You and I Have Done More for the Environment than Yvon Chouinard

Ever since I read The New Prophets of Capital by Nicole Aschoff (one of the first socialist texts I've ever read, the journey into a full-blown leftist and a better writer has been long lol) I have been skeptical of so-called "reluctant billionaires" who claim to manifest a different breed of capitalism aimed at doing both well and good. So as soon as I read the recent news of Patagonia owner Yvon Chouinard giving the company ownership away to an environmental stewardship trust and all future profits to a non-profit network I knew precisely what would come next. 

The letter to his customers - more accurately described as a press release - by Chouinard claims to "turn capitalism on its head by making earth our only shareholder". This phrase was published unchallenged into headlines at outlets like CNBC, Fortune Magazine, and People. Other major news outlets like NPR, the NYT, and the BBC are also all but lauding the move, parroting the company's talking points about responsible business practices. Not a single media company even vaguely questioned the premise that a billion-dollar garment company could possibly reverse the damage it's done to the environment.  

We would all like to believe that if massive corporations simply behaved the way Patagonia behaved, we wouldn't be facing the existential crises of climate change. It's very pretty to think so, however one of the best things you can do for the environment as a human being is to not create a massive garment corporation. I would argue that every person who doesn't create such a company is far more worthy of celebration than Chouinard, who still set his company up "to operate as a private, for-profit corporation based in Ventura, Calif., selling more than $1 billion worth of jackets, hats and ski pants each year". 

The fashion industry is responsible for almost 10% of carbon emissions and is the second largest consumer of water. The industry is also heavily responsible for microplastic pollution, pesticide use, and waste. While Patagonia often tries to ride the high horse over many of these problems - shirking the label "fast fashion" as though cheap poor people's clothes are the real culprit - the truth is you can't become a billion-dollar clothing company without contributing to these issues.

Microplastic pollution is a great example. Patagonia helped fund a major study on this issue, showing that synthetic jackets are releasing a massive amount of this pollution into the water system with terrible ecological effects. While Patagonia and many outdoor companies use recycled synthetic materials to reduce waste overall, the microplastics still wind up in water ways, food supplies, and the ocean. One might applaud Patagonia for funding the study on this issue, but given their market share of synthetic outdoor clothing, we should not be lauding the company for leading the way on this issue.

That's just one illustrative example of the issue with these relatively ethical operations. Under capitalism, what Patagonia is doing with sustainability and its new ownership structure might seem relatively good and ethical. Yet it's clear that Patagonia still operates on a destructive model of commerce and continues to prop up and legitimize an industry with even worse practices.

At best, Chouinard is worthy of praise relative to other billionaires. Relative to the rest of us, his damage as a billionaire clothing manufacturer has been done. Rather than singing his praises, we should expend our media bandwidth questioning whether or not billionaires can even exist alongside a healthy and sustainable planet. As David Sirota put it in his Lever News piece titled To Save the Planet, We Must Choose; 

"[Those in power] insist we can have billionaires and shared prosperity, legalized corruption with democracy, lower inflation plus corporate profiteering, and a livable planet alongside a prosperous ExxonMobil. You name the crisis, and we are infantilized to believe the world is an all-you-can-eat buffet and that either/or choices aren’t necessary."

Every Writer's Writer

 A Review of Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck

Back in college, I had a book of writing tips from renowned crime writer Elmore Leonard. It featured 10 sort of unconventional tips for writing fiction that I thought was interesting. Leonard admonished Steinbeck several times in the book, but almost always about his novel Sweet Thursday. It's been on my list for some time. 

Sweet Thursday is the post-war sequel to Steinbeck's earlier novel Cannery Row, which I didn't realize and so have never read. What's interesting is Steinbeck's acknowledged style change between the two novels. In the prologue to Sweet Thursday, Steinbeck features a fictional monologue from one of the characters Mac about the writing in Cannery Row: 

“I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. . . . figure out what the guy’s thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that. . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.”

Steinbeck makes the transformation of his fiction a central part of the novel. The plot, a sort of mundane love story between an eccentric amateur marine biologist and a rough-edged wayfaring young lady helped along by a goofy cast of characters, takes a back seat to process. None of his characters or settings are given much description aside from a couple of chapters titled Hooptedoodle 1 and 2, but Steinbeck succeeds in crafting dialogue that carries a description of the character in the reader's head, which is hard to grasp while you're reading but once you catch that you're using queues from the dialogue to imagine what the character looks like, it's pretty impressive.

It's also interesting Cannery Row takes place prior to World War 2 and Sweet Thursday is after. Himself serving as a wartime correspondent in the UK, for Steinbeck, the nature of writing is forever changed. He doesn't put out another major work of fiction after Sweet Thursday. Steinbeck's main character Doc is non-fiction, academic writer, observing marine creatures and writing about their psychology. While all of the characters in the novel are adrift, it is Doc the writer who is in existential crisis.

Finding a whole cache of baby octopi Doc sets about the task of documenting their psychological condition under extreme stress. Spoiler alert: the octopi all die, leaving Doc unable to finish his paper and left to engage in the frivolities of the novel's love story. It's not hard to imagine Steinbeck himself struggling with the death of his various subjects and characters, torturing his writing style in uncharacteristic experimentation in form until throwing away the already aimless plot for an equally uncharacteristically uninteresting love story. 

 If Sweet Thursday is Steinbeck's crack at the postwar novel about adrift and listless characters looking for meaning it's almost as though he's speaking to his fellow writers. Welcoming them to the meaningless world of postwar fiction.