Dear Sundog: Am I a jerk for not owning an electric vehicle yet? I live in a city, commute to work, and like to get outside. I have a decent car that gets decent mileage, but feel like I would be doing better for myself and the planet with an EV. Should I buy one? —Looking for Environmental Alternatives that are Friendly

Dear LEAF,

Let’s say you’re the average American who commutes 42 miles per day round-trip to a job that you find moderately soul-sucking. Maybe your labor serves a corporation that enriches its execs and shareholders while doing ill in the world. Maybe you work for an idealistic school or nonprofit, but are expected to work nights or weekends without additional pay. Or perhaps you simply sense that your one and only life on this gorgeous Earth is slipping past while you compose reports and gaze at Zoom.

In any case, you want to lead a more principled and less wasteful life than your vocation allows—you don’t want to be a jerk—so you upgrade your Corolla for an electric vehicle. Where will you find that $35K or $75K? If you can pull the funds directly from your savings or trust fund, then God bless you. Otherwise, you’ll borrow the money and make a monthly payment. You’ll have to keep doing your job in order to afford your green ride.

You will likely be paying interest to some bank. Will that bank use your hard-earned dollars to manifest a better society? More likely, their profits will go for millions in dividends to stock owners, or they’ll be loaned out again to finance all kinds of hideous adventures, from oil pipelines across to deforesting the .

So by reducing your dependence on the gas station—one tentacle of the fossil fuel industry—you’ve now become a partner to some other tentacle. Also, much of the electrical grid from which you’ll power that EV is still burning coal and gas to make electricity, so unless you’re charging from your own rooftop panels, you haven’t fully escaped even one tentacle.

So, no, LEAF, you’re not a jerk should you choose a different path. And yes, if you’re buying a car—especially to replace a gasoline car—it should probably be an EV. But there are so many variables.

You will no doubt have heard about the of using rare-earth elements like cobalt and lithium for electric batteries. It’s true: mining is bad. But this alone is not a valid reason to pass on buying an EV. The damage required to extract these miracle elements is much smaller than the alternative—drilling for oil and gas, and digging coal to produce electricity. If you can’t stomach the exploitation of nature and humans that is inherent to the industrial economy, let me gently suggest that you make a more radical lifestyle change than getting an EV—and try giving up your car altogether.

Sundog does not give advice he would not heed, so here’s my full disclosure: even I—literally a professor of environmental studies—do not own an EV, not even a hybrid. My family’s fleet consists of a 2005 Toyota Tundra that gets an alarming 15 to 22 miles per gallon, and a 2012 Subaru Outback that does only slightly better at 21 to 28.

As a matter of principle, I don’t think the only way to save the planet is by transferring billions of dollars from regular citizens to the corporations that build cars. As a matter of budget, I have never owned a new car. All my vehicles have cost less than $10K, except the Outback, which was $16K. I’ve actually never even sat in a Tesla, but I imagine driving one to be like having an orgasm while watching a looped clip of Elon Musk declaring: “I’ve done more for the environment for any other single human on earth.”

Let me state on the record that I love cars and trucks. They’ve provided much joy in my life, usually along a lovely lonesome stretch of two-lane blacktop or at the terminus of some rutted old ranch road. But those sort of experiences likely account for less than one percent of overall driving. In the past century, we have built American cities to accommodate people using cars for the most mundane of outings like commuting, shopping, and bar-hopping. The tradeoff is not just carbon emissions and pollution, but also sprawl, isolation and streets unsafe for walking and biking.

Turns out that in cities built before the era of the automobile—from New York to Barcelona to Kathmandu—you can get around without a car. When you remove traffic jams, parking tickets, the endless search for a place to park, the glum designation of a sober driver, and the claustrophobia of being locked in a metal box, city living is just more . . . fun.

