otto flores

11/27/20

Interview by Kjell van Sice

K: Here are my fundamental thoughts: Living sustainably in modern life doesn’t just happen — it starts with asking questions. Choosing what questions to ask, let alone even understanding which ones will lead to helpful answers, is a crucial first step. What is sustainability? What is adaptability? Is a sustainable life achieved through a certain mindset, or is it just the product of historical, environmental, and socio-economic circumstances? What role does education play in our ability to adapt? Is simplicity the key to long-term sustainability? Who has succeeded at adaptability and why? How does green marketing affect consumers’ perceptions of their so-called sustainable lives? These questions are asked every minute by consumers, designers, brand developers, and business people alike. If we learn to ask good questions and think our way to constructive answers, our outlook on sustainability will also grow.

O: I’m exited and happy to hear about the fundamentals of this series. All the things you mentioned are vital to living a sustainable life, but the most important is being mindful of your community, yourself, your surroundings, and your immediate family and friends. Practice sustainability not for any kind of social media attention , but rather for what surrounds you and your immediate community. I believe we can only affect our community directly, and those that are directly linked to us. Social media and the inspiration it can provide is definitely the trend at the moment and also a functional tool, but the truly sustainable people that I have come to admire and try to follow in their footsteps are nowhere near a social media encounter. They’re in the sustainable life for themselves, their family, and their community. With that comes what I think is a more inspiring result and also achieving better practices that can be handed off to other people. It’s important not to do it to just to promote a product, or to promote anything but the well being of your surroundings. At the end of the day, that’s what your pulse if affecting, and that’s what affects your pulse.

K: Let’s take a few steps back. What does sustainability mean?

O: Sustainability is living with as little impact as possible and actually benefitting the places where we live instead of affecting them in a negative way. There are a million different definitions for sustainability. Basically it’s about simplifying and using things efficiently. Lowering the footprint even on a mindset level, I believe in energy. There are ways to be a more sustainable person just by being low impact with your presence and efficient with your actions. I just scratched the surface with that answer!

K: When did you first come to sustainability, and what did the process of becoming more sustainable look like for you?

O: It was just common sense. It was always a matter of simplifying. When I met my wife, as I grow older, I want to shed a lot of things our evolution will be to go back to the roots of simple living. Obviously, having kids, a relationship, and building businesses means you accumulate things, but I believe in minimizing my surroundings in every which way or form. It may be from simple things like minimizing our plastic consumption to using reusable bottles, but also what we do in the household and what we do in the business to make everything less of an impact and more of a positive footprint towards the future. The goal is to simplify as we go.

K: That simplification also helps you focus your business as you run slimmer and tighter. Multifaceted benefits.

O: There’s a saying — more money, more problems. More things, more things to take care of. It all stems from that. Simplifying is the art of heading in the right direction.

K: I agree. But you can never have too many boards or hydrofoils, right? That’s the one thing I’ll have ten of…

O: I have this problem with surfboards. I’m pretty sustainable with the foils, but with the surfboards I don’t hold back. They’re tools of the trade, and the opportunity to ride new shapes and not miss out is probably my flaw. I do believe in recycling surfboards — I don’t want to have 40 of them sitting there unless I use all of them all the time. When it’s time to phase out, I keep them moving to other riders. I believe in cleaning out the shed. But I do fall victim to different curves and lines all day long. Just like you, I have a problem!

K: *Motioning to foil boards in background* These two boards here were both made from a recycled SUP. That board started out as a Starboard 7’5 pro, which was already built with premium sustainable construction tech, then was transformed by Ryan Harris from Earth Technologies into these foil boards. He used bio resin of course, along with end of roll carbon strips. The foil tracks are reinforced with balsa. When these boards’ life cycle comes to an end, I’ll bring them back to Ryan so he can recycle them into another board. My Sunova boards are also built sustainably with balsa (option for paulownia) and bio resin.

O: I don’t use any other boards than Fletch’s, just because that's the way it’s worked out for me, but I own two foilboards at the moment. My friend and I have a bunch of foils between us, and we buy and use things together so its more affordable & we’re pretty sustainable by sharing. When the guys at Lift tell me I should get their latest and greatest, I always ask for the scraps because I’m not the best foiler in the world and I think the scraps are good enough for me to get there.

