From the Outback to the Boardroom
Holding powerful people to their own promises, one letter at a time.
I recently learnt from a post by Natalie Kyriacou (author of Nature’s Last Dance) that the reason DDT’s use has been banned in most places, and heavily restricted in others, is because a woman called Olga Owens Huckins wrote a letter to Rachel Carson in 1958 about birds disappearing from her garden due to DDT. Rachel Carson subsequently wrote Silent Spring, published in 1962, which led to the banning of DDT in 1972.
Getting Apple to drop leather from its products
In 2021 I took part in the #dropcroc protests outside Hermès in Sydney, for their horrific abuse of Australian crocodiles, who are kept in tiny pens and killed for their skins. (You know, so that they can make a fucking handbag)
I knew that Apple had a partnership with Hermès, and also that Apple had very public environmental policies.
I publicly called out Tim Cook, and pointed out that their partnership with Hermès was in contradiction with their own published environmental policy:
The image I attached to my tweet was not an activist’s slogan. It was Apple’s own environmental report for the Apple Watch Series 7. Apple described responsibility across its products’ life cycles, including the materials used to make them. And it made a particularly useful point:
We sell millions of products. So making even small adjustments can have a meaningful impact.
This statement was a contradiction: If choices about materials matter at Apple’s scale, surely the materials used in its luxury partnerships deserve scrutiny too?
Two years later Apple announced it would stop using leather in its products, and the new Apple/Hermès bands were all made without animal skins. Its stated rational was environmental impact.
Did my tweet influence Apple’s decision?
I don’t know. I have no evidence that Tim Cook read it, let alone that it changed a product decision.
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I’d love to say “I tweeted, therefore Apple changed.” But I suspect pressure came from many directions. Nonetheless, my point is this:
The behaviour I was challenging could be changed. A prestigious partnership did not make its materials untouchable.
So here is my question for Hermès
Axel Dumas, Hermès’ Executive Chairman, is quoted on the company’s biodiversity page saying:
“Protecting biodiversity is a magnificent opportunity. Passing on this diversity to future generations is an obligation. It is a combat for the present day.”
Mr Dumas is highly respected business leader, credited for expanding Hermès due to his focus on creation, craftmanship, exclusivity and balancing heritage with innovation (see Harvard Business Review)
Nonetheless, Hermès expanded its crocodile farm operations, in direct contradiction to its own commitment to ‘act4nature’, a promise it made 2018.
Mr Dumas: will you commit Hermès to public, dated phase-out of exotic animal skins, with independently verifiable milestones?
You do not need to be important to ask
A useful letter does not have to be long. Name the decision. Show the evidence. Quote the promise it conflicts with. Ask for one concrete change, and make it easy to understand what a meaningful answer would look like.
Write to the person who can make that decision. Sometimes that is a chief executive. Sometimes it is a procurement manager, a councillor, a university or a local business owner.
Be firm about the issue without turning the person into an enemy. Follow up. Work alongside others. Acknowledge real progress without pretending the work is finished.
Olga Huckins could not have known what her letter would help set in motion. Our own letters may lead nowhere.
But… they might just become one small part of something larger.
