Reflections | Prospect's Prospects

May 24^th, 2019

Introduction:

On February 2^nd, 2019, The New York Times published an op-ed titled, “Why Can’t Rich People Save Winter?” It describes the hypocrisy of affluent American (downhill) skiers who have both the motivation and the resources to do something about climate change, yet fail to do much of anything. And if they do act, it’s often “anemic, low-impact ‘sustainability’ and ‘awareness’ campaigns that give the appearance of advocacy but have done little to accomplish what the winter sports world, and the world at large, needs: rapid reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.”^[1] As an Environmental Studies major as well as an avid cross-country skier, reading the article felt like staring into a deep, dark reflective pool. My perception was that the cross-country ski community as a whole (myself included) is not doing enough to confront climate change even as we are existentially threatened as skiers by it. Why is there this gap of motivation? Are skiers unaware of how dire the situation is? What should we be doing? What can we do?

I set out to address these questions by examining the intersection of skiing, community, and climate change at our local cross-country ski area, Prospect, in Woodford, VT. I did a series of interviews with various community members, many of whom were on the board, some of whom had grown up skiing in the area, some from far away, some involved with Williams, some involved at a racing levels, and some recreational skiers. Unsurprisingly, their answers were interesting and complicated, often jolting mixtures of heartwarming and devastating, fearful and hopeful. With my prior belief that cross-country skiers weren’t really engaged with climate change, I was surprised (though perhaps should not have been) by the depth to which all of the interviewees had clearly considered climate change and its effects on the future of skiing. With this in mind, my focus shifted away from the issue of climate awareness to the emotional impacts of losing cross-country skiing in the Northeast and what we can do to confront climate change. After placing these interviews in context with readings I did for this project and the conversations we had in my senior seminar, I found that the cross-country ski community at Prospect (and I suspect throughout the Northeast) is in many ways simply a microcosm of middle- to upper-class, educated, liberal America: well-informed but inactive. The interesting twist, of course, is that for skiers, climate change is an immediate but non-fatal threat. This dynamic creates a deep emotional burden for skiers facing the future of climate change, but potentially also a profound source of motivation if, in the words of Terry Tempest Williams as shared by climate scientist and Prospect devotee Pete Murdoch, we can “dare to not look away.”^[2]

Skiing in Denial:

“The possibility of climate change is both deeply disturbing and almost completely submerged, simultaneously unimaginable and common knowledge.”^[3]

-Kari Norgaard in Living in Denial

In the winter of 2001-2002, American sociologist Kari Norgaard spent a year studying a small community in Norway whose entire existence was based on skiing, culturally and economically. That particular winter happened to be unusually warm, and the entire town felt the impacts of a late snow season. This weather pattern was almost undoubtedly due to global climate change and in many ways served as a bad omen for the years to come, yet Norgaard found residents rarely talked about how climate change would affect skiing in the future within the community. The town’s residents weren’t climate deniers in the traditional sense; rather, a more insidious, but equally relatable form of denial had taken hold. Norgaard describes the situation as follows: “People were aware that climate change could radically alter life within the next decades, yet they did not go about their days wondering what life would be like for their children…or whether their grandchildren would be able to ski on real snow.”^[4] Despite rational belief in the phenomenon of climate change and knowledge of how it could destroy this skiing-based way of life and community, residents shied away from talking about it.

Sound familiar?

I certainly saw some of these dynamics playing out within my own ski communities: how we drive for hours and hours to reach a small white ribbon of snow surrounded by grass and dirt to get some early-season skiing in, even when it used to snow regularly at that time; or when we ski in t-shirts in the middle of February and just try to enjoy the sunshine while we can; or when it rains so much in January, races are canceled and we drive home, dejected and silent. But in doing this project, I also discovered the impressive extent to which community members at Prospect are thinking about climate change and how it will affect their future and their children’s futures, unlike the town in which Norgaard lived for a year. I suspect this difference has a lot to do with the fact that it’s 17 years later, and climate change has permeated all of our lives to the point we can’t not think about it, especially in relationship with skiing. Nevertheless, this personal reflection about climate change within the Prospect community has not translated into any sort of public conversation, which could lead to meaningful action.