K: It’s great when you have old gear that you can sell or give away. I just cleaned house and passed along five foil sets, gave two away to people locally. Stuff that’s still super useable. I decided to just keep one foil set for myself for the year, or until I break it.

O: What setups do you use?

K: I work with Starboard to develop their foils, but we have a loose arrangement where I can ride and review whatever else I want. That’s a great arrangement since I’m a contributing editor at Foiling Magazine and do a lot of tests and reviews and wouldn’t want to ride only a single brand of foils. My personal kits have mainly been from Starboard, Delta, and Cloud IX, with some others mixed and matched. Board wise I’ve ridden Freedom Foil Boards in the past, now I design all my own boards and have them built by Ryan Harris from Earth Technologies, who builds super sustainably. A big plus is that we don’t have to get the board shipped and use tons of packing material, I can just drive down to Ryan’s shop and pick it up. When I have old boards, I can bring them down at the same time to get recycled. Trying to keep it low impact. Now a new line of prone foil boards I developed are coming out with Sunova and GenRation.

O: For me to get Fletcher’s boards is cool, FCD guy’s turned me on to he hole foil thing so it’s only natural that I use their gear. One thing, it takes a lot of fossil fuels to get them here. So I try to sell them or give them away before moving onto the next ones. Now that traveling is not that appealing it’s time to get creative.

K: Indeed, living sustainably 100% of the time is currently impossible. So how do you keep yourself in check and do your best to be mostly sustainable?

O: To be honest, it is a next to impossible task to live a 100% sustainable life in terms of dieting, what we consume everyday, and I had a really hard time dealing with this to the point where it was becoming obsessive and not productive. I’ve kind of given up —no, not given up—rather let go, and just do the best practices we can. It’s really hard to control four people’s lives in a house, how much plastic we consume, all that. We do the best we can, recycling, upcycling on the house front. Obviously trying to live a plant based diet is the best I can see trying to help that other side of things, but I do have to admit that I’m a person who has a lot of energy connected to the ocean and I don’t skip eating fresh fish. I want to eat whole foods, I don’t want to eat the packaged stuff. We do freeze our freshly caught food in the most sustainable way possible, though. It comes down to our best practices to live a positive lifestyle. Preaching has never been my style, but leading by example is something that’s always worked for us. I think my kids are a good example of that; just by the way we live, they’ve been really opposed to plastics and understand how we can harm animals and eco systems. They’re 5 and 9, and are naturally inclined to live a more sustainable, forward thinking life. This doesn’t come from us preaching, but just practicing. Practicing what you can do will rub off on the right people, and will work better than just being a diehard preacher because you can. I personally hit that wall, because you just can’t be against everyone who doesn’t live the way you want them to live. Detaching and setting yourself from systematic living is a good way to approach it. We all have to work, we all have to live and have mouths to feed — there’s a balance you have to keep right in the middle.

K: Learning compromise.

O: Being humble enough to learn that is hard, but it frees up a lot of energy whose feedback could be bad. All the activism we’ve been doing is slowly starting to pay off for what we’ve done to the earth. Activism and humanitarian efforts soothe the soul because we practice a pretty heavy lifestyle no matter how sustainable we are. We’re in a system where everyday living — turning on the lights, making food, driving a car, flying in a plane — you’d go crazy trying to be a hermit. As hard as it is, you need to accept that on your way to a sane and sustainable lifestyle.

K: You talk about the system, I think we could all benefit from a fundamental understanding of economics, especially when trying to picture sustainability. Supply and demand govern our relationship with the environment, and obviously we haven’t always done an excellent job managing our environmental economy. Could this be because those with governing power have chosen to ignore these simple economic principles in favor of short term gain — this is probably the case 99.999% of the time — or could it be that we as regular citizens don’t see the big picture, in other words we don’t see ourselves as cogs in the wheel? Cogs that kick the can down the road, never really improving our ways because it’s not financially justifiable? The way in which we choose to use our water, our electricity, our fuel, etc.

