Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

“Clean” is the term Patagonia uses in its catalog in the 1970s when advocating the switch from pitons that scar the rock to removable chocks that don’t. This philosophy of clean climbing represents a larger leave-no-trace approach to outdoor recreation that comes to define the brand. Patagonia presents clean climbing as a way for a person to become a part of nature, to become, as the company terms it, a “natural man” (105). This goal of becoming one with nature in a Zen-like harmony manifests in different ways throughout Patagonia’s history, including in its final goal to achieve net-zero production and thus become perfectly sustainable, like nature.

Externality is an economics term that refers to a cost (or benefit) that a producer doesn’t incur in production. An environmental externality is a cost stemming from environmental degradation caused by some production that isn’t factored into the producer’s cost. Chouinard uses this term to explain that this omission means that consumers are not paying the true price of a product. He argues that an economics that doesn’t factor in environmental costs encourages environmental degradation through these artificially low prices.