When Sundog and Lady Dog set out to design our own lives, it was not to be in some Old World capitol, but rather in a midsized city in the Rockies. We didn’t aspire merely to burn fewer fossil fuels: we wanted to free ourselves from our car. We bought a house less than a mile from the place we work, less than a mile from the center of town. Our kid goes to preschool two blocks from here. Now we get around mostly by foot and bike, and can walk to trails and a creek. Many days go by where our dented guzzlers sit on the street—we drive each vehicle about 5,000 miles per year, about a third of the of 13,500.

The downside is that the houses in this neighborhood are a century old, dilapidated, small, and expensive. It’s a bit of a whack-a-mole game: our heating bills are low because we live in 1,000 square feet, but we can’t afford solar panels or a heat pump. We don’t spend much money on gasoline, but we can’t afford an EV.

Had we decided to live 21 miles from our jobs, we might have had a big new well-designed home and a slick new EV. But we love walking and biking; we want to teach our son that he can do the same, and that his parents are not his chauffeurs.

So why do we bother owning cars at all? For one, Montana is a lovely place to live, but it sure costs a lot to leave. Cheap airfares are not really a thing here. Neither is public transportation. So if you want to take a family vacation within a 1,000-mile radius, you’re likely driving. We bought the Tundra during the pandemic to tow a camp trailer (our “office”) and to haul lumber while we built a permanent office. Now we use the truck for long river trips, which entail carrying heavy loads for hundreds of miles through remote areas and down rutted dirt roads.

I don’t know of any EV that could do this. The Subaru is the town errand runner, and also takes us down bumpy roads to lakes and up icy mountains to ski. If it bites the dust and the cost of used four-wheel-drive EVs drops below twenty grand, I’d be happy to upgrade.

None of this makes Sundog feel particularly righteous. My point is that choosing a car is not a stand-alone decision as you forge an ethical life.

Mark Sundeen teaches environmental writing at the University of Montana. Despite his fleet of internal combustion engines, he refuses to purchase a parking permit and therefore commutes on a 1974 Schwinn Continental, with a ski helmet in winter.

If you have an ethical question for Sundog, send it to sundogsalmanac@hotmail.com

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The big oak tree that stood over the bedroom of Andrew Goldner’s Altadena, California, home always worried him. So when powerful Santa Ana winds battered his house on the night of Monday, January 5, Goldner, a rock climbing coach and video director, dragged his futon into the living room and slept there with his two dogs, just to be safe.

“I’ve always been scared of that thing,” Goldner told șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű.

The next day, as winds gusted to as high as 80 miles per hour, a danger of a different nature became apparent. That evening, Goldner’s brother, Jacob, stopped by his house and told him that a wildfire had sparked in nearby Eaton Canyon. Within the hour, Goldner received a call from a friend who lives on Altadena’s eastern side. Flames were leaping into nearby homes, and the friend was making a hurried evacuation. Goldner and his brother jumped into their car and fled just as the blaze spread through their own neighborhood.

“It was a horrifying escape,” he said. “We actually turned the first corner, and an entire palm tree came down in front of us and blocked the road. But we made it out, and we drove away.”

Goldner, 37, is one of hundreds of thousands of Southern California residents who narrowly escaped the . Whipped by powerful off-shore winds, and fed by bone-dry brush and vegetation, fires enveloped multiple communities in the greater Los Angeles area beginning on Tuesday, January 7. By Monday, January 13, the flames had destroyed or damaged much of Altadena and Pacific Palisades, and parts of Malibu and Pasadena. Twenty four people as of the publishing date of this story.

Los Angeles is a haven for outdoor athletes, with its hundreds of running trails, climbing gyms, surf breaks, and cycling clubs. Across the city, five blazes—the Palisades, Eaton, Kenneth, Hurst, and Sunset fires—torched favorite trail systems and climbing crags, bike routes, and surf shops. They also devastated the lives of outdoor athletes like Goldner, who teaches climbing at the Stronghold Climbing Gym in Los Angeles’ Lincoln Heights neighborhood. His home is among the estimated 12,000 structures to be destroyed or damaged.

“My house is gone,” he said. “The whole block is. The entire thing is just devastated. There’s not one standing house. All the speculation goes away, and then you’re like, it’s real now. I called my partner, and she just broke down.”

