Summer - No time for change

2010-06-14 10:36:36

Just because winter is over, doesn't mean that it's not on my mind. Maybe sub-consciously, that's why I like Never Summer snowboards so much; in my imagination it's never really summer. This fixation doesn't really fit into Freud's Psychosexual model – although I suppose in a way mountains might be phallic, but that's neither here nor there – yet I'm am quite sure that I'm not suffering from this fever alone, which is why I recently suggested some potential activities to pass the summer months. The productive quality of these activities are questionable, however, so if you're looking for a slightly more constructive endeavour for the summer, perhaps doing something to protect the season you're breathlessly awaiting (i.e. winter) is just the ticket.

While attending the SIA tradeshow in January, I got to see the premiere of Generations; a short film about climate change produced by Teton Gravity Research in partnership with The North Face and Protect Our Winters. I'm already a believer in anthropogenic climate change, so this movie was essentially "preaching to the choir", but it was still eye opening to see how winter sports have been affected by the warming trend of the global climate; especially in my usual stomping ground of New England (and by inference, the townships of Quebec).

I realise that using first hand, annecdotal, evidence to support anthropogenic climate change is stupid and un-scientific, especially when you consider that our lifetimes are insignificant when compared to global climate cycles. However, it's also stupid to say that a cold week in January is evidence which disproves the global warming phenomena; a theory which, I might add, is supported by a vast scientific consensus. Whether or not you believe in global warming, I think everyone can agree that all the crap we're putting into the atmosphere is not healthy. If you doubt this fact, I challenge you to run a gas powered lawn mower in your bedroom then come back and tell me how that makes you feel. For that reason, I think it's important for everyone, believer or not, to care about what we're spewing into the atmosphere.

Right now is a critical time for action on climate change. The US Senate narrowly defeated the Murkowski Resolution, on June 10th, by a vote of 53-47. This resolution proposed to block the Environmental Protection Agency from issuing greenhouse gas regulations. Although this, by most accounts, is a victory for the climate, there is still an uphill battle ahead to ensure that binding climate legislation gets passed.

Senator Harry Reid has been polling other Democratic Senators about whether, or not, they want to go ahead with a climate bill this year. So if you're in the U.S. of A, and are looking for something productive to do this summer, an easy one would be to write to your Senators and ask them to tell Harry Reid that they want to see a climate bill this year. Check out the "60 Days To" campaign sponsored by Protect Our Winters for more information.

It's also possible for those of us in the Great White North to get involved. The G8 Summit will be held in Muskoka, Ontario from June 25 to 27.

[This is] a perfect opportunity for the world's wealthiest nations to make some decisions about climate change. But Prime Minister Stephen Harper has refused to put it on the agenda. World leaders including UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and European Union President Manuel Barroso have urged the prime minister, as the Summit’s host, to allow discussion on this important issue. Six Nobel Peace Prize winners just sent an open letter to Stephen Harper urging the same.

The David Suzuki Foundation is currently promoting a letter writing campaign to have canadian citizens write to Prime Minister Harper to convince him to put climate change on the G8 agenda and deliver the financial support to help poor and vulnerable countries adapt to the climate change impacts we created as he committed to doing in Copenhagen.

Hopefully if enough of us get involved, our respective governments will finally stop dragging their feet and implement policies that will keep both our environment, and ourselves, healthy. This way we'll be able to keep enjoying winter for a long time to come. These are pretty simple actions that anyone can take, so they won't take too much time away from surfing YouTube and working on your tan.

Categories: Life, Environment | 0 Comments

This is El Niño - Weathering the "non-storm"

2009-12-05 11:09:08

Earlier this week I woke up and the ground was white. It was the first time this season that I've woken up to the wonderful sight of snow covered lawns. On the surface this would seem like a win for winter lovers, however, by this time last year my local hill had already been open for a couple weeks at least. As it stands it will be mid-December before the season kicks off which is kinda depressing; In spite of my many supplications to Ullr, the east coast still has not been blessed with a good blanket of snow. The actor responsible for this miserable weather, however, does not dwell in Asgard, but is an atmospheric phenomenon commonly known as El Niño.

El Niño is often thought to be a weather pattern associated with warming trends; and in some cases as a Chris Farley tropical storm on Saturday Night Live. However, this is only partly true: El Niño is in fact the warm phase of a periodic change in the atmosphere, and ocean, of tropical Pacific regions. This periodic phenomenon is known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which oscillates between El Niño (warm) and La Niña (cold) conditions -- the fact that the name "El Niño" is used for both a part and the whole is an obvious source of confusion.