What’s stopping the transition from talking about climate change within the personal sphere into the public one at Prospect? It is helpful to turn again to Norgaard, who, as a sociologist, points to various Norwegian cultural norms to explain the confounding gap between rational comprehension of climate change and the influence it will have on their lives.

First, to understand Prospect, it is important to grasp the level of joy it generates for so many people. In his interview, Williams geosciences professor and Prospect expert David Dethier mentioned that most people who come to Prospect have been there before, that it draws them into coming again and again.^[5] In my own experience, I have found that whether it is 32˚ and hailing or a windy -10˚, despite the 35 minute drive there and back, with an essay to write and a problem set due the next day, I have never regretted going to Prospect. Like many other skiers there, Prospect for me is a place of rejuvenation, recovery, and refuge from the stresses of the outside world. This view was reinforced throughout my interviews, as various Prospect community members described the countless ways in which they love Prospect, from it being the place where they get to see all their friends, soak in the beauty of nature, and get to exercise, to it being the very basis of their community. In words of one interviewee, “I don’t know… Prospect, it’s everything to me.”

The warmth and happiness that defines Prospect for so many people, however, is exactly what has made it impossible to bring climate change into the public conversation there. Climate change as a topic is so overwhelmingly depressing that it feels like it would contaminate the joyful nature of Prospect and ruin its function as an escape. Despite my dual identity as a devoted skier and an Environmental Studies major, I find myself rarely talking to others about the intersection of these worlds with regards to climate change. I think and talk about climate change a lot, and I definitely think and talk about skiing a lot, but talking about them in conjunction almost feels taboo because it is just so overwhelmingly saddening. One Norwegian man Norgaard interviewed explained that residents were unwilling to think or talk about climate change because, “People want to protect themselves a bit.”^[6] Norgaard explains further: “Knowing about global warming raised fears for the future, feelings of helplessness, and feelings of guilt, some of which were in turn threatening to individual identity,” so they avoided it.^[7]

Furthermore, this individual tendency to avoid unpleasant thoughts can become an expectation for the community as a whole. Borrowing a term invented by cognitive sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel, Norgaard calls this phenomenon “socially organized denial”^[8] and explains that, “blocking information from our own awareness and preventing it from entering others’ awareness are functions that fit together.”^[9] At Prospect, positivity has become a socialized norm preventing people from having constructive conversations about the existential threat to the thing they love. Then, this initial unwillingness to bring up climate change because of its distressing implications simply ends up reinforcing a communal neglect of the topic. The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication released a report detailing a “climate change ‘spiral of silence,’ in which people who care about the issue, shy away from discussing it because they so infrequently hear other people talking about it–reinforcing the spiral.”^[10] The report was founded on survey data covering the entire USA, but a smaller version of the spiral of silence exists at Prospect and exacerbates the silence encouraged by the collective norm of positivity.

This is not to say that nothing is being done to protect Prospect into, from, and for the future. Rather, with the transfer of ownership from a private owner to a public non-profit, there has been a renewal of interest and energy from the community in improving Prospect. The number of people willing to give $5000 to buy Prospect, the detailed planning going into creating a snowmaking system, and the endless volunteer hours by board members and others to keep the place running all attest to the community’s literal and emotional investment in preserving Prospect. The problem is that these actions are addressing the symptoms of climate change and not the root causes. I think for many, myself included, the threat of climate change to skiing looms so large that instead of being motivating as one might assume, it becomes paralyzing.

