Patagonia’s former eco-boss on business’s debt to the planet

Rick Ridge­way has the kind of CV that most of us can only dream of. The 72-year-old Cal­i­forn­ian is an award-win­ning film­mak­er, writer, eco-cam­paign­er and adven­tur­er, whose exploits have ranged from scal­ing K2 with­out sup­ple­men­tary oxy­gen to hik­ing unaid­ed across the Tibetan plateau. 

He’s some­how man­aged to fit in a lucra­tive career in busi­ness too, first as a prod­uct devel­op­ment and mar­ket­ing con­sul­tant to Kel­ty, a high-end brand of camp­ing equip­ment. He then found­ed a suc­cess­ful pho­to­graph­ic agency, Adven­ture Pho­to & Film, which he sold before join­ing US cloth­ing brand Patag­o­nia, tak­ing the lead on its envi­ron­men­tal ini­tia­tives until 2020. 

As an ear­ly pro­po­nent of sus­tain­able busi­ness, he has watched the field grow from the fledg­ling con­cern of a few wacky eco-brands to a multi­bil­lion-dol­lar indus­try.

So what has Ridge­way learnt along the way? One fac­tor that hasn’t changed through­out his 50-year career is the deep, sym­bi­ot­ic link between envi­ron­men­tal well­be­ing and eco­nom­ic health, he says.

When the Earth is func­tion­ing ful­ly, we are blessed with abun­dant raw mate­ri­als, flour­ish­ing mar­kets and pros­per­ous soci­eties, he says. When it isn’t, scarci­ty and cri­sis loom. As David Brow­er – the co-founder of Friends of the Earth who became a hero to Ridge­way and his for­mer Patag­o­nia col­leagues – once warned: “There is no busi­ness to be done on a dead plan­et.”

So self-evi­dent is this truth to Ridge­way that he won­ders how any­one could fail to accept it. Yet many busi­ness lead­ers “just don’t seem to under­stand”, he says.

Ridge­way saw the light at a young age. In his ear­ly twen­ties, he forged last­ing friend­ships with Yvon Chouinard and the late Dou­glas Tomp­kins, the founders of Patag­o­nia and The North Face respec­tive­ly, based on their shared love of moun­taineer­ing. Both men were giants of the ear­ly sus­tain­abil­i­ty move­ment. To this day, Ridge­way quotes their max­ims when hold­ing forth on the sub­ject. 

Take Chouinard’s views on com­pa­nies that adopt strong posi­tions in sup­port of social and/or envi­ron­men­tal caus­es. His advice: shout about these from the rooftops by all means, but ensure that you have a bril­liant busi­ness to back up your words. Oth­er­wise, to quote Gre­ta Thun­berg, all you’d be say­ing is “blah, blah, blah”. 

It’s a prin­ci­ple that Patag­o­nia has cer­tain­ly stuck by. With its annu­al sales reg­u­lar­ly exceed­ing $1bn (£750m), the vocal US brand can well afford to run its own high-pro­file envi­ron­men­tal cam­paigns and give gen­er­ous grants – more than $140m to date – to front-line eco-activists. 

Suc­cess in the mar­ket also ampli­fies a company’s voice in the wider world, Ridge­way argues. “As Yvon said one time: ‘It’s OK to be eccen­tric – as long as you’re rich. Oth­er­wise, peo­ple will just think you’re crazy.’”

In a sim­i­lar vein, Tomp­kins taught Ridge­way most of what he knows about sus­tain­abil­i­ty mar­ket­ing – a key tool in alert­ing con­sumers to issues of con­cern and per­suad­ing them to change their behav­iour. 

Patagonia’s full-page advert in the New York Times on Black Fri­day 2011 fea­tur­ing the slo­gan “don’t buy this jack­et” has become leg­endary in mar­ket­ing cir­cles. But what few peo­ple know is that Tomp­kins had run a very sim­i­lar ad cam­paign for The North Face in the late 1980s.

“We need mar­keters who under­stand how to make an emo­tion­al argu­ment,” Ridge­way says. “That’s what Doug was real­ly good at.”

Anoth­er prin­ci­ple for which he cred­its Tomp­kins is that of tak­ing one’s whole self to work. Cor­po­rate sus­tain­abil­i­ty poli­cies abound these days, but most get lit­tle trac­tion, he says. The few that gen­uine­ly con­nect with employ­ees do so because they res­onate with their per­son­al val­ues. 

