Rick Crawford
I started my company, Emerger Strategies, because I wanted to marry my passion for fly fishing and sustainability, and I protect what I love by guiding businesses on their sustainability journey and improving the environmental performance of their operations and products. In doing so, my clients are fighting climate change, which is the single greatest threat to fisheries on the planet. For example, by conserving resources through green building practices they use less energy from fossil fuels, and using recycled materials in their products reduces the demand for virgin materials. These are just a couple of example, but you get the point. While I believe businesses, especially in the fly fishing industry, have a responsibility to improve their environmental performance, I also believe that’s only part of the solution because the scale needed to truly fight climate change also requires better policy, which is why I have decided to donate 1% of our 2019 sales to Protect Our Winters (POW) through our 1% for the Planet Membership.
For those of you who might be unfamiliar, “Protect Our Winters (POW) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Founded by professional snowboarder Jeremy Jones in 2007, POW turns passionate outdoor people into effective climate advocates. POW leads a community of athletes, thought pioneers and forward-thinking business leaders to affect systemic political solutions to climate change.”
Initially, I discovered POW through social media, but after interviewing Hilary Hutcheson and John Land Le Coq on my blog series, The Sustainable Angler, I knew I wanted to support POW’s Work, so I became an individual member. However, after talking more with Hilary, and putting more thought into it, I believe POW is a great opportunity to demonstrate how climate change not only impacts our winters, but also our fisheries, and is the perfect example of systems thinking. For example, when there is less snowpack during winter, rivers and streams that hold cold water species like trout also warm more quickly in the summers, putting stress on fish and often times resulting in stream closures.
The ability to use systems thinking is also critical in understanding sustainable business as it forces you to consider the impact your decisions are having not just on your economic bottom line, but also your environmental and social bottom lines, which is also known as the triple bottom line in sustainable business. Based on what the climate scientists are telling us, we are running out of time and the time to act on climate is now. The question is, “what are you going to do about it?”
I, for one, am not going to sit idly by and watch, so by making changes at my home and work that demands less fossil fuels; supporting the policy work of Protect Our Winters by donating 1% of our 2019 sales to POW; and guiding businesses on their sustainability journey with my company, Emerger Strategies, I am vowing to do everything within my power to ensure that my family is able to continue enjoying the outdoor pursuits we love for generations to come.
If you would like to protect our winters, which in turn, protects our spring, summer and fall fishing, please consider joining Protect Our Winters today!