An Offsetting Truth?
I understand the worry over carbon offsets. There is a real danger that those who buy offsets will forget about the root problems that are causing global warming. It’s a legitimate concern. If you can simply offset the carbon your car emits, why bother to adjust the tire pressure for better mileage? If you can create “carbon neutral” products, why bother to get a blower door test to make your company headquarters more energy efficient?
But I think the anti-offseters are throttling a straw man. No one is saying that you can go ahead and pollute, that you can ignore the deeper causes of global warming, if you purchase offsets. Offsetting is just one part of the multi-faceted process of reducing your personal or corporate carbon footprint. It is an important one, but it must be done in conjunction with a whole range of other steps that reduce waste and consumption. Still, even if all you do is buy carbon offsets you are at least making some small difference. And it is extremely important for people to feel as if they can make a difference, even if it is by doing something very small.
According to the World Land Trust as reported in Environmental News Network (a site with excellent journalistic standards by the way), “Properly run offset projects can directly remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, permanently store it and prevent it from having any further global warming effects. There are many carbon offsetting organizations with good reputations and, whilst some are run by people more interested in money than the environment, to taint all of them with the same brush will stifle one of the few opportunities available to tackle climate change.”
Groups (and writers) protesting carbon offsetting have been comparing carbon offsetting to the Catholic Church’s granting of indulgences to pay for sins during the Renaissance and Reformation. A paper called The Carbon Neutral Myth: Offset Indulgences for Your Carbon Neutral Sins published by Netherlands-based Carbon Trade Watch seems to have introduced the idea. Read the paper. It has compelling arguments about how carbon offsetting is used as a smokescreen by large corporations. But when applied to the basic idea of individuals and small companies offsetting the carbon they use it is a bogus, disingenuous analogy. (A much better analogy would be comparing carbon offsetting without other green steps to the case of a patient with heart trouble taking his medicine but continuing to eat fatty foods, smoke, and refusing to exercise.)
Never mind how comparing carbon offsetting to indulgences ignores the complexities of Catholic theology (remember Carbon Trade Watch is based in the Netherlands, the Protestant flashpoint of the Reformation), when you look at the analogy it just doesn’t make much sense. That’s because it is meant to deceive, to subvert the dialog. Sins are intangible. Offsetting? When you buy carbon offsets you actually reduce the amount of carbon being pumped into the earth’s atmosphere. Yes, it may not affect you directly, may not make a difference in the smoggy sky above your head in LA, but it still represents a net reduction in the amount of carbon being used. It also encourages investment in wind (or other alternative power). And on an extremely basic level, the more demand for wind power the less demand for fossil fuels.
Equally obtuse is the idea that those individuals who buy carbon offsets do it out of guilt. Offsetting is done by choice. (A legitimate concern would be companies that simply offset as a marketing ploy without making any effort to reduce carbon emissions or consumption.) I would even posit that it is the offset protestors who are making those who buy offsets feel guilty for making an effort to affect climate change but not buying completely into the offset-protestor’s world-view.
Simply put, the indulgences analogy is a smear campaign. It is just the kind of political sloganism that George Orwell warns against in ”Politics and the English Language”. It is not meant to encourage debate or even to battle global warming. It is meant to demonize those selling offset credits. I first read the indulgences analogy in a piece about carbon offset protesters in Treehugger (the protestors were targeting the Carbon Neutral Company in London and concerned about the role of offsetting in international treaties as well as the trading of carbon offset futures). A few days later Treehugger blogger Mark Ontkush picked up the phrase instead of attributing it to The Carbon Neutral Myth—or thinking for himself—in a post on computer companies offsetting the carbon used to produce chips (at least I think that is what he was trying to write about). Treehugger is an extremely well linked and popular site, considered the authority on green/environmental issues (although I’m not exactly sure why since it seems more concerned about churning out posts that boost its Technorati ratings than it is with Mother Jones-style journalism), so suddenly everyone with a blog is posting the news that carbon offsetting “is similar to the indulgences of the 15th and 16th centuries, where the Dutch literally paid for their sins.” This, to me is not just wrong it is irresponsible journalism. Mr. Ontkush should have attributed his quote to Carbon Neutral from the get go instead of vapidly assimilating it into his own language. Look, I’m sure Ontkush is a thoughtful writer who is legitimately concerned about these issues and the planet, but he did a disservice to the green/sustainable movement because he, as Orwell would say, used a prepackaged political analogy that stops writers from thinking.
