Yvon Chouinard Writes

A quick interweb heads up for you - Yvon Chouinard, the legendary American climber who invented the curved-pick ice axe and founded clothing giants Patagonia has written a book and you can read extracts online now.

The extended extract on American outdoors site outsidemag.com is the story of how Chouinard managed to reconcile his role as a business man with the environmental and ethical concerns that are fundamental to him.

Starting with his 'MBA theory of management - management by absence' he became determined to 'create an entirely new kind of company'.

'I wanted to make sure every employee at Patagonia understood our business and environmental ethics,' he says.

The guidelines he came up with then are still in use today. Packaging of Patagonia products, for example, is as ecologically aware as possible with items like baselayers being bundled with a rubber band rather than encased in plastic, for example.

In 1996 the company pledged to give one per-cent of its profits to environmental causes and in 2001 Chouinard started '1 % for the Planet' an alliance of 148 companies pledged to do the same.

An interesting read about the founder of one of our favourite companies. See outsidemag.com