Let my people go surfing

The long-awaited memoir/manifesto from legendary climber, businessman, and environmentalist Yvon Chouinard, founder and owner of one of the world's most inspiring companies, Patagonia, Inc.Whether you care about adventure sports, the fate of the natural world, or pure brand maintenance and business success, Patagonia, Inc. is one of the earth's most interesting and inspiring companies. For almost forty years, its reputation for unsurpassed high quality, maverick innovation, and long-term environmental responsibility has put it in a class by itself. And everything flows from Patagonia's founder, Yvon Chouinard.Chouinard's creation myth is now an American business legend. As a child, he moved with his father, a French Canadian blacksmith, and the rest of his family to Southern California in the 1950s with little English and less money. He escaped into mountain climbing as a teenager and by his early twenties was among the best climbers in America, making famous first ascents of a number of notorious faces. When he decided he could make better climbing tools himself for less money and when his fellow climbers agreed and clamored for more, a way of life became a business. Some forty years later, Yvon Chouinard still summits peaks around the world (though he now spends more time surfing). Patagonia still makes exceptionally high-quality things, only it now earns more than $250 million a year from worldwide sales, and Chouinard is able to leverage his concern for the natural settings he's spent a lifetime enjoying. His resolve to minimize Patagonia's impact on the environment has led the company to make its famous fleeces out of recycled soda bottles and to donate at least 1 percent of its revenue each year to environmental causes, among many other things.In Let My People Go Surfing, Yvon Chouinard relates his and his company's story and the core philosophies that have sustained Patagonia, Inc. year in and year out. This is not another story of a successful businessman wh