I would ask Ontkush and others who enter the offset debate to listen to Orwell’s advice:
“A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: 1. Could I put it more shortly? 2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you—even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent—and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.”
And truly it is that debasement of the dialog that worries me far more than the actual argument over carbon offsets (which is after all an important and many-faceted debate). The proliferation of the indulgences analogy is just the type of lazy writing and lazy thought that Orwell found so dangerous. (Interestingly enough both rightists and leftist lay claim to Orwell’s legacy. And both are justified. Orwell was more concerned with truth than holding the party line, and real thinkers of any political persuasion should be worried about losing their individual ability to think.)
I think there is a deeper debate here that may be the root of all the impassioned anti-offset rhetoric, and it too deserves careful though instead of instant abhorrence. Many “greenies” don’t like the idea that people are making money off fighting global warming (Ontkush bashes Terrapass a green-thinking company that sells carbon offsets). Now, this is a matter of personal political preference, but I am of the mind that a capitalistic society offers more freedom than a state-run society. I’m also of the mind that the best way for anti-global warming initiatives to work is if they are profitable. Human nature. We like money. Nothing wrong with that. The evil is in what you do with the power you achieve with that money. But instead of being resistant to the idea that individuals and corporations can profit from green initiatives, I’m encouraged by it. The more people who save money or even make money by saving the planet, the better chance we have of actually doing something about global warming. I personally don’t like the state-controlled alternatives to capitalism and I suggest reading Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind if you have delusions of left-wing (or right-wing) utopias.
In the end, all I really ask is that, if we are going to engage in a debate on carbon offsets, both sides come to the table with realistic answers to the problem. I hope that the carbon offset and global warming debate can be based on how we can realistically make things better instead of being dragged into gut-reactions that dilute the movement and in the end derail a truly noble cause.
Link-o-rama!
What to do when you are too busy to post but have been compulsively reading all sorts of worthwhile stuff? It’s time for Link-o-rama:
* Well RED is just what we thought it would be. I truly believe consumer-driven charity can work. The big mistake here was that the high-end marketing and PR firms used the same stuff they would have rolled out if this had been any other celebrity launch (and blew $5o million). What the project required was a campaign that created a new paradigm. E.g., instead of using the Gisele ad that could have come from the latest line of perfume, why not have her shedding a red tear? Or surrounded by refugees? Those are gross off-the-cuff examples, but something that contrasted the world of consumer pleasure with the serious side of RED’s mission would have better expressed the message. The marketers couldn’t see past what they normally do to create something that spoke for the uniqueness of the project’s vision.
* If you want to get your core-certified dude credentials in order, move to the Bay Area and keep away from the Wahlbergs.
* I love this idea. This is really smart simple green/sustainable thinking. Cut down on all that wasteful stuff you get with to-go orders. Best part: not only does it cut down on waste, it saves the restaurant money.
* Red Sox bullpen looking
bearish.
* If only this Starbury would show up on the court.
* I was always annoyed by the misguided Times Select program. Now the big ethical question: do I use my alumni ID to get it? No way. The fewer subscribers Times Select gets the sooner the content becomes free again and the more readers get to access the material.
* If the Gonzales/US Attorney’s scandal blows up, Josh Marshall deserves the credit for sticking to the type of old-time hard-boiled journalistic instincts and first-class reporting that print and TV news outlets seem to think are out of vogue. The most interesting thing here to me is that this could turn the corner for blog journalism. Granted 99 percent of it is free-swinging opinion-driven garbage, but if more journalists like Marshall create sites that base their posts on credible, professional reporting and investigation blog journalism could be the key to keeping politicians honest. And Marshall smells blood here.