In this state of paralysis, we become caught in a cycle of worsening despair over the death of winter and skiing. Glenn Albrecht, an environmental philosopher, coined the term “solastalgia” to describe situations such as these. A play off of the words “solace” and “nostalgia,” solastalgia is defined as

the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault (physical desolation). It is manifest in an attack on one’s sense of place, in the erosion of the sense of belonging (identity) to a particular place and a feeling of distress (psychological desolation) about its transformation. It is an intense desire for the place where one is a resident to be maintained in a state that continues to give comfort or solace.^[11]

Solastalgia encompasses not only the physical destruction of landscapes (i.e. the disappearance of snow and cold at Prospect), but also the severance of cultural and emotional ties to the landscape due to the physical harm. Importantly, it also highlights our tendency to hunker down and simply preserve the good place we have, which is what is occurring at Prospect and at ski areas all across the USA. Climate change, however, is not something we can simply fence off to keep Prospect safe. Indeed, the trends illustrated by late season starts and mid-winter thaws have already shown that hunkering down to keep what we’ve got is not a viable solution.

Conversation, Action, and Hope in the Death of Winter:

“Critical thinking without hope is cynicism, but hope without critical thinking is naïveté.”^[12]

-Maria Popova

It is important to recognize that winter and skiing as we currently know it will disappear from the Northeast, likely in my lifetime and probably in yours too.^[13]^,[14] These are difficult words for me to write and even more difficult to internalize as truth, but the fact is that humans have released enough greenhouse gas emissions that a certain amount of warming is simply baked into our future at this point.^[15] In the near future, it would be relatively easy to continue living in what sociologist Stanley Cohen has termed “implicative denial,”^[16] wherein “we recognize the troubling implications of [the] facts but respond by busying ourselves on activities that do not arise from a full assessment of the situation.”^[17] But I believe we have an ethical obligation to not do this, whether it is to ourselves, our neighbors, our children, or all of humanity, despite their separation from us by space or time.

Professor of sustainability leadership Jem Bendell recently came out with a controversial essay titled “Deep Adaptation” that predicts relatively imminent societal collapse due to climate change and offers a framework to confront this apocalyptic future.^[18] Though Bendell’s conclusion that we are on the doorstep of societal collapse is questionable and disputed fiercely by many other environmental thinkers, the framework he develops in his paper may actually still be useful to the cross-country ski community since a rupture of this particular society built around skiing is inevitable. If cross-country skiing becomes doing one-kilometer loop after one-kilometer loop on a narrow strip of manmade-snow surrounded by grass or dirt, many interviewees said that skiing at that point would just not be worth it anymore. For many Prospect skiers, without the connection to nature that natural snow affords and without the solid community built around it now, that version of skiing would not really be skiing anymore.

In the face of a bleak future such as this, Bendell offers a framework of resilience, relinquishment, and restoration.^[19] In short, resilience asks what values and norms we want to bring with us from our current society into a changed future; relinquishment asks what practices we should let go of when “retaining them could make matters worse;” and restoration asks which “attitudes and approaches to life” can we bring back from pre-industrial times to make a better future. What would this look like if we applied to it to skiing at Prospect? I have no concrete answers to this, but instead I want to offer the framework as jumping-off point for a wider discussion of what skiing could look like in a world without proper winter and what other actions should be taken to address climate change.

It may be that we can’t save skiing in the Northeast as it is, but we have the opportunity to potentially save a version of the current community and prevent even larger losses in other, more vital areas of our lives. Moreover, I believe Prospect is a pertinent place to start having these conversations. I will admit that I was initially skeptical that more discussion is required when it feels like the clock is frantically ticking and action is needed now. In a review of climate change communication literature, Susanne Moser, an expert in the field, asks, “Is it not simply time for action now?”^[20] While the superficial sentiment of the question rang true for me at the outset of this project, Moser asks this question to make the point that actually more conversation is still needed. Moser continues, “dialogic, deliberative processes can open minds, deepen understanding, foster empathy, change attitudes, and increase receptivity to policy alternatives,” which, put simply, means that having public dialogue matters to enacting change.^[21] If we view this process as a timeline of sorts with personal reconciliation and understanding of climate change as the first step and collective action as the final goal, we see that a public conversation about what is happening and what should be done collectively must come before the community can take action as a whole.

