Malcolm Johnson

In one of the last interviews he gave before he passed away, the writer and conservationist shares his reflections on the past, and the work still to do.

There’s nothing more important than having waves a few minutes away.

Patagonia Designers on the ‘Celebrating Public Lands’ Collection

“For us, the tide is the boss,” says Adam James of Hama Hama Oysters, a fifth-generation, family-run shellfish farm on Washington’s Puget Sound. “In late August and September, we’ll be out there on the beach harvesting at 3 or 4 a.m., and when the sun finally comes up you can’t help but pause. It reminds…

It didn’t take long for Ben Wilkinson to figure out that there was freedom to be had in working for himself—and that freedom was the first requirement if he wanted to go surfing whenever the waves got huge. “I left home when I was 16,” he remembers, “which was old enough in my eyes. But…

If you’ve ever read a story about surfing on the Canadian coast, you’re pretty sure to have read a few boilerplate paragraphs about how pristine it is in this part of the world. How bears and wolves stroll past the tent sites on the shoreline, perhaps, or how the lineups are alive with seals and…

I’d been dreaming about Haida Gwaii for as long as I could remember. Or, if not quite as long as I could remember, at least since my time as a skinny, bespectacled kid in public school, staring wide-eyed at the Haida totems in front of the Royal British Columbia Museum. In more recent years, with…

A few weeks ago some of the folks from the California office cruised up to our part of the coast. Glen Morden, one of Patagonia’s product designers, is a transplanted Canadian, so he was piloting the minivan as they rolled across the Island and into town. They showed up on a typical Tofino day—thick cloud,…