The effect of this warming phase on North America is warmer-than-average winters; especially in the upper Midwest of the U.S. and in the Northeast. We're definitely seeing signs of this as it is already December and we have yet to experience sustained sub-freezing temperatures. Smuggler's Notch and Jay Peak have had to push back their official opening date several times this year as a result.

Warmer weather in the winter does have one advantage: increased evaporation which leads to increased precipitation. However, if the warming trend is too high, that precipitation will fall as rain, effectively becoming wasted precipitation. Although in mountainous regions, the change in pressures at elevation, caused by orographic lift, means that this may still fall as snow (which would explain why Whistler has had more than 500 cm of snow fall so far this season).

Some of you, at this point, may be wondering what all this has to do with snowboarding. Snowboarding is an activity that is very much dependent on weather for providing the necessary conditions to practice it. Snowboarders have a similar connection to nature that surfers have, but instead of relying on the formation of distant wind-waves, and tidal forces to provide ideal conditions, we depend on precipitation, low-pressure systems, and sub-freezing temperatures. The atmosphere is our mistress, and understanding her may be an important factor when planning a shred trip; It could make the difference between a good time and a bad time by allowing you to make an educated guess as to when and where the precipitation will fall as snow. There are a lot of variables to keep track of, however, so it's usually better to rely on the experts to do the actual forecasting, but a little knowledge makes decoding the forecast a little less like trying to decipher the dead-sea scrolls. It certainly makes Roger Hill's weather report that much easier to understand.

Understanding weather patterns is even more important when in the back-country. There's no snow making in the wild and being stranded on the exposed face of a mountain during an extreme weather event could spell disaster; something that is quite common on Mt. Washington in New Hampshire which often experiences very extreme weather. It's also important to know about weather to understand how avalanches are formed in order to stay safe while traveling -- this is something that I have been thinking about a lot recently in the lead up to my AIARE Avalanche 1 course at Pinkham Notch on December 18th. National Geographic have an interesting interactive Flash-based web-app which illustrates the effects of weather on avalanche conditions. It's a good way to kill a few minutes while waiting for El Niño to chill out a little bit so the weather will cool down.

Before heading out on your next snowboarding road trip, try and learn a bit about weather and the systems that affect it. Then, in addition to checking the regular forecast, you can impress your friends by telling them where the best shred conditions will be and why. The best reference that I've found is the National Weather Service's Climate Link. If you manage to interpret the statistics and figures, you'll be a star just like Roger Hill of Weathering Heights. Although learning about the phenomena that are preventing you from snowboarding is a poor consolation when you can't actually go ride, in desperate times you do what you can. I doubt a good stiff ankle lock can get El Niño to ease up a bit on this warming trend, but hopefully he starts acting right soon so I can stop thinking about snowboarding in favor of actually snowboarding.

Categories: Snowboarding, Environment, Nerdiness | 2 Comments

New Season Resolution - Buy less sh*t, go snowboarding

2009-09-30 23:18:12

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle is a mantra often used to promote a more ecologically conscious lifestyle. The concept of the three Rs has, in many ways, become ingrained in our modern culture. However, the importance of the order of these three Rs is often forgotten, so most people are only getting half the story.

Similarly when it comes to snowboarding, there seems to be a strong emphasis on gear rather than just getting outside. This is understandable as the industry relies on the sale of snowboarding hardgoods, softgoods, and other apparel to survive. This has encouraged companies to develop lighter, better, and safer gear for us to ride -- long gone are the days of duct taped Sorels -- but has also seen the emergence of the "gear whore" phenomenon; where people own more snowboard gear than they'll ever need or use in a single season.

I myself am guilty of being a bit of a gear whore as I presently own four usable snowboards: an 08/09 Prior AMF, an 07/08 Venture Zephyr, an 08/09 Never Summer Evo-R, and an old Option Kevin Sansalone (which I got second hand so I have no idea what year it was made). I'd like to point out that each of those boards have their specific uses: the AMF for general all mountain-riding, the Evo-R for freestyle, Zephyr for tits deep pow, and the Kevin Sansalone pro for sketchy, exposed, out of bounds riding. However, this by no means is an excuse for my obvious gear excesses.

To compound the problem, in addition to these usable boards, I also have a mostly functional APO Family 158 with stripped inserts. Eventually this will be converted into either a splitboard or a NoBoard; both solutions exemplify the third 'R' of the eco-triad -- Recycle -- and allow me to work around the whole stripped inserts problem.