But as the flames spread across neighborhoods and across the city’s canyons and open spaces, communities of outdoor enthusiasts came together to raise funds and offer support to one another. And to try and imagine how life will continue when the time to rebuild comes.

Escaping the Eaton Fire

When hiking guide Amanda Getty, 43, learned that Eaton Canyon had caught fire, she put her daughter and dog into the car and drove towards the canyon to see the blaze. Getty often leads hiking groups up the four-mile route, which leads to a picturesque waterfall. “I feel shameful about it because, in hindsight, it wasn’t the wisest thing to do, but I had to see it,” Getty told șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű. “Eaton Canyon is an integral reason why we live here.”

What Getty saw made the situation feel “very real.” The gusting winds were stronger than any she’d ever felt. She wondered if she should immediately evacuate with her daughter or wait for officials to weigh in. Her husband, Charles, was away on a trip to Colorado, and after she returned home, she called him.

“A huge part of a tree broke off and landed on the roof,” she said. “I should have left then.”

Getty put her daughter to bed and scrolled coverage on social media before eventually falling asleep. Then, at 3:30 A.M. her phone buzzed to life with a text from a neighbor: TIME TO GO. Minutes later, police cars circled the neighborhood blaring their sirens. She woke her daughter and grabbed her dog and sprinted for the car. “The wind was trying to knock us over as we ran,” she said.

Getty and her husband came back to the neighborhood the next day and found many homes burning. Their home was amazingly still intact. The two spent the day clearing brush from the yard and hosing down their roof to prevent the flames from spreading. “I’ve met more people in my front yard than I ever have these past two days,” she said. “I think that’s what you have to do right now: just be the most basic form of human when you see people. Are you OK? Can I help you?”

Madi Pearce, a climber and trail runner who lives in Altadena, was also surprised to find her house still intact after the blaze ripped through her neighborhood. Pearce, 23, had evacuated at 11 P.M. on Tuesday night with a bag of clothes and pet bird, Oliver.

When she came back to her neighborhood on Wednesday morning, Pearce saw that her neighbor’s home was still engulfed in flames. A home two doors down was burning as well. “Everything was on fire,” she said. “Neighbors were grabbing trash cans and filling them with water, spraying hoses, and just doing everything they could because there were no firemen on our street.”

Pearce, 23, heard explosions from the burning structures. She saw fire crews a short distance away trying to extinguish flames at the nearby country club, and other crews several blocks away working on a home fire.

A fire truck sped down her street, and Pearce attempted to flag it down to try and extinguish her neighbor’s home. But the crews sped off. “I don’t know if they had some kind of strategy or they were just stretched too thin,” she said. “Maybe our houses were just too far gone. It was all heartbreaking.”

But somehow, Pearce’s home withstood the blowing embers and flames. Most of the blocks in her neighborhood, she said, are leveled. “Chimneys standing in ash,” she said.

Outdoor Communities Lend a Hand

Even as flames blazed through neighborhoods, communities across Los Angeles rallied to raise funds for rebuilding efforts. The donations platform GoFundMe l for wildfire victims, and by January 13 the group had collected $2.3 million. The and also ramped up donation efforts, as did the —a group that provides funding for both fire victims and rescue crews.

Communities of outdoor athletes also became rallying points for these efforts. When Peace Sports and Total Trash Cycling Clubs learned of the fires, organizers canceled a 60-mile group ride through Altadena and Pasadena that had been planned for the weekend. The groups rescheduled the event for February, and made it a fundraiser for fire victims. Escalemos, a SoCal climbing club, launched a for local climbers impacted by the fires.

Bike Oven, a cycling shop in Highland Park, also canceled its organized rides and instead pivoted to outreach and . Management posted on social media that the shop would become a drop-off location and distribution center for supplies for those impacted by the fires.

Shop employees told șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű that the location quickly became inundated with donations. When șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű visited the shop, bottled water, tampons, toilet paper, and socks filled the store and spilled out onto a nearby sidewalk. “We’re just trying to hurry things to people in need,” Will Stevens, a Bike Oven employee, said.