O: A good friend of mine enlightened me in this sense. A lot of powerful people in this world are still trying to cash in on fossil fuels and other things that harm the environment, and governments are inclined to head that direction. One of the saddest things I’ve learned is that we already have the means to live in a totally sustainable, solar-powered lifestyle, for all humanity. The earth absorbs vastly more solar energy than we would need to capture this energy we need every day, and the technology is here, but it’s just all these functional business lobbying government that are slowing that down. We have technology that can be recycled from a car’s energy and put back into its system, or paint for the exterior of houses that captures solar power to charge batteries. We see the technology coming from forward thinking companies , and at some point, that will be affordable. And there are people who are running sustainable oriented companies. I’m not sure what happened with COVID, but there are a lot of companies taking advantage of the the system and from that, a lot of economic hardship came down for everybody. Even though we are too late to go back to a system like trading and bartering in the local community, we have the economic resources to subside sustainably. It comes down to simplicity. If you simplify life — and I say this after living through all the catastrophes in P.R. (Puerto Rico) for the past years — everything boils down to if you have a house in the country where you can grow your own food and collect your own water, and have the ocean and mountains around you for mental health ,what else do you need? No matter if you’re wealthy or not, the more these catastrophes hit, the more I think we all want to retreat to places were we can be self-sufficient. The community aspect is so important because if you have a functional community, you can trade whatever you have of value in your finca, or ranch, with your neighbor, which creates a trade and barter system. One neighbor is a plumber, the other is something else, and you create a microgrid. We’ve obviously come to prioritize numbers, and everything is geared towards growing numbers and dollars. But living by numbers isn’t sustainable because someone is always going to end up broke. I live in a country that is something like $70 billion in debt, and we aren’t digging ourselves out of that. Someone got really rich off that debt, and probably still is getting richer. The mathematics definitely aren’t equating, and they’re one sided. It all circles back down to that Yin and Yang where enough people have to live a certain way just to offset those that aren’t.

K: It cycles back to education. In your view, what broadly needs to advance in that respect?

O: Countries are responsible for educating their people, and all around the world, that doesn’t happen enough. Even in places like the U.S where the education is part of our taxpayer money, there’s still segregation and economic disparity which boxes people in. There are a lot of sustainably smart people that are able to get out of that system and live rich and beautiful lives by having their own chickens and cattle and a farm — but especially in the U.S, that takes a lot of money to do. What I see in conversations I have with people that are influential and successful is they are educated and knowledgable about the food supply system. We all need it to survive, and the most affordable food is usually the worst. Again it’s another example of inequality in the United States. You could talk about this subject for hours. From the food system, to the medical and tax system, it’s all heavily manipulated and difficult to understand broken if you ask me And I’m not just jumping on the U.S, this is a global issue. Lack of education pigeonholes the population into having to live an unsustainable way. People’s lack of understanding and awareness in this respect is going to keep harming us in the future.

K: The vast majority of the population is not lucky enough to receive a well-rounded, modern education, either formally or from family and mentors, that can prepare them for everything they have to deal with in society. Especially not enough to become truly sustainable. At the same time, there are so many tools to help us educate ourselves, but they’re only tools and can only give answers. How do we shape kids so they are able to ask good questions?

O: The best question to ask is to keep asking questions. Not asking questions means you’re not learning your not evolving. There are plenty of brilliant self-educated people out there — I mean self educated in that their parents took it upon themselves to homeschool them, and family values & morals were really important. Before I developed the sustainable mentality I have today, my perspective was in a way immature, but always going in the right direction because I always asked questions constantly. Asking the questions is the way to learn what works for you. Maybe you’ll ask a question and the answer isn’t what you’re looking for, which may teach you something valuable. Asking hard or uncomfortable questions as a traveling kid shaped how I thought about what I did and didn’t want to become. I tell people that one of my best teachers is my brother who suffers from addiction, because he took all these steps which I saw were not working out so well. He also saw racism at a time when I couldn’t understand it, him being a white guy with green eyes from Puerto Rico living in Austin Texas was not the norm. He experienced racism when we were in the U.S., and us being very mixed race meant we didn’t see that back home in P.R. I wouldn’t say we were naive, but being multicultural in P.R. makes it easier to not see segregation as a mayor threat it’s a small island & a melting pot of old cultures that came together in the new world. A lot of my questions were answered by seeing examples of what not to do, how not to act or how not to talk to other people. I also realized that not everyone has the answers, but asking the question is the catalyst for eventually getting to a solid answer. The irony is that the student will always be a step ahead of the teacher by virtue of asking why and how in the context of the present and future. So education is critical. The most impressive people to me are the farmers and fisherman who are so in tune with nature knowledgeable and always have their hands in the mix. They’re the ones telling me if the winds are so and so, the fish will be there, and if it rains this amount, the soil is going to change like this, and those are the people that are super connected to the earth. They know to ask questions and observe, and they appreciate the level of understanding you need to build to see the world as it is.

