Make America Deep Again Make America Deep Again Hat
MAKE AMERICA DEEP AGAIN
On April 29, our partners at Protect Our Winters (POW) are marching to Brand America Deep Again.
Lynsey Dyer | Jackson Hole, WY PHOTOGRAPH WADE MCKOY
Protect Our Winters and Salve the World
by Eric Hansen
Jeremy Jones is not an obvious option for a leader in the fight against global warming. A National Geographic Adventurer of the Year, an O'Neill-sponsored large mount snowboarder, and the owner of his own company, Jones Snowboards, the 39-year-former is plenty decorated.
He's also no system homo . By his own account, he barely graduated high school. And before starting the Protect Our Winters nonprofit in 2007, beyond tracking the next low-pressure arrangement, he didn't think also deeply about the future of snow. "I definitely wasn't some enviro driving a veggie-oil machine," he says.
Simply while traveling the earth for motion picture shoots and ripping his local mountain, California's Squaw Valley, he started to wonder if it was only him, or if indeed winters were growing more unpredictable. One winter Alaska was getting hammered; the next, it was almost dry out. A piddling fleck of research suggested at that place was a genuine problem—ski seasons were getting shorter and more erratic. So Jones did what many do when faced with a trouble of grave severity. He pulled out his checkbook. He set aside gain from his signature boards, enlisted the assist of an environmentalist friend, and looked for a suitable nonprofit to back up. Problem was, they couldn't find a unmarried advocacy grouping representing America'southward 20 million snow sports enthusiasts. "My friend said, 'You lot need to start your ain thing!'" says Jones. Two years afterwards, that'south exactly what Jones, reluctantly, did. And Protect Our Winters was born.
Jeremy Jones and Ryland Bell | Mountain Timlin, AK
Photograph JEFF CURLEY
Prisoner of war, as it'southward called, is now simply awesome. Based in Pacific Palisades, California, the nonprofit advancement organisation touts thirty,000 members and dozens of corporate sponsors, including big names and big money like The Due north Face, Clif Bar, Patagonia, Vans, and the Mertz Gilmore Foundation. The grouping lobbies elected officials, speaks at dozens of schools, and commissions studies on how global warming affects the $61 billion American snow sports industry. (Hint: not positively.) The goal is to unite skiers and snowboarders and everyone involved in winter sports against policies and practices that increment greenhouse gas emissions. More than that though, Pw works to alter the tone of climate change discussions from doom and gloom to hope and action.
Part of their success is probable due to the fact that Jones is such a reluctant savior. He has insisted from the first that POW shouldn't be flamboyant, but efficient. "From the get-get, I thought, in order for this to work, it can't be a Jeremy Jones foundation," he says. "We demand people to rally effectually it and we need to put a microscope on the work." Early on, Jones convinced lawyers, website designers, public relations firms, and marketing man Chris Steinkamp, currently Prisoner of war's executive director, to volunteer their services. He made certain that at least 85 cents of every dollar went to programs, not paychecks or slush funds. And and then Prisoner of war did something truly difficult: The group made joining the fight against climate change cool.
It'due south a vital point given how dry the science has been in the by. It helps that climatic change is no longer a debatable concept. In August, the Un warned that humans are "extremely likely" to have been the "ascendant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century," and warned of "sharp and irreversible" changes to our planet if carbon dioxide connected to exist emitted at present rates.
Still, fighting climatic change is not sexy, fifty-fifty by the relatively depression standards of environmental groups. There is no global warming backhoe to chain oneself to or global warming owl to rally effectually. The fight is so big that it can appear to be on an altogether inhuman scale. We are, after all, talking nigh the entire earth. And so Jones put a face on the fight. He volunteered his hale mug, not different Bono did for African debt relief in the 1990s, and chop-chop attracted many more pro athlete ambassadors to the cause.
Pow has since signed up some 60 winter sports athletes, from China to Michigan, from Olympic medalists to Ten Games champs, from other big mountain snowboarders to cantankerous-country skiers. The Pw Riders Alliance lends its vocalisation to ecology films like concluding spring'due south Momenta, pens op-eds and talks warming on-camera, and creates large-scale artwork. At this year's Higher movie premiere (the third installment of Jones's well received human being-powered snowboarding series) Riders Alliance athletes asked the audience to sign a huge imprint and write why they want a cooler planet. The overarching goal of the Riders Alliance is to bring still more people into the fold, and to encourage other skiers and boarders to adopt The POW Seven, which is an outline of the easy ways that we can all advocate for colder, longer winters. Number one on the list is "Get political." Number 3 is "Find Your Biggest Lever." Not flamboyant—efficient. Sarah Laskow, writing in ecology magazine Grist, called The POW Vii "the all-time green action programme we've ever seen."
The Pow Seven fits in Pw'southward vision of creating smart programs—equally opposed to haranguing people into recycling. "We're a little too far down the timeline for that," says Porter Fox, writer of DEEP: The Story of Skiing and The Future of Snow. Instead, POW is focused squarely on maximizing their impact—finding that large lever. In this instance that means using the Riders Alliance to help recruit an army of young soldiers to the fight against climatic change—and through them, urge politicians to do the right things. Now.
