There's No Difference Between A Pessimist Who

I Took A Dozen Of Our Top Managers To Argentina, To The Windswept Mountains Of The Real Patagonia, For A Walkabout. In The Course Of Roaming Around Those Wild Lands, We Asked Ourselves Why We Were In Business And What Kind Of Business We Wanted Patagonia To Be. A Billion-dollar Company? Okay, But Not If It Meant We Had To Make Products We Couldn't Be Proud Of. And We Discussed What We Could Do To Help Stem The Environmental Harm We Caused As A Company. We Talked About The Values We Had In Common, And The Shared Culture That Had Brought Everyone To Patagonia, Inc., And Not Another Company.

Once You Educate Yourself, You're Left With Choices.

You Have A Whole Life In The Outdoors, You Realize You Have A Sense Of Responsibility To Protect These Wild Places.

There Is A Beginning And End To All Life - And To All Human Endeavors. Species Evolve And Die Off. Empires Rise, Then Break Apart. Businesses Grow, Then Fold. There Are No Exceptions. I'm Ok With All That. Yet It Pains Me To Bear Witness To The Sixth Great Extinction, Where We Humans Are Directly Responsible For The Extirpation Of So Many Wonderful Creatures And Invaluable Indigenous Cultures. It Saddens Me To Observe The Plight Of Our Own Species; We Appear To Be Incapable Of Solving Our Problems.

The Rules Of The Game Must Be Constantly Updated To Keep Up With The Expanding Technology. Otherwise We Overkill The Classic Climbs And Delude Ourselves Into Thinking We Are Better Climbers Than The Pioneers.