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Earthkeeper | The Big Green Bus
Send Story to a FriendSkiing in July & Waxing
Zabel
Sorry that this post is a little delayed – we left Telluride a few days ago – but some of the thoughts percolating in my head from our experience there have taken a little longer than expected to come to a boil. I say as much because of an internal battle that I’ve been waging – one that is part of a much larger war – since we left town.
On July 6, a few of us woke up at the crack of dawn to drive 5,000 ft above Telluride to Imogen pass – to ski! After a record winter snowfall, a few feet of that sweet sweet white stuff still stuck to the north-facing slopes, and with the help of Land Rover and an Explorer we were able to carve turns for a few hours into picture perfect corn snow. It was a surreal experience, slicing turns into the snow in July in a t-shirt at 13,000 ft.; literally a dream of mine came true. But hidden beneath the giddy, schoolboy ecstasy of that morning was a disconcerting truth.
One of the many problems of environmentalism is the nature of biophilia. To explain, psychologists have begun to prove that people are simply more content when they are surrounded by greenery – people are biophilic. In my own experience, that has been entirely evident. When I, and many of my comrades, get a chance to get out and play in the land that we try to protect and steward responsibly, we are at our happiest. Yet the very act of enjoying the land is often to degrade that land. It is most certainly the case with skiing; the carbon dioxide emissions from lifts, or in the case of our July adventure, an SUV, reduce the likelihood that we’ll get to enjoy a similar experience in the future. In a warmer world, mountain snowpack in the Rockies will rarely if ever last into July. It was a disheartening realization on the way down from the mountain.
Although practices, such as Leave No Trace, seek to minimize the impact that many outdoor activities will have on the ecosystems we travel through, my ski runs drove home a sad fact. Environmentalism seems always to seek the grail of minimization - of being less bad. While it may be the right goal, being less bad isn't going to inspire anyone. People want to be good, not less bad.
When we talk about environmental apocalypses, though the information out there may indeed point that way, its easy to lose heart. That why I'd like to give a big thank you to everyone out there who's doing the work of building natural resource issues into other arenas - social equity, personal health, etc. When we view the problem as part of the web of human ecology - and thus a chance to do good - we can take heart and take up our work again.
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