Patagonia Challenges Businesses to Eschew Lax Textile Standards, Support Regenerative Agriculture
Author: Talia Rudee | Published: December 14, 2016
Purpose-driven US outdoor clothing giant Patagonia is calling for business leaders to back regenerative organic agriculture, claiming that certain textile standards are “not going far enough.”
“A growing number of corporations, researchers, journalists and practitioners have also started using the term ‘regenerative’ — as well as ‘restorative,’ ‘sustainable,’ ‘ethical,’ and others — almost interchangeably, without any clear sense of what we’re talking about,” Patagonia president and CEO Rose Marcario asserted in a recent post. “Even worse, we’re increasingly seeing ‘sustainable’ claims combined with conventional (non-organic) farming, which defeats the purpose entirely.”
Instead of tolerating “the watering down of agricultural practices that hold potential for enormous benefit to our suffering planet,” she contends, companies need to avoid perpetuating environmental degradation – not to mention potential greenwashing – by committing to the use of materials created through regenerative organic agriculture, which “includes any agricultural practice that increases soil organic matter from baseline levels over time, provides long-term economic stability for farmers and ranchers, and creates resilient ecosystems and communities.