I was waiting for a package in Paresky the other day and, perusing the catalog table, picked up the latest from Patagonia, an outdoor clothing store. Taking it back home, I flipped through it, loving the great photography and informative, eco-friendly “mini-articles” that are interspersed with the product descriptions. The features in this particular issue dealt with conservation issues in northern Patagonia, with artfully-written diatribes against hydro-electric projects initiated the Chilean government that would ruin the stark, beautiful landscape. Their answer? Wealthy North Americans—some of the creators of Patagonia and The North Face—have bought up vast swaths of land in this remote region and have created a private park, called Parque Pumalín (http://www.parquepumalin.cl/content/index.htm).
I had heard of this interesting approach to conservation before, but after reading Papson’s “Green Marketing and the Commodity Self” I was prompted to adopt a more critical attitude toward the park and the Patagonia magalog as well. The point that resonated with me the most in the article was the companies’ questionable dedication to an eco-friendly lifestyle. Papson argues that if the people at a company like Patagonia were really friendly to the environment, they wouldn’t manufacture consumer goods in the first place. Patagonia as a brand and as a company is about as “eco-friendly” as you can get—they advertise their manufacturing practices and charity donations almost as much as their products. The catalog adopts an almost conciliatory tone towards the consumer, saying, “we know that this sort of thing is crass, and you’d rather just be outdoors and away from all of this, but we’re the best of all the consumer evils that you have to deal with.” In a sense, the catalog practices a form of self-hatred—it doesn’t want to be a gross, common catalog, so it inserts “articles.” It doesn’t want to peddle environment-destroying, consumer-society-based products, so it highlights its photographs of sweeping, exotic mountain ranges and active people over the actual things that it’s selling.
Like Papson says, what the catalog is really selling is Nature, or a road to Nature. The Patagonia Person is one that is spiritually at peace, going “outside” as much as possible, is ecologically conscious and down-to-earth. In practice, however, many times a different sort of person emerges. Back home, I was one of a group of people who might spend almost as much time in an REI store as actually outside doing things (EMS to you east-coasters). We referred to ourselves facetiously as “gear-whores,” as we would walk into the shop with usually no real objective in our mind as to what to purchase. Often we would not buy anything, just hang around and intake the brand-created atmosphere of the climber-biker-hiker-camper jet set. Looking back on this now brings to mind DeBord’s society of the spectacle—we were always prepared to do whatever adventurous things we wanted to with all of our fancy gear, but actually doing stuff outside tended to be wet, dirty and often miserable. The actual escapades were good stories to tell our friends while sipping coffee in REI and buying a new sleeping bag.
Why the aforementioned Parque Pumalín interest me, though, is because, from what I’ve heard of it, it resembles the Patagonia-brand “ideal” transplanted on earth. The park has a corporate-funded infrastructure, complete with rest houses, trails, cool-and-groovy organic farming projects and ecological-stability programs—all on private land. While this is all very cool, what’s next? Zimbabwe brought to you by Nike? The idea that a company can give us branded nature, to me, is repulsive, no matter how “ecologically-friendly” the company is.