Some outdoor businesses have helped the community simply by opening their doors. At Stronghold Climbing Gym in Echo Park, owners Kate Mullen and Peter Steadman have remained open so that people can use electricity, showers, and bathrooms.

“Right now, our staff needs the time off, but people still need a place to plug their stuff in, and be around their community,” Mullen said. “A guy came in earlier and asked for a towel. He went in, showered, and then left with wet hair.”

Cities Reshaped by Fire

It will take months, maybe even years, to truly understand how the wildfires of 2025 will reshape the communities across Southern California. The Eaton Fire blazed much of downtown Altadena and its surrounding neighborhoods; the Pacific Palisades fire leveled multimillion-dollar homes, some of which had stood for generations.

In Malibu—where fires devastated the community as recently as 2018—fires burned structures on both sides of the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH).ÌęSurfer and writer Jamie Brisick believes parts of Malibu may remain changed forever.

“Malibu is such a joyous place, but now, driving north on PCH, to see the devastation of all those beachfront homes will totally change the experience,” he said. “There’s almost this sort of glamour of driving north on PCH—you pass Nobu, and there might be paparazzi out front, and you pass the Soho House, and there’s glamour there, and then there’s Billionaire Beach, with hundred-million dollar homes, and now to see what it is, all firebombed the way it is, will bring you to Malibu in a different mood. It will be a completely different energy now.”

Getty, who calls Eaton Canyon her “second home,” told șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű that she’s spent much of the week thinking about the trails and canyons where she leads groups. “Grieving the loss of trails is so insignificant to the loss of someone’s home,” she said.

Still, Getty wonders how long it will take them to return. “I know that nature is resilient, so much more resilient than I am,” she said. “And these places are going to come back faster than I am, and much faster than people’s homes.”

Flames destroyed the Eaton Canyon Nature Center, which was built in 1993 after another fire, called the Kinneloa Fire, ravaged the area. On Wednesday, the Nature Center’s superintendent emailed park volunteers “Now is the time to grieve, but this has happened before. We will rebuild.”

Returning to Altadena

On Wednesday, January 8, Andrew Goldner checked his phone and saw a text message from a neighbor. The text included a video of the neighborhood’s destruction, including images of Goldner’s burned house.

But Goldner noticed that his garage was still standing. Inside of the garage was the 1966 Triumph Tiger Cub motorcycle that his grandfatherÌęhad left him as a memento. “He didn’t really impart a lot of things to other people, but he gave that one to me,” Goldner said.

Goldner texted a few friends about the discovery, and within minutes they’d all replied, including one with bolt cutters and a van. They loaded the van and drove into Altadena to try and save the vintage motorcycle.

They found downed power lines, plus police cars and fire crews. They weaved the van through blockades and plumes of smoke. They passed entire city blocks that were burned to the ground. “Then, the next block would be the flip side, where all of the houses were there except for one,” Goldner said. “Embers were falling and landing on random houses of their choosing.”

Eventually they found . They broke open the garage and rescued the old motorcycle. Other than a new layer of soot and dust, it was exactly as he’d left it.

As Goldner walked back from the garage, the big oak tree that had caused him so much concern was still there, barely touched by the flames. The house, however, was gone.

Seattle native Gavin Feek lives in Los Angeles. He contributes to and Stab Magazine, and has been published in șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, , and The Stranger. Feek loves to rock climb, surf, trail run, and ride his gravel bike. Prior to becoming a writer he ran the Glacier Point Cross-Country ski hut in Yosemite National Park.

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This past Saturday, January 4, Daniel Swain, a climate scientist for the University of California Los Angeles, on his blog, WeatherWest.com. In the post, Swain warned ofÌę an “extreme offshore wind and fire-weather event” in Southern California in the coming days.

Two days later, Swain where he again sounded alarm bells for Los Angeles. “The quite serious extreme wind and fire-weather threat in Southern California—it is going to affect millions of people and potentially cause some real damage and really ramp up the threat of destructive wildfire,” Swain said. A published Swain’s comments.

