people. It’s not their attitude towards sustainability that’s the problem – it’s the broader societal and systemic issues that lead to growth being an end that’s the real problem. But, as I suggested above, we are not subject to the same constraints as a large corporation – we can ‘break the chain’. We don’t need to accept that growth is an end. We should buy less, do less and engage in degrowth.
