We are beginning the last full week of August. The Minnesota State Fair begins in a few days. Summer of 2021 is effectively behind US. School begins in a few weeks. The Delta variant of COVID-19 has brought about a fourth wave or surge. There are reports that Minnesota have no fully staffed medical/surgical or ICU beds available. School districts and parents are battling over mask mandates and in person versus distance learning. Water levels in many rivers and lakes are approaching record level lows. Wildfires are consuming square miles of our forestlands. The Boundary Waters Canoe Area is closed for the first time in 45 years. Parts of Tennessee recently received seventeen inches of rain. New York City experienced record rainfall from tropical storm/hurricane Henri.
Meanwhile political leaders such as Minnesota’s Governor Walz and President Biden promise much but do little to provide meaningful responses to our climate crises. Does anyone see anything wrong with this picture? Is it a portrait of the kind of world in which you want to live, let alone raise a family? So what’s the alternative? Yes, there is one, it’s based on honesty, integrity, successful business models and acumen and, as the old saying goes, “walking the talk.” The business is Patagonia, purveyor of sustainable outdoor clothing and gear.
What prompted today’s mention is the fact that the company has recently refused to continue supplying their products to their largest customer in the Jackson Hole region of Wyoming, because of a fundraiser one of the resort owners “...co-hosted on Aug. 5 that featured former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.)...”
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| abandoned home: to be torched, disassembled, or restored?
Photo by J. Harrington
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Talk about putting your money where your values are! I’m proud to acknowledge that I’ve been a customer for a number or years and will go out of my way in the future to get my needs met with their products. Wouldn’t the world be a much better place if all companies and governments acted in consort with Patagonia’s values? Soon such integrity and orientation may be a necessity to be in business at all.
A Story
Philip Levine - 1928-2015
Everyone loves a story. Let's begin with a house. We can fill it with careful rooms and fill the rooms with things—tables, chairs, cupboards, drawers closed to hide tiny beds where children once slept or big drawers that yawn open to reveal precisely folded garments washed half to death, unsoiled, stale, and waiting to be worn out. There must be a kitchen, and the kitchen must have a stove, perhaps a big iron one with a fat black pipe that vanishes into the ceiling to reach the sky and exhale its smells and collusions. This was the center of whatever family life was here, this and the sink gone yellow around the drain where the water, dirty or pure, ran off with no explanation, somehow like the point of this, the story we promised and may yet deliver. Make no mistake, a family was here. You see the path worn into the linoleum where the wood, gray and certainly pine, shows through. Father stood there in the middle of his life to call to the heavens he imagined above the roof must surely be listening. When no one answered you can see where his heel came down again and again, even though he'd been taught never to demand. Not that life was especially cruel; they had well water they pumped at first, a stove that gave heat, a mother who stood at the sink at all hours and gazed longingly to where the woods once held the voices of small bears—themselves a family—and the songs of birds long fled once the deep woods surrendered one tree at a time after the workmen arrived with jugs of hot coffee. The worn spot on the sill is where Mother rested her head when no one saw, those two stained ridges were handholds she relied on; they never let her down. Where is she now? You think you have a right to know everything? The children tiny enough to inhabit cupboards, large enough to have rooms of their own and to abandon them, the father with his right hand raised against the sky? If those questions are too personal, then tell us, where are the woods? They had to have been because the continent was clothed in trees. We all read that in school and knew it to be true. Yet all we see are houses, rows and rows of houses as far as sight, and where sight vanishes into nothing, into the new world no one has seen, there has to be more than dust, wind-borne particles of burning earth, the earth we lost, and nothing else.
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