At the recent Net Impact conference, Patagonia CEO Yvon Chouinard set the tone in the opening keynote by declaring: "I believe there is a proper size for every endeavor." In context, this meant that the company couldn't grow steadily and limitlessly while still keeping its values front and center, and that perhaps it can only grow so much before unacceptable trade-offs would need to be made.
Yvon's solution: controlled growth, even no growth, in order to preserve his enterprise the way he intended it: a place where he and his friends could work together, bring their children, and make products they loved with minimal harm to the environment. This includes ideas like cradle-to-cradle responsibility, in which the company makes fleeces out of old soda bottles, and is willing to recycle the fleece when (and if!) the consumer has worn it out.
The expression of a "proper scale" reminds me of The Omnivore's Dilemma. In an earlier post I quoted from that book, repeating the words of a farmer striving for sustainability:
"It's all connected. This farm is more like an organism than a machine, and like any organism it has its proper scale. A mouse is the size of a mouse for a good reason, and a mouse that was the size of an elephant wouldn't do very well."
The whole idea of a proper scale also fits into my own feeling that the very distance and abstraction that multinational supply chains introduce is a fundamental cause of social and environmental problems: without understanding how our goods are sourced, it's very difficult for the average consumer to express a preference for more "ethical" products. If we were buying goods from a neighbor, on the other hand, it would be easy to see if he mistreated his animals or his land.
All this underlies the go-local movement, and the general antipathy for big-business. BUT (and you knew there was a "but") many conference speakers espoused an opposing view - one which also makes a great deal of sense. Essentially, they say that if big corporations do exist, the opportunity to have the biggest impact on social and environmental challenges lies with changing the big corporations. If Wal-Mart changes one small thing, it is changed a billion times over. If industrial agriculture uses 10% fewer pesticides, the total amount of toxins being used is reduced far more than if just a few of us switch to small organic farms. In terms of impact per unit effort, it pays to engage with the big corporations.
Yet in the end, I feel that the answer is not in making big corporations less damaging, it's in moving away from an unsustainable economic model. In the meantime, the bang-for-buck of corporate engagement makes sense, but in the long run I'd like to see more thriving local economies. It's not just about units of pesticides either - it's about building the world that I want to live in.
They say that many seemingly obvious quality-of-life indicators (such as wealth) actually have very little impact on personal happiness, but that one in particular stands out: having a meaningful role in one's community. As organizations grow bigger and bigger, the opportunities to have a meaningful place in one's community are harder to find. Instead, we end up competing for a few big-boss spots in organizations so huge we can't even fully understand how they work, specializing our work into a teeny tiny niche, and outsourcing everything else in our lives to time-saving appliances and service professionals.
Wouldn't it be nice to live our lives on a smaller scale? To know our neighbors, succeed within our communities, and have time to take care of our gardens and our homes, spend time with our families, pursue our passions, and help others in the community too? Success on a global scale is all-consuming, but on a small scale it can be balanced. So, even though supporting Starbucks over Dunkin' Donuts brings high-paid barista jobs to the neighborhood, supporting a local cafe helps even more - by creating local owners, local culture, and a community space all its own. In other words, I'm in Yvon's camp now.
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