Ryan Gellert, Patagonia’s C.E.O., Has a Mission: ‘Save Our Home Planet’
Scott Stephens | USA TODAY
To help save the world — and himself — Scott Stephens is starting an online venture: his own personal adventure that involves everything in life except money and food.
In the early hours of Wednesday morning, he began tweeting a daily itinerary that will follow him across a region that spans parts of Argentina, Uruguay, Australia, Peru, Chile, French Guiana, and Belize.
“In this time of climate chaos and ecological devastation, it’s time to focus on saving ourselves first,” Stephens writes in the itinerary. “This is my personal story of life, of loss, and of hope. I’m living it and sharing it with you to spread hope and joy through this message: You’re not alone.”
“It’s my hope to inspire others to live with more conscious awareness and to inspire others to think of themselves as part of the solution, rather than part of the problem,” he adds. “There’s no shame in loving the planet. There’s no shame in living within our means.”
Stephens’s life is a stark contrast to the one of his late wife, Elizabeth, who died from cancer in August at age 39. In their only son’s words, she was “an extremely loving and giving person. Her life was about helping others.”
From the minute he wakes up, Stephens takes note of everything he sees online. Then, he tweets what he sees: “Went for a run today. I ran 20 miles, climbed 20 feet of rock, and threw out my back 3 times. Went from pain to pain, to pain to pain, to pain to pain. Took the littlest kid to play with my cat today.”
Stephens’ self-thesis was set out in a blog post he published on the Huffington Post in January, after Elizabeth’s death: “My life is a journey from loss to loss to loss. Every day