Since launching in 2011, POW athletes accept visited more than 50 schools in a program cosponsored by The North Face called "Hot Planet/Absurd Athletes." At the schools they atomic number 82 assemblies, play some gnarly clips, and so go into an engaging talk virtually how the ane.4-degree increase in temperature since 1800 is, well, melting snowfall. "That generation is so much more upwardly to the challenge than babe boomers," Jones says. "They're similar, 'We desire the same earth you grew upwards in. Why is this even up for discussion?'"
Things in Washington, D.C. are a bit trickier. Each twelvemonth, a dozen athletes from the Riders Alliance and a half dozen representatives from the likes of Burton, Patagonia, and Aspen Skiing Visitor spend a whirlwind mean solar day on the colina lobbying senators, congressmen, and members of the EPA. On a recent trip, Jones ended up in hiking boots, having forgotten his dress shoes. And he still needs assistance tying his tie. Only thankfully, POW'south fish-out-of-h2o status inside the Beltway also plays to their advantage.
"What virtually all the senators and congressmen said to us is, 'You lot know what, I agree with what you lot're doing. Make me practice it, forcefulness me, on a local level, to vote your fashion.' In other words, if we can build a groundswell around these issues, and then they have to act on it. Which is just what Pow is doing, what it's dandy at doing. We tin move the needle." —Chris Davenport
"In Washington, a lot of the senators and people hear the same thing over and over from lobbyists," says executive managing director Steinkamp. "Simply when athletes testify up, it'due south different." He recalls a Pow visit to Lisa Murkowski, the Republican senator from Alaska who has been a notorious climate change flip flopper. The POW folks expected the meeting to last x minutes. Instead, it lasted an hr. No coal-fired power plants were mothballed, but a surprising brotherhood was formed. Murkowski, it turned out, is a skier, and her nephew is a founder of ski film visitor Sweetgrass Productions.
One of POW's biggest successes and then far was on June 2 of this yr. Knowing the EPA was likely to announce stricter carbon emissions standards for power plants, POW turned its members and fans into Tweeting, Instagraming, Facebooking cheerleaders. "Nosotros reached out to anybody and said, 'Here are sample Tweets, hither are some good facts, here are other things you can do.' And then we simply lit the place upwards," says Jones. Net slacktivism information technology was non. At the cease of the business organisation mean solar day, a staffer at the White House called POW to personally thank them for the support.
"I've lived here for 12 years and the snowfall simply isn't every bit consistent. At least Mammoth is high enough that the freezing level is pretty consistent, but we're even so seeing drastic swings. Four years ago, nosotros had our absolute best season on record, followed by our accented worst." —Kimmy Fasani
PHOTOGRAPH Erin Hogue
To say that Pow faces a host of formidable foes is an understatement. The oil industry, for example, has reserves of crude and other fossil fuel discoveries that it is not keen to abandon, or have regulated. So while Prisoner of war fries away, the big five oil companies lobby Congress to maintain the status quo—spending an boilerplate of $445,000 on Capitol Loma each day, according to Fox.
Fifty-fifty more daunting, recent studies testify that somehow, despite the wealth of science, half of Americans however doubt that human-caused global warming exists, not to mention could crusade "abrupt and irreversible" changes.
Jones and POW respond with firsthand stories, or when necessary, they unleash the wonky facts. In May, the White Firm released the third National Climate Cess. The president's science counselor summarized the scientific consensus on global warming. "On the whole," he said, "summers are longer and hotter, with longer periods of extended heat. Wildfires start earlier in the spring and proceed later into the fall. Rain comes downward in heavier downpours. People are experiencing changes in the length and severity of seasonal allergies. And climate disruptions to water resources and agriculture have been increasing."
Photograph Lee Cohen
With its clear focus on winter, POW is able to extract the essential information of concern to its winter-minded members and followers—many of which are included in the widely publicized study they and the Natural Resources Defence Council deputed,Climate Impacts on the Winter Tourism Economy in the United states. Overall, there volition exist more rain in coming decades, cheers to ascension temperatures, and ski seasons will become shorter, thanks to longer, warmer shoulder seasons. Tahoe, California, already sees leap ii weeks earlier than in 1961. By 2050, half of the ski areas in the Northeast, some 50 resorts, could close, mostly because they won't have enough snow to open up for the lucrative Christmas vacation. And resorts in the Due west could lose a quarter to all of their midwinter snowpack by 2100.
To this depressing news, Jones replies, "Dude, join Pw."
More important than securing another $20 membership fee is only increasing membership, increasing the size of the tribe. The more people Pow represents in D.C., the more convincing it is with political wafflers. And the sooner Jones, and all of us, can get back to doing what we really want to do: riding deep snow.
On April 29, our partners at Protect Our Winters (POW) are marching to Make America Deep Again. We're with them. To help get you on board, we're dedicating the prime existent estate on our site to a smattering of the POW content that Mountain Media has produced over the years. Check it out, get inspired, so follow this link http://protectourwinters.org/bring together-a-march/ to find a mountain town march near you. #March4POW
Source: http://www.mountainonline.com/make-america-deep/
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