K: I was recently listening to an interview in the 70s of Dr. Richard Feynman, who when asked a question about a complex subject, answered that this question would only raise an impractical number of further questions, and that no response he could provide would be sufficient given the reporter’s lack of knowledge about the subject. In essence, Feynman meant that we cannot expect simple answers to complex questions. In that way, we can’t expect something as broad as living a sustainable life to be achieved by recycling alone.

O: I can tell you why the waves break a certain way, but like you said, I can’t give you a simple answer about why Pipeline breaks the way it does. This is a question my son has asked me a lot. Well, it’s because of the contour of the bottom, the change in depth, the swell direction, and so on — but at that point I’ve gone so deep that I’ve lost him. Giving answers, it’s important to simplify things that can be simplified. But also it’s really important to realize that how you ask the question changes the response.

K: And that’s the way we have to approach asking questions about sustainability. It’s so easy to be on board and feel like you understand what a sustainable existence looks like, but then variables change and you have to adapt your understanding by adapting the questions you pose.

O: I have a good analogy for you on that one, and it has to do with my relationship with Patagonia. Before I was even involved whatsoever with them, I knew they were at the forefront of sustainability and figuring out the best practices to run the company ecosystem sustainably. They have thousands of employees answering that one question, so that question has to be interpreted and manipulated through each set of eyes. This is a situation where just saying “be sustainable” flies into so many areas that it’s no longer that simple. It’s amazing to walk into a company where every single aspect is dissected and brought back to the question of sustainability. The soil from which the cotton is grown, regenerative agriculture, fair trade certified, sustainability becomes a matrix of answers. At the same time, it’s hard to not send a piece of clothing in a piece of plastic packaging because that’s currently the only really good option for keeping the quality of that product before it reaches the customer. So even people at the forefront — and this goes back to the question you asked me before — we all have to pay our taxes to earth and help it get better, but it’s impossible to all do perfectly. It might be the microfibers of the jacket that gets washed, and that gets washed into the ocean. But it’s about minimizing. Mitigating and reducing risk is something I learned through ocean risk management. In a triage, you have to figure out who you’re going to help first, and you have to make that decision in seconds. The answer to most of these questions is common sense. Look around, and you’ll realize that most of the time, common sense prevails.

K: Triage is strategy. Strategy, either on a local or global scale, is critical. We can see the effects of applying strategy to sustainability and conservation on the political front, like the Paris Agreement or Kyoto Protocol. These efforts are so massive that they’re hard to relate to. Also the fact that they’re presented to us on paper makes it difficult to picture. How do we develop our own strategies as individuals?

O: That’s where I think sticking to your community — your peripheral vision — has to be the first step. If you go in the right direction within that smaller scale, the bigger steps will become obvious. I see this in a lot of my peers I look up to for example Ramon Navarro and Greg Long , who have defined a certain strategy and direction and have marched that way effectively. That’s grown out and inspired a larger audience. When I was a kid, I was always aspiring to be way bigger than where I was from. I wanted to archive my goals in places like Hawaii and Tahiti, and that seemed to be where my success would be. In reality, all that did was bring me back to where I’m from in a more solid and understanding way. Witnessing and living the Pacific, European, South American cultures, all that knowledge I captured gave ideals to bring value back to my community, and share this information with them. Also, just because I saw something done a certain way over there doesn’t mean we have to do it exactly the same way here at home, but at least we can take some inspiration from other cultures. Reading back into history, starting in our immediate communities is very effective. No revolution has occurred from the top, it always starts down at the bottom where the passion and real people are. I think I might have herd that from Yvon. All revolutions grew out of passion, necessity, and a certain type of hardship that inspired them to make a change.

