Yvon Chouinard, co-founder of outdoor outfitter Patagonia and 1% for the Planet, will be the keynote speaker at the annual Seafood Summit in Vancouver, Canada, from 31 January to 2 February, 2011.
Seafood Choices of Silver Spring, Md., an initiative of ocean conservation organization SeaWeb, made the announcement on Wednesday.
“Yvon Chouinard’s leadership in pioneering sustainable business practices through his company Patagonia is inspirational, and we are thrilled at the rare privilege of having him deliver the keynote address at the upcoming Seafood Summit,” said Dawn Martin, president of SeaWeb.
“Who are businesses really responsible to? Their shareholders? Their customers? Their employees? None of the above, I have finally come to believe,” said Chouinard.
“Fundamentally, businesses are responsible to their resource base. Without a healthy planet there are no shareholders, no customers, no employees. As the conservationist David Brower liked to say, ‘There is no business to be done on a dead planet.’ But what does behaving responsibly to the environment mean? It took me nearly 25 years in business to learn how to ask that question. It has taken another 15 years of trial and error to uncover the process that Patagonia — or any environmentally minded company — has to go through in pursuit of answers,” added Chouinard.
Registration for the ninth annual Seafood Summit, which will be held at The Westin Bayshore in Vancouver, is now open. The theme of the 2011 event is “responsibility without borders.”
Representatives of the global seafood industry, conservation organizations, scientists, academics, policymakers and media professionals convene for three days to examine the many factors influencing sustainability and their role in the global seafood landscape.
This year’s event in Paris attracted more than 640 delegates from 42 countries. Click here to check out SeafoodSource’s coverage of the 2009 Seafood Summit by SeafoodSource Contributing Editor Lindsey Partos and SeaFood Business Associate Editor James Wright.
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