The Tao of the Dirtbag

With Earth Day coming round again, magazines are rolling out their annual 'green issues.' Fortune 'goes green' in April. So does Outside. Interestingly, both glossies feature Arnold Schwarzenegger. But guess which one puts the Guvernator on the cover. That's right: Outside. In what seems like role reversal, Fortune leads with Patagonia founder and self-described dirtbag, Yvon Chouinard. Makes sense though. Chouinard has lately been on a crusade to change the way America does business. To flog his book Let My People Go Surfing, which is equal parts memoir and personal business philosophy, Chouinard skipped the bookstores. He went straight to the business schools instead. As the article by Susan Casey reports,

These days he's a standing-room-only ticket at Stanford and Harvard business schools. Yale, which awarded him an honorary doctorate in humane letters in 1995, recently offered him a fellowship to teach courses merging business with environmental studies. "I mean, can you imagine that?" he says, laughing. "I got a degree in auto mechanics at John Burroughs High School. But there's no surf in New Haven."

Spoken like a true dirtbag.

As a final note, big props to the Gristers for their inclusion in Outside's pages. But, c'mon dudes! Get them jeans dirty, would ya?