Award Dinner | In celebrating ELI’s 50th anniversary, the annual convocation honors a panoply of environmental professionals
The Environmental Law Institute 2019 Award Dinner was one of the biggest in the history of the Institute, with over 750 environmental professionals across all different sectors in attendance. The dinner, held each year, honors individuals and organizations for demonstrating outstanding commitment to environmental protection. It also continues to serve as an opportunity for environmental professionals to forge new bonds of cooperation, while supporting the agenda-setting research, education, and publications of the Institute.
ELI presented the 2019 Environmental Achievement Award to Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia, and Rose Marcario, Patagonia’s president and CEO, in recognition of their leadership and environmental stewardship.
In his opening remarks, President Scott Fulton congratulated the two awardees, noting that, “through their leadership we see an example of business engagement relating to the environment that is extraordinary and multifaceted. They have achieved greening of their own operations and their supply chain, extending the commitment of company resources for environmental causes, and even deployment of legal tools to give more voice and reinforcement to their environmental ideals — while having the most prosperous years in the company’s history.”
Avi Garbow, staff environmental advocate at Patagonia, and a former EPA general counsel, received the award on behalf of Chouinard and Marcario, who were unable to attend the event in person.
Garbow noted that Chouinard’s climbing equipment company had become the largest in the United States when, in its 1972 catalogue, he stated: “No longer can it be seen that the earth’s resources are limitless, that there are ranges of unlimited peace endlessly beyond the horizon. Mountains are finite, and despite their massive appearance, they are fragile.”
While Chouinard grew the business into Patagonia in the 1970s and 1980s by adding clothing to the line, he became increasingly aware of not only the opportunity but also the responsibility to improve the places and conditions that inspired him to found the company. By 1998, the company was giving to grassroots campaigns across the country that aimed to restore rivers, preserve public lands, and clean the air. Garbow noted that since 2002 when Mr. Chouinard founded 1% for the Planet, Patagonia as well as its members and partners have collectively given over $220 million to grassroots environmental causes.
In 2008, Marcario joined as CFO and became CEO in 2014, “immediately embracing the company’s environmental ideals.” Under Chouinard and Marcario’s leadership, Patagonia has created a platform for customers to connect with local grassroots organizations, invested in a company program that repairs customer garments, and set goals for the entire supply chain to be 100% carbon neutral by 2025.
“We are in the fight of our lives to protect our home planet, and we will use every part of our business to set an example of what it means to be a responsible business,” said Marcario in a thank you video to ELI and its supporters, shown at the event.
In celebration of the Institute’s 50th anniversary, ELI also presented Founders Awards to Craig Mathews, James Moorman, and Tom Alder, who helped create the Institute 50 years ago. Moorman accepted the award on the three recipients’ behalf, reflecting on their work in developing the Environmental Law Reporter, the primary idea that led to creation of the Institute.
In addition, ELI awarded an Environmental Futures Award to former ELIers Nick Bryner, Seema Kakade, and Jordan Diamond, a group with varying professional environmental backgrounds, recognized as the next generation of leaders striving to address the environmental challenges of tomorrow.
Kakade, who accepted the award on behalf of the three recipients, noted that “this diversity of work in my view is truly indicative of what has become the field of environmental law today.”
Corporate Forum takes on businesses’ renewable energy goals
Each year in the afternoon of the annual award dinner, ELI holds a high-profile Corporate Forum. This year’s topic was Renewable Energy: Corporate Obstacles & Opportunities. Sofia O’Connor, ELI staff attorney and co-author of “Corporate Statements About the Use of Renewable Energy,” moderated the session.
Wayne Balta, vice president of corporate environmental affairs and product safety at IBM, began the talk by describing his company’s ambitious energy saving and renewable energy goals. However, Balta noted a lack of transparency in renewable energy certificates and maintained that some of the greatest regulatory barriers for companies such as IBM to transition to renewables include the existence of regulated versus unregulated markets.
Beth Deane, chief counsel of project development at FirstSolar, emphasized the importance of lifecycle analysis in manufacturing renewable energy products.
As the largest U.S. panel manufacturer, FirstSolar recognizes the importance of addressing impacts from their manufacturing operations. She explained that grid congestion is one of the current obstacles facing the renewables industry, as well as new regulatory challenges that vary across states.
Panelist Janice Dean, deputy counsel of NYSERDA, described how the state agency has been working to mitigate risks associated with renewable energy projects. Echoing Deane, she mentioned that the New York agency has worked to address all stages of development of these projects to make the transition to renewables and implementation of policies smoother.