On Tuesday, January 7, wildfires erupted across Southern California, with the largest blaze igniting in the Pacific Palisades region of Santa Monica. Whipped by extremely high winds, the inferno enveloped thousands of homes and businesses and killed at least five people. Hundreds of thousands of residents evacuated as the blazes roared through neighborhoods across Southern California, including Altadena, Pasadena, and Pacific Palisades. As of the publishing of this story, the fires were zero percent contained.

We caught up with Swain to talk about the conditions that led him to post his warnings.

What dynamics led you to predict an extreme fire event in Southern California this week?
SWAIN: This was an extraordinarily well-predicted extreme weather and fire risk event, and I wasn’t the only person who saw it coming. The national weather service gave strong messaging—Red Flag, high-wind watch. These are tiers of warnings that are rarely issued. We saw the extreme winds coming to Los Angeles perhaps a week or so out. But more importantly, we knew that the dry conditions across Southern California were exceptional. That has been cumulative, over months. So, if a big bad wind event came along before the first rains came, we knew that the fire danger would be bad.

But going further back in time, the past two years were very wet in Southern California—historically wet in some areas. People celebrated that the drought was over, and it was. We aren’t seeing long-term drought right now, but we’re seeing something different, which is called hydroclimate whiplash. That’s where you go from extreme wet to extreme dry. So, we had extremely wet weather and then the driest six-to-nine month stretch ever observed. This sequence matters in Southern California, because what you see burning isn’t mature forest but rather grass and brush, which grows in periods of high moisture.

What role did climate play in these fires?
There are two climate connections. In a warming climate we’re seeing wetter wet periods and drier dry periods, but it’s warmer all of the time. That’s a dangerous sequence. You have these increasingly wide swings between extreme wet and extreme dry, which leads to the abundant growth of grass, brush, and vegetation that burns easily. We also see hotter summers and drier falls and early winter, which extends fire season into the winter. And as you extend the fire season, it starts to overlap with the season of strong offshore winds. Having high winds in January isn’t too unusual. But having an abundance of vegetation as dry as it is right now is not typical. That’s the other dangerous component.

We actually saw this danger coming nine months out. Of course you can’t pinpoint the exact dates. But we saw that the summer was the hottest on record across Southern California, followed by a heat wave in the fall that baked and dried out the vegetation. And it hasn’t rained. Each piece of this contributed in a way that makes ecological and meteorological sense.

What similarities do you see between this and the Marshall Fire in Boulder County, Colorado, back in December, 2021?
I see some parallels. It was a bone-dry fall and start to winter in Colorado when the Marhsall Fire sparked. Of course dry winters are more typical in Front Range Colorado than they are in coastal California. But in 2021 in Colorado we hadn’t seen snow by late December, and then we had an extreme downslope wind storm. The winds were actually more extreme during the Marshall Fire.

A lot has been written about the fire danger as the wildland-urban interface continues to expand.Ìę
The Marshall Fire was definitely a mixed wildland/urban fire where the fire went from open spaces and rural areas into neighborhoods, where it then burned structure to structure, block by block. The Southern California fires are more like urban fires than a true wildland fire. They started close to densely populated areas and the moved quickly into town centers and more neighborhoods. This wasn’t a true wildland-urban interface fire. In some of these city areas it’s just spreading from the house, to the PetCo, to the mall, to the gas station.

When winds are that extreme there doesn’t need to be an abundance of vegetation for it to spread. But like the Marshall Fire, we are seeing it spread up creek corridors and parks like a candle wick. The vegetation found in urban parks, open space, and even medians is still fuel, even if it gets irrigated.

