I have mixed feelings about Patagonia, or mainly its leader Yvon. I'm in the camp where it's possible to be pro wild fish without being totally anti-hatchery. I have to be because I want there to be more fish than the extant environment can produce naturally. I recognize and accept that even if we could restore rivers and the oceans to historic productivity, (which we can't) we wouldn't do it because it would interfere with too many other things that are beneficial to society.

I'm miffed that Yvon funds or subsidizes his son-in-laws environmental consulting company because they very actively oppose a trap-and-haul fish passage alternative on CA's Yuba River. They want the dams removed. Well, that's nice, but it's CA, and CA has 38 million people who need a whole lot of water. The human population continues to grow, as does the need for water. The Central Valley's rim dams with large storage reservoirs are not ever coming down. Water will be transferred from ag to M&I, but the reservoirs are there to stay.

So Yvon and his allies are actively choosing to forego recovery of threatened and endangered Chinook and steelhead, because, in their words, "wild salmon don't ride in trucks." Well CA ain't Bristol Bay, AK, and frankly, wild salmon actually don't care how they get to their spawning grounds, except that they only know how to swim. If we aren't allowed to help fish around dams, whether it's trucks, fish ladders, or other artificial means, to get them to the places where suitable habitat still exists, then recovery is off the table. And that bugs me.

And yes, I occasionally buy Patagonia products that fill my needs and I find them on sale.