You Climb To The Summit And There

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

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.

At Patagonia, Making A Profit Is Not The Goal Because The Zen Master Would Say Profits Happen 'when You Do Everything Else Right'.

...there's No Such Thing As Sustainability. There Are Just Levels Of It. It's A Process, Not A Real Goal. All You Can Do Is Work Toward It. There's No Such Thing As Any Sustainable Economy. The Only Thing I Know That's Even Close To Sustainable Economic Activity Would Be Organic Farming On A Very Small Scale Or Hunting And Gathering On A Very Small Scale. And Manufacturing, You End Up With Way More Waste Than You End Up With Finished Product. It's Totally Unsustainable. It's Just The Way It Is.

I Think Risk Is Important. I Don't Care If It's A Great Financial Risk Or A Physical Risk. You Only Get Out Of Something What You Put Into It And The Fact That You Are Willing To Risk Something Means That You Are Going To Get A Lot More Out Of It.