Climate change is not an individual problem and the process of mourning cross-country skiing as we know it in the Northeast is not an individual problem either. It is then craziness to think that solutions to either of these problems can work on an individual level. Buying electric cars or installing solar panels on one’s own roof are not feasible for everyone nor will they be enough to cause real change. Though it may be an overused truism, it is safe to say that in these cases, the whole is indeed more than the sum of its parts, which is why starting a public conversation about climate change is crucial at Prospect. Norgaard emphasizes this in the conclusion of her book: “Working together may over time create the supportive community that is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for people to face large fears about the future. Engagement in such activities may also serve an important strategy of providing hopeful action.”^[22]

Despite the grim outlook for winter and cross-country skiing, Prospect is uniquely situated to be an effective node of change, certainly among other ski areas and in the general landscape of climate change action as well. Because of its geographic location, Prospect draws people from a wide swath of places: southern Vermont and northwestern Massachusetts obviously, but also the capital region of New York and down into southern Massachusetts and Connecticut. More importantly, Prospect’s two main constituencies, Bennington and Williamstown, are both home to institutions of higher learning, Bennington College and Williams College. At both of these schools, there are numerous climate and earth scientists and experts on environmental policy, humanities, and social studies. Further, their presence means there are large populations of highly educated, relatively affluent people who care deeply about Prospect and its future. Everyone has a responsibility to address climate change in the ways they can, but the burden lies especially heavily on those with the resources and time to do so. Prospect has a much higher percentage of people in its extended community with the means to do something than the average slice of the American population, and they have an immediate emotional impetus that can be initially paralyzing, but in the end demands collective talk and then action.

So, what would starting a public conversation about climate change at Prospect look like? How can we break the present norms of positivity and silence without contaminating the beauty and joy that currently defines Prospect? How can we collectively turn our grief over the loss of cross-country skiing as a sport and a way of life into something ultimately productive and beneficial beyond Prospect?

This semester, our class spoke to Trisha Shrum, an environmental economist and one of the founders of Dear Tomorrow, a website where anyone can post a letter to a future relative (child, niece, grandchild, etc.) explaining their thoughts and feelings about climate change. I was initially skeptical that this amorphous, touchy-feely process of letter-writing could be an effective way of motivating people to action, but after talking to Shrum and hearing how personally meaningful it has been for many, I was more convinced. During our conversation, Shrum also talked about how Dear Tomorrow’s letter-writing campaign has inspired communities, like church groups, to have productive focus group sessions about climate change and how it will impact their community. I believe writing letters to the next generation about Prospect and cross-country skiing could be a worthwhile reflection process for many Prospect goers, and hopefully the personal contemplation would spread into the public arena, potentially in the form of a focus group session.

The key part of these actions is to provide space and time for members of the Prospect community to engage with climate change beyond the immediate actions we can take to preserve Prospect as it is. It’s not that we need to stop talking about snowmaking, but we need to move beyond that conversation. First, we must collectively acknowledge how scary the future may be, and then we need to brainstorm actions that address those fears as a community. We can look to other communities that have already been spurred to action for inspiration. For example, the New England Nordic Ski Association holds an annual Race for Snow at Weston Ski Track in Boston, MA to fundraise for 350.org.^[23] Further afield, students at Lund University in Sweden (a country filled with cross-country skiers) recently convinced their trustees to divest the school’s financial holdings from fossil-fuel companies.^[24] Members of Prospect could encourage similar campaigns at Williams or Bennington College. There is an immense amount of power and capability within the Prospect community that could be channeled towards addressing climate change and perhaps even transforming how we conceptualize climate change. At this point, anything that brings climate change out of the shadows and into the public consciousness at Prospect will be a constructive step.

