Patagonia has a distinguished record of environmental philanthropy. The company is also seeing double-digit annual growth. Photograph by Robert Alexander/Getty

Earlier this month, a peculiar vehicle appeared on the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn: a biodiesel-fuelled, reclaimed-wood camper that could have been a food truck selling vegan “ish” and chips. But instead of a meal, the truck was made to sell a message on behalf of Patagonia, the outdoor-clothing company.

The camper, dubbed Delia, was on a six-week cross-country road trip, repairing outdoor gear and selling used Patagonia products along the way. The amount of fixing that went on was humble in scale: ninety-three garments in New York City and about twenty-one hundred nationwide. The tour, which ended May 12th in Boston, is better thought of as the latest embodiment of the company’s ongoing campaign to encourage a national conversation about the threat posed to the planet by a global economy that depends on relentless growth and consumerism.

That conversation—despite being spurred, in recent years, by such figures as the author-activists Bill McKibben (a former staff writer) and Naomi Klein; the economists Robert Costanza, Tim Jackson, and Peter Victor; and the participants in a thinly spread “degrowth” movement—has so far failed to reach the volume even of mainstream Internet buzz. Yet anti-consumerism is clearly helping to build the Patagonia brand. Indeed, the company is seeing double-digit annual growth.

Rick Ridgeway, Patagonia’s vice-president of environmental affairs, told me that the company’s approach was inspired by a 2009 Times story he read about consumer spending during the last days of the Great Recession. The article noted that the financial squeeze was putting “value in vogue”—and not only in the predictable form of bargain hunting. Impulse buying and conspicuous consumption had slowed, and some shoppers were seeking goods that offered enduring worth, such as fuel-efficient vehicles and gardening tools that allowed them to grow their own food.

“That really caught my eye, because that is our value proposition. That is what we’re trying to deliver to our customers—those kinds of products,” Ridgeway said. “I thought, Wow, if at least some small cohort of people are recognizing that, then those people are our people, and how could we do a better job of giving them what they need to live more responsibly, not just in recession but any time?”

The company’s anti-materialistic stance ramped up on Black Friday, 2011, with a memorable full-page advertisement in the Times that read, “Don’t Buy This Jacket.” The ad’s text broke down the environmental costs of the company’s top-selling R2 fleece sweater and asked consumers to think twice before buying it or any other product. The attention the ad received helped to bump Patagonia’s 2012 sales significantly.

In September, 2013, the company launched its Responsible Economy campaign. In an accompanying essay (which, like the rest of the campaign's material, is no longer available at Patagonia.com but still can be read in Google's cache), under a graphic that declared “growth is a dead end,” Ridgeway argued that global environmental crises such as climate change, toxic pollution, and resource depletion were only symptoms of a larger problem. Annual, compounded economic expansion, of the kind that the Club of Rome warned against in its 1972 book, “The Limits to Growth,” was the “elephant in the room.” Since Ridgeway published his essay, Patagonia’s own expansion has continued unabated: this year, the company expects to gross about six hundred million dollars.

All of this would be jet fuel for the engines of modern cynicism, if not for the fact that Patagonia, a privately owned corporation now in its fifth decade, has a distinguished record of environmental philanthropy and investment. The company has often made risky choices in favor of its ecological and social ethics, including early bets that consumers would pay more for products made with organic cotton or Fair Trade certification, the latter of which is now available on thirty-three of its products. The Responsible Economy campaign similarly backed talk with action. Patagonia is trying second-hand-clothing sales at its shop in Portland, Oregon, and has made product repair and recycling a growing part of its business model. It recently invested in Yerdle—a Web startup whose stated mission is to reduce new-product purchases by twenty-five per cent—as a way for people, and even the company itself, to swap or give away used Patagonia gear.

This spring’s truck tour was part of a related campaign called Worn Wear, which is an attempt to draft a new compact between Patagonia and its customers. The company promises to make products that endure, and to repair, resell, or recycle them as necessary, while consumers, in turn, pledge to buy only what they need, and to similarly steward their purchases from new garment to storied heirloom to the recycling bin.

It is confounding to try to draw lines around when Patagonia’s marketing encourages sales and when it discourages them. The gimlet eye will find no shortage of contradictions. Watch enough of the company’s promotional videos, which feature real Patagonia customers, and you might start to believe that the United States is mainly a nation of earthy, physically fit people who are handy with a framing hammer, enjoy rock climbing, and know their way around Bhutan (one Worn Wear spot depicts an actual mountain guide turned family farmer). But visit the company’s stores in locations like the Upper West Side, Hong Kong, and Chamonix, and you will also see the affluent recreational shoppers who helped to inspire the nickname Patagucci. Online, the company offers D.I.Y. garment-repair tutorials, produced in partnership with iFixit, but these also feature a thirty-dollar “expedition sewing kit” that resembles a prop designed for the Khaki Scouts in Wes Anderson’s “Moonrise Kingdom.” Click for more information on the kit and a typical marketing stratagem plays out: you will be offered six other Patagonia products.

Corporate-social-responsibility theorists say that successful activist companies go though a “sense making” process that renders their efforts meaningful both within the corporation and among its customers. In Patagonia’s case, self-inquisition was part of the campaign. Even two years ago, with the launch of the Responsible Economy concept, Ridgeway was publicly questioning Patagonia’s steady expansion. “Companies, including ours, are reducing the environmental footprint of our individual products but increasing the footprint of our company as a whole as we grow,” he told Adweek. To GreenBiz_,_ he said this: “It’s our hunch that all these sustainability innovations put together are not going to be enough to offset the continued increase in our human footprint that comes from this tie to growth.”

These days, the company is less ambivalent. “We’re not afraid of growth—we’re excited about it,” Adam Fetcher, the company’s director of global P.R. and communications, told me. Ridgeway was more expansive: “There is a point out there where our own growth is going to likely create more problems than it does solutions,” he said. “But as far out on the horizon line as we can see right now, we’re continuing to produce products that allow people to live a more responsible life with the apparel that they choose. As long as there’s a lot of other people out there that don’t do that, and that are creating more problems than they are solutions, then we should be growing.”