This is my proposed concentration of study moving forward in the ENVS department at Lewis and Clark College.
Extreme Sports Impact on a Sustainable Future
Growing up I found myself outside every single day in the winter. Living in rural Massachusetts, I felt that I had two options, playing basketball or going skiing. Unfortunately I have always been short so snowboarding was an easy choice. Years later I was in high school snowboarding at competitions throughout the country at some of the highest levels possible. It wasn’t until recently that I took a step backwards and stopped. I began cleaning up old skiing trails and hiking all day for the opportunity to ski just one run. Before I knew it I was reading John Muir and participating in climate rallies, but why? Extreme Sports rellie so heavily on the environments they are in. As seen in the new Alex Honnold Movie, Free Solo, the rocks he climbs are those protected by our national parks. In a piece by Bret Stephen, he writes about the amazing feats of rock climbing explaining, “In 1923, the mountaineer George Mallory gave an interview to The New York Times in which he famously explained why he was determined to summit Mount Everest. “Because it’s there.”’ (Stephen). As long as these natural resources remain, humans will continue to push boundaries in their sport. Connected is the need to protect the resources so that they may continue pursuing their sports. A large topic surrounding environmental studies currently is engagement. This past week we have had the opportunity to have Daryl Davis at our school. Through his struggles with racism his stories of convincing klan members to leave are very powerful forms of engagement. According to, When contact changes minds: An experiment on transmission of support for gay equality, Personal experiences serve as a powerful form of engagement. In this article researchers find that the way to sway cemented views is similar to that of Mr. Davis. If a gay canvasser went to the door and had an interaction with the voter they were then more likely to vote in favor of supporting gay marriage. These personal levels of interaction that help give emotion to a cause may also be present in sports, specifically action sports. In Extreme Sports as a Precursor to Environmental Sustainability by Eric Brymer, he brings in groups of extreme sports athletes to analyze their interactions with nature. In the paper we writes, “In Interview participants also describe the experience within the extreme sport activity of being ‘at one’ with the natural world, and a dissolution or obscuring of the boundary between the individual and nature was a recurring theme in phenomenological analysis of interview transcripts. The Hawaiians have a word for this state, ‘HoB puB pu,’ or the experience of becoming one with a wave when surfing,” (Brymer, 200) describing an interconnection between themselves and the environment. Does this love and mutual respect have an impact on engagement as well? Perhaps so, however it raises the question of who may be worse off. In l Robbins’, Conservation as It Is: Illicit Resource Use in a Wildlife Reserve in India, the author discusses how set asides sometime negatively affect people using them. Similar to how rock climbers may ask for land to be protected for their use, Robbins looks at how something like that may affect someone. In this paper they look at A reserve in India that has been closed off to public use. In an effort to determine the levels of illicit use, they found that the locals were using the land heavily. Even with closing it off the farmers brought there cattle etc. By closing off the section it would affect household economies and hurt local habitats. In the case of rock climbing or other things of this nature we too must look and ask how protecting a certain land section may be bad for different groups. On the other side of things some groups focus on overall climate awareness rather than just promoting set asides. Protect Our Winters (POW) thinks that it does. POW was founded by professional snowboarder Jeremy Jones with an aim to turn, “passionate outdoor people into effective climate advocates. POW leads a community of athletes, thought pioneers and forward-thinking business leaders to affect systemic political solutions to climate change.” Targeting environmental change they engage with people using environmental sport. They also target young children and aim to teach them through sport, a notion suggested by Mr. Davis at our symposium last week. I plan to dive deeper into this conversation and look at the extreme sport as a method of engagement to promote change in our ever growing fight against climate change. UNEP. UNEP Frontiers 2017: Emerging Issues of Environmental Concern. Nairobi, Kenya: United Nations Environment Programme, 2017.
Robbins, Paul, Kendra McSweeney, Anil K. Chhangani, and Jennifer L. Rice. “Conservation as It Is: Illicit Resource Use in a Wildlife Reserve in India.” Human Ecology 37, no. 5 (2009): 559.