As Ridge­way observes about his moun­taineer­ing “posse” in his new book, Life Lived Wild: “The pro­fes­sion­al side of our lives was nev­er the cen­tral defin­ing attribute of who we were.” 

For a man who has spent so much of his life up moun­tains (he reck­ons he has spent near­ly 2,000 nights in tents), Ridge­way is remark­ably ground­ed in the real­i­ties of com­mer­cial life. For one thing, he ful­ly accepts that it’s cru­cial for busi­ness­es to gen­er­ate a return for their investors. His only pro­vi­so is that they are best doing so when they val­ue peo­ple and the plan­et on an equal foot­ing to prof­itabil­i­ty. 

“Busi­ness needs to under­stand that it can have high­er goals and still achieve its fun­da­men­tal objec­tive of pro­vid­ing val­ue to share­hold­ers,” he says. “The two aren’t mutu­al­ly exclu­sive.” 

Ridge­way recog­nis­es that, for all its progress in recent years, the pri­vate sec­tor is still a long way from achiev­ing true sus­tain­abil­i­ty – and has lit­tle time in which to do so. For that rea­son, he says, its lead­ers need to show gen­uine lead­er­ship.

It also requires big brands to work more close­ly with com­pa­nies in their sup­ply chains to tack­le impor­tant envi­ron­men­tal and social prob­lems. Such engage­ment is start­ing to hap­pen. Ridge­way cites a tool devel­oped by the indus­try-led Sus­tain­able Appar­el Coali­tion (SAC), which he used to chair: the Higg Mate­ri­als Sus­tain­abil­i­ty Index helps firms to assess the social and envi­ron­men­tal impacts of about 800 mate­ri­als. The coalition’s 280 mem­bers, which include glob­al play­ers such as Gap, H&M and Levi’s, use the tool to iden­ti­fy areas of risk and dis­cuss with sup­pli­ers how neg­a­tive impacts can be mit­i­gat­ed. 

The SAC is look­ing to work with man­u­fac­tur­ers in oth­er sec­tors to adapt the tool to their own oper­a­tions – some­thing that Ridge­way believes would be “pret­ty easy to do”. One of the goals of this project is to make sup­ply-side impacts clear­er more gen­er­al­ly, which would cre­ate a com­mer­cial incen­tive for sup­pli­ers across the board to improve their per­for­mance. 

Encour­ag­ing con­sumers to vote with their wal­lets is anoth­er area in which busi­ness­es need to show more lead­er­ship, accord­ing to Ridge­way. 

Again, he takes heart from emerg­ing cas­es of good prac­tice. For instance, a clutch of cloth­ing brands are using the SAC’s tool to pub­lish infor­ma­tion about the eco-cre­den­tials of the fab­rics they use. Par­tic­i­pants in this scheme, which remains in a tri­al phase, include H&M, Tom­my Hil­figer and Calvin Klein. Their moti­va­tion? “To get their cus­tomers to pay more atten­tion to these issues, because they know that they need a healthy plan­et to have a healthy busi­ness,” Ridge­way says.

Despite such ini­tia­tives, the route to true sus­tain­abil­i­ty remains moun­tain­ous for most com­pa­nies. A few busi­ness lead­ers, like him and his for­mer col­leagues at Patag­o­nia, will be led by their instinct. Oth­ers will adopt a more cal­cu­lat­ed view, seek­ing out ben­e­fits such as brand rep­u­ta­tion, employ­ee reten­tion and/or long-term resilience. Yet many are hap­py to con­tin­ue tip­toe­ing around near base camp. 

Ridge­way under­stands this ten­den­cy, which is why he believes that gov­ern­ment inter­ven­tion is required if sus­tain­able busi­ness is ever to go ful­ly main­stream. 

He esti­mates that about 40% of play­ers in the appar­el indus­try are on board with the sus­tain­abil­i­ty agen­da. As he admits: “That’s real scale, but it’s still not where we need to be. We need to get them all.”

Full adop­tion of sus­tain­abil­i­ty prac­tices will hap­pen only when gov­ern­ments make the use of report­ing tools such as the Higg Mate­ri­als Sus­tain­abil­i­ty Index manda­to­ry, he argues. 

“The cool thing is that we’ve already built these tools and they’re work­ing real­ly well,” Ridge­way says. “We just need to scale things up.”