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| Yvon Chouinard |
By Moristotle
Wilderness adventurer Chuck Smythe wrote me Friday that he and a hiking buddy “are shortly headed to Bears Ears, to see it once more before the criminals trash it.”
For background on “the criminals,” Chuck included a link to novelist Rosecrans Baldwin’s article “Patagonia vs. Donald Trump” [MSN News, April 6], about Yvon Chouinard’s clothing company Patagonia’s opposition to Donald Trump’s reducing the size of national monuments, including Bears Ears National Monument, which President Obama established by presidential proclamation on December 28, 2016:
Chouinard and Patagonia had seen a few disasters. The Thomas wildfire, the largest in California history, torched the hills around the company's Ventura [California] headquarters. Five employees lost their homes, and then came the mudslides. All of which took place while Patagonia dealt with a crisis back east: a decision by President Trump, the great un-doer, to shrink some of his predecessor’s national monuments. The pledge was a first for an American president; limiting the size of monuments like Bears Ears in Utah would mean the largest reduction of protected land in U.S. history. Which is what led Patagonia, in early December, to change its home page to a stark message: “The President Stole Your Land.”Yvon Chouinard is a 79-year-old man,
In response, the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources sent out an e-mail with the subject line “Patagonia: don’t buy it.” This wasn't just Trump whining on Twitter that Nordstrom wasn’t supporting his daughter’s fashion line. The federal government, run by allegedly pro-business Republicans, basically called for the boycott of a privately held company—provoking a former director of the Office of Government Ethics to label the action “a bizarre and dangerous departure from civic norms.”
born in Maine but formed in California. The son of a hardworking French-Canadian carpenter, he moved with his family to Burbank, just north of Los Angeles, in 1946, when Chouinard was 8; it was his mother’s idea, to improve his dad’s asthma. In California, Chouinard stood out, not in a good way. He was short, spoke French, and had a name like a girl. He hated school. High school history class was for practicing holding his breath, so he could free-dive deeper to catch wild lobster off Malibu. “I learned a long time ago that if you want to be a winner,” he told me, “you invent your own games.”Mr. Chouinard’s story is fascinating. [Read more of Mr. Baldwin’s story]
[Editor’s note: Chuck told me after publication that he probably should have mentioned that he’d met Chouinard. “I took an ice-climbing course from him in the Tetons back around ’84. A low-key working stiff, as the article said. Also widely regarded as one of the world’s best ice climbers, back even before he started Patagucci.”]
| Copyright © 2018 by Moristotle |
Chuck told me after publication that he probably should have mentioned that he’d met Chouinard. “I took an ice-climbing course from him in the Tetons back around ’84. A low-key working stiff, as the article said. Also widely regarded as one of the world’s best ice climbers, back even before he started Patagucci.”
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