* Finally… There are probably too many outdoor brands out there. Winter OR had over 800 exhibitors. I’m suffering over the problem of how to winnow the 30 hard shells I have been testing down to just seven for Outside’s Buyer’s Guide. Etc. But I’m excited about Ahnu. This is the same team that made Keen such a truly socially responsible brand and I’m excited to see what they do here. Drew Simmons is the perfect man to help spread their word.
Green Machine
According to Biccylce Retailer, Huffy just rolled out its 500,000 Green Machine and “’Kids are posting their best Green Machine moves on YouTube,’ said Ray Thomson, vice president of marketing and product development at Huffy.” I think my first backcountry adventure began at 5 years old on Green Machine when I convinced a few neighborhood kids to runaway to France with me and we pedaled into the woods at the end of Salem Lane in Little Silver, NJ. Can’t seeem to find that video on YouTube.
Vanity of Vanities
Writing is both the most meaningful and the most narcissistic of human undertakings. Or so says Pankaj Mishra in this month’s The Believer. His response to the question of how can you be a writer and still practice Buddhist non-attachment really hit home for me:
“But so much of writing is fed by vanity and the feeling that what you are doing is the most important thing in the world and it has not been done before and only you can do it. Without these feelings, many writers would not be able to write anything at all. If you think that what you are doing is not all that important in the larger scheme of things and that you’re just an insignificant creature in the whole wide world, which is full of six billion people, and that people are born and die everyday and it makes no difference to future generations what you write, and that writing and reading are increasingly irrelevant activites, you’d probably never get out of bed. You need to work yourself up into some kind of state every morning and believe that you are doing something terribly important upon which the future of literature, if not the world, depends. Buddhism tells you that this is just a foolish fantasy. So, I try not to think too much about Buddhism early in the morning. From noon on, I think about it.”
If only I could write in the morning.
No Snow Is the Least of Our Problems
Here is a reprint of an editorial on global warming and the snowsports industry I wrote for the SIA SnowPress Show Daily.
No Snow Is the Least of Our Problems
Global warming is a fact. According to James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, we have 10 years to solve this problem. According to many scientists, if we don’t eliminate 90 percent of the globe’s CO2 emission by 2100, our descendants will live on a barren planet. Even the Bush Administration, which once sought to discredit Hansen, has recognized the problem, proposing to list polar bears as a threatened species last month because of melting Arctic sea ice.
The snowsports industry, however, has little to combat global warming. Why should we? Skiing and snowboarding are apolitical acts, an escape. And it’s still snowing. We have had big years recently, especially in the West. Colorado has been pummeled by storms this year. The legendary winter of ’98–’99 shellacked a world record 1,124 inches on Mount Baker. What global warming?
But there have also been frightening signs. The winter has been a complete wash this year on the East Coast. Europe is bone dry. The Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development released a report claiming, “the years 1994, 2000, 2002, and 2003 were the warmest on record in the Alps in the last 500 years.” Yet climate change is apt to cause unpredictable fluxations in weather and Europe could get pounded next year the way Colorado is now. But this is no reason to get optimistic. Predictable winters are what snowsports resorts, manufacturers, and retailers need to thrive, not intermittent dumps.
“Global weirding,” is what extreme ski diva Alison Gannett says we should call the frightening phenomenon. Gannett is one of the few people in the snowsports industry who has made a concerted effort to do something about the changes we have wreaked on our climate. And she walks the walk. Gannett lives in an energy-efficient, straw-bale house in Crested Butte, Colorado. And she talks the talk. She has been traveling the country—and she will be touring this winter in her Save Our Snow Tour with Clif Bar in a vegie-powered RV—giving slideshows about climate change and teaching businesses how they can save money by purchasing wind credits, calculating their carbon footprints, and conducting blower door tests, which can cut energy bills by a minimum of 25. Businesses are listening.
“Everybody always thinks doing the green thing is expensive. That’s a myth I have been trying to disprove for the last 15 years,” says Gannett. “All of a sudden people are realizing ‘hey, I can do what’s right for the planet and save money—and make more money.”
The Aspen Skiing Company is also saving money while it saves the world. It purchases wind credits, fuels cats with biodiesel, and finds ways for the resort to be more energy efficient, saving the company $50,000–$60,000 per year. But it also has a mission to get the rest of the industry, and the world, to do something.