Clearly I have more gear than I need even though I make every attempt to be conscientious about my purchases. I try to keep my environmental impact in mind whenever I buy new gear. The Prior AMF, Never Summer Evo-R, and Venture Zephyr were all made in North America (the first in Whistler, the latter two in Colorado), so they didn't have to be shipped overseas. My Zephyr also has a core made with sustainably harvested wood which lessens its impact on nature. The Option board, since it was purchased second hand, exemplifies the second 'R' of the eco-triad: Reuse. However, my dedication to the most important 'R' from the triad, Reduce, seems to be delinquent. Perhaps I've become a victim of that phenomena that Buddha, and Tyler Durden, have warned us about: the danger of living for material possessions. As Tyler said: sometimes the things you own, end up owning you.

As relates to the material life, a friend of mine has an interesting analogy. He compares life to a shit sandwich: the more bread you have, the less you have to taste the shit. However, the corollary to this argument is that, in general, when people have more bread, they inevitably wind up buying more shit; counter to the principle of the first 'R' of the eco-triad. In the end, this defeats the purpose of maximizing the amount of bread you have (in case you haven't figured it out yet, bread is a metaphor for money). So in this case, having more bread does not necessarily lead to tasting less of the shit. The real solution is to maximize the bread-shit ratio. One way to do this is by Reducing the amount of shit you have between your bread. The bottom line is that, happiness and/or contentment, would be better served by buying less shit and playing more. This mantra is also proposed by Phoresia.org, a sustainable surf blog whose editors believe that life is play, and that we should buy less shit and surf more. However, since I'm not that good of a surfer, I'm gonna snowboard more instead. After all the principal is the same.

To mitigate the possibility of being owned by my things I propose that, much like a new year's resolution, we should all have a new season resolution. For the upcoming season, I'm making the resolution to reduce the amount of shit that I buy and instead get out to play more. On the surface, it may seem like I'm turning my back on the industry which is dependent on consumerism. However, I think this is more of a re-focusing of priorities; instead of getting the latest, super-tech, snowboard, I'll focus instead on getting outside, to Tailgate Alaska for example, with the things that I already have. That's not to say that I won't be getting any new gear this season, after all, I just got a new down jacket. However, this was something that I needed in order to be outside on those days where it's minus a billion degrees out. In the end, buying less and snowboarding more may lead to a richer, more fulfilling snowboard season which is what we should all be after anyway.

Categories: Snowboarding, Life, Environment | 2 Comments

Bond Outerwear - Because tomorrow never dies

2009-06-12 10:02:44

I first heard of Bond outerwear a few months ago. They got my attention by a) being an outerwear company that cares about the environment, and b) signing up T.J. Schneider to ride for them. If Bond is even half as down to earth as T.J. Schneider is, then I have faith that they will be able to live up to their goal of being a carbon neutral company.

I recently got a look at the Bond catalog for the 09/10 season. Front and center in the catalog is Bond's commitment to sustainability. They seem to be one of the few companies that are taking concrete and measurable steps to reduce their impact on mother nature. Some of the more ecological features of the outerwear line include:

• All of Bond's outer shells and inner liners use a blend of Recycled PET (which is made from plastic bottles), and virgin polyester. This makes the liners and shells 100% recyclable. Although, to the best of my knowledge, the facilities to do so don't currently exist in North America.
• Snaps and zippers are made from discarded plastic pellets from heavy industries. This is a good way to keep that material out of the waste stream.
• Use of discarded coconut shells to create a moisture wicking liner. This will not only wick sweat away from your hot body, but will make you smell like pina coladas at the same time.
• Bond also claims that their waterproofing is engineered to be as "environmentally friendly as it is durable", however, the catalog is sketchy on details of how this is achieved. 10K, 15K, and 20K waterproofing is available.

This is the first I ever hear of a company using coconut fibers as textiles, so the innovative qualities of the Bond lineup are unquestionable. The real question is: how does everything look? Counter to what I would expect, the lineup is quite colorful. Usually it seems to be expected that environmentally friendly clothing will predominantly be in earth tones. This is certainly not the case with Bond where bright orange, pastel blue, and yellow seem to be the most dominant colours.

In addition to outerwear, Bond also has a lineup of soft goods: t-shirts and hoodies made with 100% organic cotton, toques and base layers made of recycled polyester, and socks made with recycled polyester and bamboo fibers. So whatever you need to complete your attire next season, Bond should have you covered.

I'm looking forward to getting my hands on some Bond outerwear this season. Not only will it inflate my sense of environmental responsibility (looking out for tomorrow), but if I choose wisely, the colourways are obnoxious enough to give the ski school director at my local mountain fits. Besides, with a brand name like Bond emblazoned on my clothes, the ladies will love me. I just need to figure out where to take my tattered outerwear to have it recycled (possibly into new Bond threads, cradle to cradle indeed). Check out Bond on Facebook for more information or download the premiere catalog from the Bond website.

Categories: Snowboarding, Gear, Environment | 1 Comments