"🌎 is now our only shareholder"
Woop Patagonia does it again
🌎Dear eco-nnecters,
Some heroes don’t wear capes, and Yvon Chouinard is one of them. Billionaire and activist is again showing the world the real definition of success. Thank you Yvon.
🗞️This Week in Climate News:
🇦🇺 Australia passes first climate legislation in over a decade.
🌵 Megadrought in the American south-west: a climate disaster unseen in 1,200 years.
🇪🇺 EU slammed over failure to protect marine life from ‘destructive’ fishing (and subsidizing it).
📈 Cool Trends
🌲Memorial trees and biodegradable urns instead of coffins.
⛰️Patagonia In Business to Save our Home
“I was in Forbes magazine listed as a billionaire, which really, really pissed me off.”—Chouinard
In 2017 Forbes magazine listed Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard as a billionaire, a dream many people spend their entire lives working to achieve. For Chouinard this was a sign that he had failed in his mission of making the world a better and fairer place. Since the article was published, Chouinard has been working with his family and lawyers to set up a new corporate structure that fully enables his sports-wear company’s profits to benefit environmental causes.
“As of now, Earth is our only shareholder, ALL profits, in perpetuity, will go to our mission to ‘save our home planet’.”—Patagonia representative
What is the structure?
Chouinard’s family donated 2% of all stock and all decision-making authority to a trust, which will oversee the company’s mission and values. The other 98% of the company’s stock will go to a non-profit called the Holdfast Collective, which “will use every dollar received to fight the environmental crisis, protect nature and biodiversity, and support thriving communities, as quickly as possible”, according to the statement.
Each year, the money Patagonia makes after reinvesting in the business will be distributed to the non-profit to help fight the environmental crisis.
The structure, the statement said, was designed to avoid selling the company or taking it public, which could have meant a change in its values.
“Instead of ‘going public’, you could say we’re ‘going purpose’, instead of extracting value from nature and transforming it into wealth for investors, we’ll use the wealth Patagonia creates to protect the source of all wealth.”—said Chouinard.
🌲 Living Legacy Forest
Living Legacy Forest Memorial trees provide a beautiful and conscientious alternative to return to the Earth after death. Instead of a gravestone or a cremation plot, the project has formulated a scientific process that transforms cremated ashes into micronutrients which are infused into a tree to help it grow.
Planting a memorial tree acknowledges the effect our loved ones have had on our world, fully closing the circle of life. As the tree grows, families and future generations will continue to benefit from their loved ones’ energy.
💩 WTF? news
🌏 The Culture Club
📺 What we’re watching: The Scale of Hope, by Patagonia
📖 What we’re reading: Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, by
🤯 Crazy fact we learnt this week: Climate deniers get twice the news coverage of pro-climate messages, study finds.