It’s working. In 1997, Aspen was the only major ski resort to buy wind power. Today, 51 resorts in North America are offsetting their carbon emissions with wind power, according to the Bonneville Environmental Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to reducing the impacts of climate change. And Auden Schendler, Aspen’s environmental affairs director, believes that even if Aspen can’t singlehandedly change the world, it can use its influence to act as a political motivator, what he calls “a lever for change.” To that end, in September, Aspen Skiing Company filed an amicus brief with the US Supreme Court in support of twelve states and three environmental organizations suing the environmental Protection Agency for not recognizing CO2 as a pollutant.
“This might be the most important action Aspen Skiing Company has ever undertaken,” said Schendler.
And although we have heard it a million times before, and it has registered abstractly somewhere, we all should act too. Because we love snow and the wildness and freedom it brings to mountains in winter, sure. Because it is good for our business, definitely. But we should also act because, as Aspen and Alison Gannett have at least realized, it is about far more than snow.
“It’s embarrassing to worry about skiing,” says Schendler. “By the time skiing goes away, we will be far more concerned with devastation to our food supply, with mass movements of populations, by war, by massive outbreaks of malaria and other diseases.”
So the day definitely is coming when we will not be able to shut ourselves up in our privileged mountain towns.
But for now, Alison Gannett is riding her bike to go ski powder. She’ll use the wind-powered lifts at Crested Butte. Out on the road, she’ll show slides of what’s happening to the planet, how places once covered in snow are melting. She’ll convince big-box companies to try something as mundane—and effective—as a blower door test. And for now, the snow is still falling. Who is going to join her?
Testing in the Eldo BC
Isaac, John Devlin and I got out into the Eldora backcountry this weekend to test hardshells for Outside’s Fall Buyer’s Guide. The conditons: sweaty. This snow looks good, but it was actaully pretty heavy technical skiing. Nice soft stuff in the shadows, but anything exposed was tricky (as is evident by the weird, sloppy lines you can see the bowl in the last photo). The key was sitting back on big fast alpine turns. Anyway it was better than working… oh wait, I was working.
Confetti on the Charles?
Baseball Prospectus has posted analyses of how each MLB team can win the World Series.
Keith Woolner (who invented VORP, or Value Over Replacement Player, stats, which measure how many more runs/wins/etc. a new player is worth to a team, and is a big Red Sox fan) predicts that
“Combined, the offense and pitching in our rosy scenario post a 560 VORP. That would lead to a projected record of 104-58, and while any 100-win team has a legitimate shot at the World Series, those with three dominating starting pitchers do better than those with equivalent-but-deeper total talent. If Schilling, Beckett, and Matsuzaka are humming along, the wait for the next Red Sox World Championship won’t be anywhere near as long as the last one.”
He also runs down all the reasons why the ’07 Sox could crash and burn like last year’s version. Here you go: old (Schilling, Wakefield), unproven (Matsuzaka, Papelbon), and erratic (Beckett) starting pitching. No closer (Joel Pineiro?!). Injuries waiting to happen (a.k.a J.D. Drew). Of course, if that rotation hits its stride at the end of the year and someone like Brendan Donnelly comes back from the dead to shut the door, there will be confetti on the Charles.
I’ll be watching Donnelly. He has reinvented himself before (or is that reinjected?) to bust out of the minors after 10 years and seems to have the mental makeup to do it again. I’d rather see the starters begin the season a bit rough and then dial in for a playoff run (like last year’s Cardinals). Somehow, I think Beckett is the key. If he gets hot and lives up to his potential, this team will be on fire. The line up can hit (if Drew stays healthy/motivated and Crisp and Pedroia blossom it will crush). I’ll also be wathcing for chemistry. Somehow the Red Sox just don’t seem like the Red Sox since Pedro has been gone. It wasn’t just his hall-of-fame ability, there was something about his aura, his personality, his connection to the city. For now these guys (excpet maybe for Ortiz, Varitek, Shcilling, Manny) seem like the typical mecenaries the Yankees have been marching out on the field for the past 7 years. And speaking of the Yankees, they have been so quiet and obviously pissed off about last year, that I wouldn’t be surprised if they play with a true motivating chip on their shoulders.
