Jeffrey B. Swartz: I Fought the Law and the Law Won

By Jeffrey B. Swartz, Huffington Post

Talk about a brave new world: when my grandfather started this company more than 30 years ago, he was concerned about making a profit, not making headlines ... "sustainability" meant staying in business, not saving the environment.

The challenges I face as a third generation bootmaker are very different ... not necessarily bigger or smaller than the ones that kept my grandfather awake at night, but probably more complex. The good news, in my unwaveringly optimistic mind, is that the more complex the problem, the greater the possibilities for creating meaningful solutions.

Take deforestation in the Amazon rainforest. You might think, as I did, interesting issue. Deforestation is never good, and the Amazon deserves to have its natural environment and ecosystems protected as much as the next region, so no -- deforestation in the Amazon is not okay. But -- how is it our problem? We're a U.S.-based bootmaking business - sympathetic to the cause, but certainly not responsible for it. Right?

Not according to the environmental activists at Greenpeace, who recently issued a report detailing the impact of deforestation in the Amazon and tracing the deforesting activity to major brands and businesses that benefit in some way from the deforesting activity. Timberland is a company that buys a lot of leather ... and leather is a bi-product of cattle farming ... and the cattle industry in Brazil is huge. Ah-ha. We source some of our leather from a supplier...

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