Taking root

California – Outdoor clothing company Patagonia has published a series of essays that aims to educate, inspire and inform readers about environmental activism.

The brand’s first Tools for Grassroots Activists Conference was held in 1994
Speakers including Bill McKibben and Terry Tempest Williams explain how to gain funding and generate press

For more than 20 years, Patagonia has run a series of workshops and conferences that help activists make a positive impact on the environment.

This insight is now being shared with the wider world in its new book, Patagonia’s Tools for Grassroots Activists: Best Practices for Success in the Environmental Movement, which comprises a series of essays penned by past speakers. Five archived talks are also available to stream on the company’s SoundCloud page.

‘In a just society, the people with the best information win. But we are not dealing with a just society,’ says Yvon Chouinard, founder and owner of Patagonia. ‘We need to fight with the same tools the enemy is fighting us with, we have to be more clever and more creative, and we can never lose sight of the fact that every lasting revolution has begun at the bottom, not the top.’

The Big Picture

Patagonia has long been at the vanguard of the Brandstanding movement first identified by LS:N Global in 2011. Its latest move highlights the importance of having a mission as well as a product and the role of publishing and media within this. For more on how brands are redefining conversations about the environment, read our Whole-system Thinking macrotrend.