But of course this is all gut speculation. Look to the Prospectus and Sons of Sam Horn for proven geeeky by-the-numbers predictions.
Terry Tempest Williams Interview
Here is the interview I did with Terry Tempest Williams for the OR Show Daily. She spoke at the Conservation Alliance breakfast and brought the crowd to tears. She’s truly something more than a writer—a philosopher, an activist, an icon, but most of all a gracious and chivalrous person.
Terry Tempest Williams has become the moral and spiritual compass for the American conservation movement. Her enormously popular books, including Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, Red: Patience and Passion in the Desert, and The Open Space of Democracy, explore complex interconnections between wild lands and human destiny. Ever outspoken, she is a strong proponent for Utah’s Redrock Wilderness, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the importance of wild places to our culture. We talked to her about her new book Mosaic: Finding Beauty in a Broken World (due out later in 2007) and what she hopes to convey to the outdoor industry.
Your new book deals with your experiences in Rwanda. Can you tell us about that?
I was in Rwanda in the fall of 2005 with a Chinese-American artist named Lily Yeh who is a community artist. She’s a mosaicist and for years she was the director of the Village of Arts and Humanities, based in a very tough neighborhood In Philadelphia. Basically, she, along with extraordinary members of the community, took a ravaged urban landscape and created public gardens, community theatre, beautiful murals on the sides of broken buildings. It really transformed a place of deep despair into one of hope and beauty. Then she met a Rwandan named John Bosco. She heard the story of that country’s genocide [in which at least 500,000 people died in 100 days in 1994] and was deeply moved. She said “how can I help?” and he said you can help us create a genocide memorial for this survivors village. So she went to Rwanda and asked if I would be her scribe.
How did that affect you?
I was a transformative experience—difficult, heartbreaking, soul-inspiriting. It encompassed a full range of emotion. Talk about a mosaic, it was a mosaic of both brokenness and beauty.
And you have incorporated those experiences into the book?
It’s one section. There’s another section on prairie dogs and another section on Byzantine mosaics in Italy and another section on environmental humanities. The book itself is a mosaic.
How did you come to write the book?
After September 11, all of us were wondering about this broken State. Democracy as I knew it was not what I was seeing. I found myself being very outspoken. I found myself speaking out in ways that were not safe and in tough situations of censorship. But, I realized that my rhetoric had been as brittle as the rhetoric I was opposing. In September 2002, I was in Maine, and I remember going out to the coast to this one particular rock. I remember asking the ocean to give me one wild word, just one wild word that would carry me to a place of poetry again, and after a long silence the word that came back to me was mosaic.
Mosaic? What does that mean?
We’re seeing fragmentation in every aspect of our lives, both personally and collectively—whether it’s climate change, whether it’s how we manage our time. We’re seeing this kind of fragmentation in our government, War is a state of fragmentation. If we can embrace an ecological mind, then we can begin to bring these fragments, these tesserae, these pieces of the mosaic together into a larger picture.
And how do we begin to do that?
I was thinking, “How does this relate to the outdoor recreation industry?” The image that I have is when we were in this genocide survivors village in Rwanda, right on the edge of the Congo, we saw these two orphans standing in the center of the village. One was wearing a Patagonia and the other was wearing a North Face, For us in this privileged place of the Untied States, in this privileged profession of outdoor gear and recreation, I think that image tells a story that out concerns can no longer simply be local. What we think about, the decisions that we make and the community we create has these concentric circles that reach even into a genocide survivors village in Rwanda.
There has been a lot of talk at the show about doing something about global climate change. What are your thoughts on that issue?
I’m seeing climate change not only as an ecological issue, a political issue, a social issue (as we saw with Hurricane Katrina)—I also see it as a philosophical issue. We really are engaged in a climate change philosophically. I think that has to do with seeing the impact of community and the concentric circles of community and how they radiate out into the world. So when you look at the outdoor industry I see the impact they had on Utah with Peter Metcalf of Black Diamond and others who said, “You know, wilderness matters [when the OIA threatened to pull the show from Salt Lake City because of then-governor Leavitt’s opposition to roadless lands in 2003]. They said, “It’s a local issue. It’s a state issue.” It created national awareness. I look at the support the Conservation Alliance gave us in Castle Valley [when it helped the local Castle Rock Collaboration halt development around Castleton Tower]. That was a local issue, and yet, because of that support early on, we now have a bill before Congress that would set aside 4,000 acres in a land exchange.