We can no longer turn a blind eye towards climate change, as painful as confronting reality may be. Admitting that cross-country skiing must change and mourning the loss of the way it is now is not giving up, for hope “is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine.”^[25] Rather, as author Rebecca Solnit has stated, “grief and hope can coexist…[and] hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.”^[26] As skiers at Prospect, we are constantly awash in uncertainties: uncertain if our kick wax will work, uncertain if our toes will be warm enough, uncertain if we will be able to make the turn at the bottom of the hill, and uncertain if Steve has made chocolate chip cookies today. The one thing we can be certain about, however, is that Prospect and the places and communities like it are worth having difficult conversations over. As a community, it is time to embrace what we do know and what we don’t know, to remember our collective values of camaraderie, stewardship, and dedication, and to ask what we want Prospect to mean for generations to come.

Works Cited:

Albrecht, Glenn. “‘Solastalgia’’: A New Concept in Health and Identity.’” PAN 3 (2005): 41–55.

Bendell, Jem. “Deep Adaption.” IFLAS Occasional Paper 2, July 27, 2018.

Dethier, David. Interview by Ingrid Thyr, April 4, 2019.

Fox, Porter. “Opinion | Why Can’t Rich People Save Winter?” The New York Times, February 2, 2019, sec. Opinion. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/02/opinion/sunday/winter-snow-ski-climate.html.

Maibach, Edward, Anthony Leiserowitz, Seth Rosenthal, Connie Roser-Renouf, and Matthew Cutler. “Is There a Climate ‘Spiral of Silence’ in America?” Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. New Haven, CT: Yale University and George Mason University, 2016. https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/climate-spiral-silence-america/.

Mauritsen, Thorsten, and Robert Pincus. “Committed Warming Inferred from Observations.” Nature Climate Change 7, no. 9 (September 2017): 652–55. https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3357.

McKibben, Bill. “Sweden, Home to the World’s Oldest Cross-Country Ski Race, Confronts a Changing Climate,” March 5, 2019. https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/sweden-home-to-the-worlds-oldest-cross-country-ski-race-confronts-a-changing-climate.

Moser, Susanne C. “Reflections on Climate Change Communication Research and Practice in the Second Decade of the 21st Century: What More Is There to Say?” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 7, no. 3 (2016): 345–69. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.403.

Murdoch, Peter. Interview by Ingrid Thyr, April 10, 2019.

Norgaard, Kari Marie. Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life. The MIT Press, 2011. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262015448.001.0001.

Popova, Maria. “Hope, Cynicism, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves.” Brain Pickings (blog), February 9, 2015. https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/02/09/hope-cynicism/.

Scott, Daniel, Jackie Dawson, and Brenda Jones. “Climate Change Vulnerability of the US Northeast Winter Recreation– Tourism Sector.” Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change 13, no. 5 (June 1, 2008): 577–96. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11027-007-9136-z.

Solnit, Rebecca. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. Haymarket Books, 2016.

“‘The Race for Snow’ Ski Race Fundraiser for Climate Change.” New England Nordic Ski Association (blog), 2019. https://www.nensa.net/event/the-race-for-snow-ski-race-fundraiser-for-climate-change/.

Wobus, Cameron, Eric E. Small, Heather Hosterman, David Mills, Justin Stein, Matthew Rissing, Russell Jones, et al. “Projected Climate Change Impacts on Skiing and Snowmobiling: A Case Study of the United States.” Global Environmental Change 45 (July 1, 2017): 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2017.04.006.

Zerubavel, Eviatar. Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology. Reprint edition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.

^[1] Fox, “Opinion | Why Can’t Rich People Save Winter?”

^[2] Murdoch, interview.

^[3] Norgaard, Living in Denial. xix.

^[4] Norgaard. 3.

^[5] Dethier, interview.

^[6] Norgaard, Living in Denial. 80.

^[7] Norgaard. 80.

^[8] Zerubavel, Social Mindscapes.

^[9] Norgaard, Living in Denial. 212.

^[10] Maibach et al., “Is There a Climate ‘Spiral of Silence’ in America?”

^[11] Albrecht, “‘Solastalgia’’: A New Concept in Health and Identity.’” 45.