On the regulatory front, Balta and Dean agreed that variability has presented some challenges, and in response, NYSERDA hopes to continue to collaborate with corporations to make the regulatory landscape on renewable energy work for everyone.
Institute holds first international conference on peacebuilding
Environmental stresses and related conflicts have created global humanitarian crises for decades. For 50 years now, people across the world have been developing different ways of analyzing and finding solutions at the intersection of violent conflict and environmental degradation through the theory and practice of environmental peacebuilding. Until 2019, there had been no global forum dedicated to professionals working in environmental peacebuilding to share their experiences and build a global network.
In late October, the Environmental Peacebuilding Association, of which ELI is the secretariat, held the First International Conference on Environmental Peacebuilding. The conference took place at the University of California, Irvine, and featured speakers from 38 countries who were joined by 240 participants from more than 40 countries. The conference served as a space for bringing together stories from practitioners, researchers, communities, and decisionmakers across viewpoints of different generations, nations, and experiences.
The conference highlighted two special themes: technology and innovation in environmental peacebuilding, and environmental peacebuilding in Colombia. In addition to the 40 panels and roundtables and eight training sessions, the conference included a concert featuring Perla Batalla, as well as a professional photographic exhibition and poster session, adding audio and visual elements for attendees.
The three-day event was a significant step toward untangling the current challenges of the environmental peacebuilding field, such as how to build the evidence base for environmental peacebuilding, and subsequently how to refine frameworks to link together different threads of environmental peacebuilding.
The conference encouraged participants to consider how the field could work to develop better tools for monitoring, evaluation, and learning, as well as how technology could be integrated in efforts to prevent, mitigate, and respond to incidents of environmental degradation and violent conflict.
The conference fostered new networks and presented opportunities for the field of environmental peacebuilding to grow worldwide.
ELI Award How Patagonia acknowledged its impacts and forged a leadership role in dedicating the firm to saving the earth
On behalf of Yvon Chouinard, our founder, and Rose Marcario, our CEO, I want to extend their deep gratitude to ELI and all of its supporters gathered here for the 2019 award for environmental achievement and to celebrate ELI’s 50th anniversary. In doing so, I hope to give you a sense of Yvon and Rose personally and their pursuit of environmental responsibility and achievement professionally through the lens of their business.
The story of Patagonia begins in the early 1960s in Southern California, where Yvon, who was a surfer, a climber, and indeed a falconer fresh off service in the Army, put out his first one-page catalog of climbing hardware that he forged in an old Lockheed warehouse in Burbank. The interesting thing for me is at the bottom of the catalog — or I should say the piece of paper — was a disclaimer that said, “Don’t expect fast delivery between the months of May to November.”
He soon moved his small operation, called the Chouinard Equipment Company, a bit up north to Patagonia, where we are currently based. In fact, he relocated to what we now fondly call the old tin shed. It’s a place that many of us still gather. By 1970, Yvon’s company had become the largest supplier of climbing hardware in the United States.
At that time, one of the mainstay pieces of equipment for climbing was the piton, a wedge that climbers jam into cracks to use them as support. Yvon made some of the best in the world.
But it soon became evident to Yvon and to other climbers coming back from Yosemite and other fabled places that these pitons were scarring the face of the very cliffs and mountains that Yvon and others were inspired by. So there emerged what was called a Clean Climbing Movement, and they developed a chock that you could simply put into the crack by hand rather than hammering in.
In 1972, right on the cusp of this movement, the Chouinard Equipment Company put out what’s now a quite famous catalog. At the beginning of their listings was an essay by Yvon and his partner, Tom Frost. It began this way, “No longer can we assume that the earth’s resources are limitless, that there are ranges of unlimited peaks endlessly beyond the horizon. Mountains are finite and despite their massive appearance, they are fragile.”
That is a prescient statement and a metaphor of so much that we find dear when it comes to the environment. And Yvon ended that note in his catalog by saying, “Remember, the rock, the other climber.”
Soon afterwards, Yvon began to add clothing to his line so that he and his friends and others could better get out and explore wild places. His idea at the time was to make this firm, newly named Patagonia, a clean company, certainly in comparison to the grit and the fire in the forge when he was putting out the climbing equipment. But, of course, anybody knows that few things come easily in business and certainly very few companies, if any, are clean. So he soon had to confront the impacts of his activities. Patagonia began to do just that. Not just Yvon as an individual or as people in the company but as the company itself — emphasizing the responsibility, the opportunity, to improve the wild environments that were really the impetus for the founding of the company in the first place.
