Patagonia founder gives his company away to protect the planet

Sep 14, 2022

New life after the rains: a Scottish bluebell. (all photos in this article by Alexander Verbeek)

Until quite recently, the impact of climate change was so hard to see that it was easy to deny that it was taking place. But in just a few years, our climate has been changing so fast that even climate change deniers had to change their message. Now they say that it is either so insignificant that it is harmless, or they go to the other extreme and say that it is so bad that we can't do anything about it anymore.

Whatever they said before, and whatever they say now, their message remains the same: don't reduce the burning of fossil fuels, and thus the income of those who pay for this created confusion.

Our hot summer

Look around you. How hot was your summer? If practically all of us experienced more heatwaves, forest fires, droughts, or floods in the past years, then it looks like the scientists were right, and the climate change deniers were wrong.

Having been right (in believing climate scientists) doesn't make me happy. Deep in my heart, I had a tiny bit of hope that the sad message the scientists shared was perhaps a bit exaggerated. But, unfortunately, they were spot-on in predicting atmospheric warming at higher levels of greenhouse gasses, and they even somewhat underestimated how dynamic the Earth's systems reacted to the human-made changes to the atmosphere.

Eunice Foote

Surprisingly often, the most vocal climate change deniers are men. I guess many of them are the types that won't like it that it was a woman who was the first to acknowledge that carbon dioxide had the power to change the temperature of the Earth. Eunice Foote wrote in 1856 a scientific paper about an experiment she had conducted with two glass cylinders that she placed in the sun. One was filled with carbon dioxide and the other with air. Foote noted that the cylinder filled with carbon dioxide was warmer and must have trapped more heat. She concluded: "An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature."

A few years later, a male scientist, John Tyndall, published his research on heat-trapping gasses. It is unclear if he knew Foote's work. He didn't refer to her study but did have a paper on color blindness published in the same 1856 journal as Foote, so I would say it is pretty likely that he must have read her article. Until several years ago, Tyndall's more detailed work was typically credited as the foundation of climate science. I can only imagine the frustration Foote must have felt.

On the other hand, she was not the last climate scientist or activist whose voice was ignored. Nor will she be the last. The list is endless, and the frustration of not being listened to only increased when alarming messages from scientists got more frightening every year.

Take, for instance, Guy Callendar, who decided in 1938 to take a break from his day job as a steam engineer to collect records from weather stations worldwide. He found that global temperatures had risen 0.3°C over 50 years and argued that the warming was caused by carbon dioxide emissions from industry. We now know that his estimates were highly accurate, but other scientists largely ignored his study.

The IPCC on unprecedented climate events

Fast forward to just ten years ago. Then, the 2012 UN IPCC report on extreme events, disasters, and climate change warned that there would be more heat waves, worsening droughts, increasing downpours causing floods, and more robust and wetter tropical cyclones. In short, it warned of "unprecedented extreme weather and climate events."

Since the report's publication, the world has not taken sufficient climate action, and greenhouse gas emissions have gone up instead of down. What also does go up is the number of unprecedented weather and climate events.

A bridge over troubled waters: I took this photo after three days of rain.

I increasingly need to take temporary breaks from the alarming reality, and nature is where I usually escape. Last week, I walked in the beautiful east of the Netherlands. But my escape from reality was unsuccessful because I was shocked to see how dry this delta of northwestern Europe had become. Never before did I see so many ditches and fosses without any water. For months we had hardly any rain. And the rain that finally had fallen in the previous days seemed to have disappeared entirely in the dry ground.

Green shoots this afternoon in the dunes.

Hope

But there is some good news too. Since I returned a few days ago, we have had every day some more rain. This afternoon I was in the dunes close to my village on the Dutch island. I could see everywhere what a week of rain means for the record-dry dunes. The color green is coming back. Everywhere I saw small green shots popping up. I went down on my knees to enjoy in detail the sight of new life sprouting out of the sand, especially of the smaller patches with darker, more humid, fertile, and warmer soil. Today, some of the dried-up ponds had a little bit of water.

Under the sand, the root you can see on the right grows further to the left, and a new plant pops up every few days.

Patagonia

And there was more good news today: Yvon Chouinard, the founder of apparel maker Patagonia, has given his company away to protect our planet. The New York Times reported that: "Rather than selling the company or taking it public, Mr. Chouinard, his wife, and two adult children have transferred their ownership of Patagonia, valued at about $3 billion, to a specially designed trust and a nonprofit organization. They were created to preserve the company's independence and ensure that all of its profits — some $100 million a year — are used to combat climate change and protect undeveloped land around the globe".

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