K: I know you’re affiliated with brands that are leaders in sustainability, but who do you think does it right and why?

O: There was a thought I had a few years ago. It was that if I’m living this lifestyle because I want to live in it for myself, then I need to represent brands that align with that same idea. I’m pretty proud to say that any brand I’m affiliated with are either practicing at their best, or have definitely stepped out of their comfort zone to do so. There are brands that are not necessarily the most sustainable, but are building towards it by having a sustainable business model. There are plenty of brands that are taking that ethos which Yvon started — creating a brand not to be another company, but to become the industry standard — and have fully run with it. You mentioned something at the start of our conversation which is a very true statement: a lot of companies do what they do only for the consumer to buy the product, and not to better the planet, the industry, or the lives of the people building the product. They just want to stay on financial track. That’s where companies differentiate themselves. Those who have a history of doing things for a deeper reason versus those looking for next year’s marketing scheme will be seen for that.

K: Shortsightedness.

O: I don’t know how long the “sustainability” thing is going to last for companies in terms of a marketing tool. Should become an operation standard. There is definitely an audience for that, and customers are saying they will buy things they believe in. Customers might be getting more educated? We’re at a boiling point where if you’re not sustainable, you’re just creating more damage than good.

K: I think it’s fascinating that Patagonia, for all its sustainability ethos and a largely sustainability-aware customer base, has become a fashion icon at this point in time. I say “fashion” with a certain tone because it’s not a sustainable approach to clothing. I know more people who buy Patagonia soft goods because the label makes them feel sustainable than I do those who purchase it and live a genuinely well-rounded sustainable existence. At the end of the day, simultaneously owning red, blue, green, and brown Patagonia jackets doesn’t make anyone sustainable, no matter how sustainable Patagonia itself might be in manufacturing process. I ask myself when, if ever, will the expiration date arrive on customers turning sustainable products into fashionable consumables? Maybe that’s just the inevitable result of offering a great product, though.

O: The goal is to keep following suit on innovation. The menu is still pretty slim in terms of distinct pieces, and a lot of styles that Patagonia has been offering have been available for 40 years. They’re not new. Same silhouettes, they just get keep evolving getting better with time & people still love to buy them. What I see happening is that young people are tuning into function vs fashion and they love to see a fashion-forward piece of functional apparel. They would love to use that piece that’s super sleek to wear and at the same time functional and sustainable. As a kid, I was pretty fashion forward, and I built my surfing career as a more eccentric type of character. My style was directed & said simplicity: t shirts with no logos, shorts with no logos. In a way, It grew into a kit and now I’ve built this trustworthy kit — these trunks — that I always have on every trip, in every story. These trunks go everywhere I do. So does this backpack and this jacket. It’s a kit that no matter where you are, you’re comfortable, warm, and you know you can wash your clothes in a sink somewhere. In this stage in my life, it’s all about a simple mentality We’re smart and not buying fifteen boardshorts anymore, just one or two. My black trunks are never going to go out of style. There will always be kids that want to go to Orange County with their neon shades and pink shorts, but there are more and more kids who say “I’m going to buy a garment that I can trust no matter if I have to spend a little more, and it’s going to last me for a long time.Nobody shows up on the Central Coast with their quicksilver jacket anymore. They go buy their $400 jacket once and keep it for who knows how long. Who knows what brand they pick but there’s a clear shift away from short term, look-at-me fashion. Now we’re getting into the conspiracy that other industries are looking at the outdoor industry and saying, “hey, we need to be like them!” In my case this is what I see. Wherever the surf industry sees success, they go there. It’s good to see that, in spite of the change, companies are sticking to their classics. Again, brands with good fundamentals, a strong history, and a clear vision are doing well. Also, because of social media, the industry is moving towards creating an image that’s more relatable to the average Joe. It’s easier to relate to a carpenter getting barreled at his local spot than to Medina who makes millions of dollars for shaving his armpits for a commercial. That inclusivity is really good, and I’m happy to see things trending that way. But the Patagonias shouldn’t be the only leader in the industry. Sustainable standards should be practiced across the board. Best practices should be an impactful requisite for all companies to give this earth a better chance. I know we are not perfect but might as well die trying.

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