Alternative Paths of Green Entrepreneurship: The Environmental Legacies of the North Face’s Doug Tompkins and Patagonia’s Yvon Chouinard

This working paper examines the impact of two entrepreneurs who offered alternative paths to reach their shared goal of a more sustainable world. Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tompkins were respective founders of the prominent outdoor apparel brands Patagonia and The North Face. Chouinard pursued incremental sustainability strategies over decades at his firm. Tompkins, who went on to manage the fashion company Esprit, opted in 1989 to exit business entirely having concluded that capitalism could never be sufficiently sustainable to reverse environmental degradation. He purchased 1.5 million hectares of land in Chile and Argentina which he converted to protected areas and national parks. The Chouinard strategy represented best practice green entrepreneurship which if widely adopted might markedly reduce the environmental impact of business, but its full execution appeared possible only because Patagonia was a private company. The Tompkins dual strategy of exit from business and application of entrepreneurial skills to conservation resulted in large environmental gains, including sequestering and storing an estimated 80 million tons of carbon. We lack the metrics and methodologies to compare rigorously which offers the better path to sustainability, but a case can be made that the application of entrepreneurial talents to activities beyond for-profit business (of which conservation is one example) might be a more effective strategy

Benefits and Trade-Offs of Different Model Representations in Decision Support Systems for Non-expert Users

Researchers have reported a lack of experience and low graph literacy as significant problems when making visual analytics applications available to a general audience. Therefore, it is fundamental to understand the strengths and weaknesses of different visualizations in the decision-making process. This paper explores the benefits and challenges of an intuitive, a compact, and a detailed visualization for supporting non-expert users. Using objective and subjective means proposed by earlier work, we determine the benefits and trade-offs of these visualizations for different task complexity levels. We found that while an intuitive visualization can be a good choice for easy level and medium level tasks, hard level tasks are best supported with a richer, yet visually more demanding visualization