The outdoor retailer has supported grass-roots environmental activists for decades. Now it is suing the
president in a bid to protect Bears Ears National Monument.
The offices of Patagonia occupy a low-slung complex of stucco buildings in this sleepy beachside town in Southern California. There are solar panels and picnic tables in the parking lot, day care with a jungle gym by the main lobby and easy access to the beach, where employees surf during lunch break. It is a corporate Eden of sorts, where idealistic Californians run a privately held company that sells about $1 billion of puffy down jackets and organic cotton jeans each year.
But on an unseasonably hot and windy Monday morning in early December, Patagonia headquarters were transformed into something that quickly resembled a war room. There were emergency conference calls with Washington lawyers. Court filings were prepared. Web designers remade the company’s home page.
It wasn’t a business crisis that had mobilized the company, however. It was politics.
Hours earlier, President Trump had announced plans to sharply reduce the size of two national monuments in Utah. Bears Ears, an expanse of red-rock canyons rich with archaeologically significant sites, would be slashed in size by 85 percent, more than one million acres. Another monument, Grand Staircase-Escalante, would be reduced by half.
LINK (via: The New York Times)
