You ask me about the past, you ask me about the future, the only way to be happy is to be living right now.

I've accepted the fact that there's a beginning and end to everything. All species are born, evolve, and then die off. We're going through the 6th great extinction and the large mammals are going first and, you know what - we're large mammals!

What they don't realize is that I'm not in the business to make clothes. I'm not in the business to make more money for myself, for Christ's sake. This is the reason Patagonia exists - to put into action the recommendations I read about in books to avoid environmental collapse. That's the reason I'm in business - to try to clean up our own act, and try to influence other companies to do the right thing, and try to influence our customers to do the right thing. So we're not going to change.

Going back to a simpler life is not a step backwards.

The solution may be for a lot of the world's problems is to turn around and take a forward step. You can't just keep trying to make a flawed system work.

Nature doesn't like empires. It doesn't like accumulation in one place, it doesn't like monoculture. It's always trying to make diverse species. It wants to spread everything out. And we're constantly trying to hold everything in.

The future of Yosemite climbing lies not in Yosemite, but in using the new techniques in the great granite ranges of the world.