Patagonia has a playbook for fighting Trump. Here’s what other companies can learn

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Patagonia has a playbook for fighting Trump. Here’s what other companies can learn

By Adele Peters

Five years ago, if you bought a particular pair of shorts from Patagonia, you might have noticed a message sewn into the back of the label: “Vote the assholes out.”

It was one step in the outdoor retailer’s fight against the first Trump administration. When the administration announced plans to reduce national monuments, for example, the company temporarily replaced its homepage with the message, “The President Stole Your Land.” Along with others, it helped mobilize millions of public comments. The company later sued the president over his plans to dramatically shrink the size of Bears Ears National Monument.

Now that Trump is back in office, the company is beginning a new fight. The team started strategizing last month, when the Trump administration announced that it planned to open up more public lands to oil and gas drilling and later started slashing jobs at national parks and in the Forest Service.

For Patagonia, there’s an obvious business case for pushing back against the administration’s policy, beyond the company’s core mission to protect the planet. “The outdoor industry relies on our whole system of public lands as the infrastructure that our community members use to get out and use our products and connect with the outdoors,” says Hans Cole, VP of environmental activism at Patagonia. “When you attack that infrastructure, that set of protected landscapes, absolutely we could see impacts.”

Some of those impacts could happen quickly.

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