How can the outdoor industry continue to have an effect on these large social and political issues?
I just have so much respect for the tradition of this gathering and who is behind it. You think about real visionaries like Yvon Chouinard and Eric Reynolds. The potential is so huge for what could happen here in terms of social change. A lot of people say that this gathering [the Outdoor Retailer show] is about clothing. This is about gear. I disagree. Yes, it’s about clothing. Yes, it’s about technology and extraordinary equipment, but it’s really about a philosophy and a belief in wild places and what is at the heart of wildness. What do you think Henry David Thoreau meant when he said, “in wilderness is the preservation of the world”?
Do you have hope then for the future?
On a fundamental level, I buried my hope in Rwanda. The issues we saw in terms of poverty and illness and violence were so overwhelming, it was hard for me to even see any hope. What I did leave with was a tremendous sense of faith, which I find very different that hope. Hope often feels like it is attached to our own desires, faith is more open-ended. I saw what a few people can accomplish together through hard work and a belief in the transformative power of art. In many ways, art is related to faith. Coming out of a Mormon tradition, I think of my great-grandmother who said, “faith without works is dead.” If I were to say that I do have hope I think that’s where it is based—in love put into action. I think we see that in the conservation movement, in our relationship to public lands and wilderness.
So how do we go forward?
It comes down to the question of “what are we in the service of?” And I think that is a question that we can all ask even as we are attending Outdoor Retailer. I mean, what are we in the service of? Is it commerce? Is it the wild? Is it community? How do we make these connections to something larger than ourselves?
What are you in the service of?
I think if we can ask the question then the answers follow. I hope I’m in the service of a wild heart. I hope I’m in the service of others. I hope I’m in the service of beauty. I think all of us hope to be in the service of some truth larger than ourselves.
Two Poems for the Surge
one for honesty…
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
By Randall Jarrell
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
one for what we can do…
Try to Praise the Mutilated World
By Adam Zagajewski
Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the grey feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.
Translated by Renata Gorczynski
Both, I think, call for compassion in a world where we are far too willling to do harm. In all the current world dialogue, there are very few who call for compassion. Where is the world leader who will offer reconciliation?
The other day I was working in a cafe and saw a girl sitting across from me put her hands up to her eyes. She was crying. What could I do? Smile? Say something? Would that truly have been appropriate? I thought about buying her a chocolate and asking the barista to bring it to her anonymously. I never did it. Instead, I left and she haunted me. If I had made some effort, would it truly have been compassion or fulfillling some need of my own to do good? What was it that Byron said after he watched three criminals being executed in Campo dei Fiore? “I would have saved them if I could.”
Doesn’t Jarrell show greater compassion for the ball-turret gunner with that last, brutally honest line than he ever could have with some proclamation of his own sadness?
I was lucky enough to interview Terry Tempest Williams in December. I was the first writer outside of her immediate circle with whom she discussed her upsoming book Mosaic: Finding Beauty in a Broken World. It recounts her experiences working in still-ravaged Rwanda (alongside stories about Byzantine mosaics and prairie dogs) and trying to find a way to piece together this fragemented world. Immediately, I thought of Zagajewski’s poem, how this simple attention to beauty and compassion is all we can do.
Near the end of our talk, Terry posed the question “What are we in the service of?” I’m still trying to answer.
Why We Backcountry Ski
This is how it works. Dudes go backcountry skiing in Rocky Mountain National Park. Dudes reach bottom of tour, flex thier muscles, turn off their transcievers… and need to move out of the way of gang of teenage girls in shorts and tank tops traipsing through the woods. This really is the kind of stuff that happens whenever we go backcountry sking, right dudes? I think we can sell it as a service piece to some of the New York mags: Top Spots to Meet Women while Backcountry Skiing.