In 1998, Patagonia put out another catalog — actually a pamphlet. It was titled “Louder than Words.” There were no products, just a compilation of environmental essays. The purpose was to answer the question of what a rag seller is doing on the environment soapbox. It began thusly, “Inspiration needs noise. It needs leadership, and to inspire solutions to the environmental crisis you have to go public with your own.”
Patagonia, like many companies, gets its share of fan mail. Nowadays, most of that sort of fan mail comes by way of social media. We have plenty of supporters. But Patagonia back then and certainly today has critics, oftentimes sadly directed at our environmental advocacy and our efforts.
We published one of these critiques. It was a note from a gentleman in Grants Pass, Oregon, who was angered at our support for a forest protection group in his area. “Stay out and stay home, mind your own business,” he wrote. Patagonia published that on the back of its 1998 catalog.
That was when Yvon and Patagonia were starting to give to environmental grassroots organizations. The very reason for the company was to have a healthy environment and to be able to explore public lands and be inspired by wild landscapes. So what began early as efforts to protect surf breaks or steelhead in the Ventura River soon began to be larger campaigns to help all our public lands, restore our rivers, and clean our air. Today, I would say on a scale only matched by the scope of the global crisis, Patagonia is working very hard to address climate change.
With each of these campaigns it was always Yvon’s sense that a group of passionate folks in a local community had the best opportunity to make the largest impact. So in 2002, along with a co-founder who had an angler shop in Wyoming, he founded 1% Percent for the Planet, based on the not-so-radical idea that business impacts the planet. It was his way of having an Earth Tax, to give back. I’m happy to say that since that time, the members and the partners in 1% for the Planet have collectively given over $220 million to support grassroots environmental organizations.
In 2008, Rose Marcario joined Patagonia as its chief financial officer. She immediately embraced our environmental ideals and became CEO of the company six year later. Yvon has said that she is the best leader his company has had.
Both Yvon and Rose know that, given the way things are in our environment, that we at Patagonia really needed to step up our game. So, about a year ago they changed the mission statement of the business.
This is not simply switching to a new poster that you put in your cafeteria. What the new mission statement did was to declare, We are in business to save the home planet. That message resonated with every single individual who works at Patagonia. So true to our mission, we’re quite partisan, but not in the D.C. and political sense — partisan when it comes to the planet.
We always look for ways to be more effective. We created an online platform called Patagonia Action Works, which acts like a dating service that introduces Patagonia customers to opportunities with local environmental grassroots groups. We gave away all the money that Patagonia got on Black Friday to local organizations. We invested in repairs to customers’ garments through our Worn Wear Program, because we know that the longer you can use our product and not buy a new one is actually better for the environment.
We’ve set for ourselves an aggressive goal of being 100 percent carbon neutral throughout the business by 2025. When I say throughout the business, that is throughout our entire supply chain. We formed the Regenerative Organic Alliance with Dr. Bronner’s and the Rodale Institute to find a new way of farming, something that regenerates our soils — because we know that is needed not only to sustain our harvest, to nourish our families, but also to fight our climate crisis.
As an aside, my hope is that all of you were able to sample some of the products of our food company and our brewery at the reception. Our beer is made with Kernza, which is a neat perennial grain whose roots grow 10 feet in the ground. It’s got its own cool environmental story.
Finally, we’ve sued to protect our public lands. We are going to continue to use the very laws that are the foundation for ELI to pursue a healthy planet for all of us. And all this activity by the company was during what was also its most prosperous years in its history. It can be done.
Who are we today? Yvon has said we’re actually an experiment, one that exists to present a new style of responsible business. We don’t kid ourselves. We don’t do everything that a responsible company can do. Frankly, we’re not really aware of anybody that does, but that doesn’t mean that we’re not committed to challenging ourselves to constant improvement.
Improvement when it comes to our customers, our communities, our employees and for the planet because Patagonia actually views all of them as our stakeholders, importantly the environment as well. That’s the only paradigm that we think will work for business going forward. It’s why Patagonia was the first company in California to register as a benefit corporation. Yvon has always said that the cure for depression is action, so with their leadership we will continue to push ourselves.
I want to in closing thank ELI and all of its supporters for conferring this wonderful honor on Rose and Yvon. I want to thank my colleagues at Patagonia here and elsewhere for your steadfast dedication to our mission. I also want to thank everybody here for the work that you do. Whatever you have done — in your law firms, in your companies, in your agencies and organizations — to help restore and preserve the planet, that’s what I want to offer my thanks for.