If scientists predicted fires, why have they been so devastating?
It’s hard for even me to fathom, but these fires would have been worse had we not had the predictions. The warnings led to preemptive positioning of aircraft and fire crews. Had the predictions not been as good, you would have seen fewer firefighters and crews in place in those first hours. And it was the work that people did during those first few hours that probably saved hundreds of lives. There could have been an incredible loss of life in this scenario, and we came close to it in Pacific Palisades. California has a veritable army of firefighters in Los Angeles, the LA City and local departments, CAL Fire, Cal Office of Emergency Services. But yes, this is still what we see—under conditions this powerful, this kind of destruction can still happen. I don’t see this as a failure of firefighting. I see it as a tragic lesson in the limits of what firefighting can achieve under conditions that are this extreme.

This interview was edited for space and clarity.Ìę

Organizations Accepting Donations to Help Those Affected by the Fires

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Glaciers shrinking in Europe are no secret, especially to ski racers.

Just eight years ago, U.S. speed skier Sam Morse remembers training on a glacier above Zermatt. When the training session ended, he skied on the glacier all the way down to the cable car’s mid-station and downloaded to town from there. Now, the glacier no longer reaches the mid-station. After a day of training, ski racers have to head back to the summit and download the full length of the cable car.

“In less than 10 years, the glaciers have receded a substantial amount, like probably almost a kilometer or two up the hillside, so you can’t ski out,” he described recently by phone from a training camp in Colorado.

Other U.S. skiers report similar observations. While training in Saas Fe in 2020, Morse’s teammate Erik Arvidsson remembers taking a lift above a bare slope. His coaches told him that they used to be able to train on this slope in July and August.

Earlier this fall, Mikaela Shiffrin adjusted her training plan to stay in South America longer than in previous seasons because training on Europe’s glaciers to prep for the Sölden World Cup is “really mostly rock at this point.”

Couple these observations with last year’s viral photos of excavators digging into Europe’s glaciers to make early-season World Cup race courses, and we have to wonder if ski racing is viable as climate change takes its toll. And worse, is it contributing to the problem?

Perhaps. But Morse and Arvidsson think the sport can lead the way in meaningful change.

First, the Bad News 


A slim minority of U.S. citizens believe that climate change is a hoax. But the facts are hard to deny. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has data showing that the ten warmest years since record-keeping began in 1850 have occurred in the past decade. And NOAA’s climate tools show that the planet will continue to warm rapidly.

In ski country, average daily temperatures in the early season (November) are already over two degrees higher than from 1950-2013—”a fairly significant increase,” said Chris Gloninger, a meteorologist and climate scientist for the Woods Hole Group in Massachusetts.

Interestingly, climatologists now consider December a fall month in New England, when the grass still grows and lawns need mowing. This is a monumental shift, added Gloninger.

Warmer air leads to warmer oceans that are slow to cool, and an ice-free Arctic sets up a wavy Jetstream over the Northern Hemisphere. These deep waves can plunge us into extremes, from a polar vortex to a prominent ridge that brings unseasonably warm temperatures north. The only good news is that warmer air masses can hold more moisture, so when it does snow, it can be a good dump.

But for how long?

NOAA’s climate projection tools predict that if we don’t drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions, average daily temperatures by the end of the century could be eight to 10 degrees (Fahrenheit) warmer than in the mid-20th century.

“The climate in Burlington, for example, will be more like it is in Poughkeepsie, New York, by 2060 and Washington, DC, by 2100,” said Gloninger, using data from Climate Central. This organization communicates climate change science, effects, and solutions to the public.

By 2100, the western ski cities of Denver and Salt Lake City will have climates similar to those in Mexico, though higher elevations in the mountains will remain cooler.

Europe is experiencing similar warming. A study by the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service showed that the Alps’ glaciers have lost 10 percent of their volume in the past two years. It’s no surprise that climatologists predict the end of snow sports as we know them in a generation or two.

FIS’s Efforts

With the future of winter on the line, the International Ski Federation has started to act. Earlier this fall, FIS released its, “a roadmap to a more sustainable and inclusive snow sports ecosystem.” The climate change section of the program lists one strategic objective— to reduce the carbon footprint of FIS activities and events as much as possible, become climate neutral, and support concrete actions to combat or adapt to climate change—along with several promising sub-objectives (e.g., reduce FIS carbon footprint by 50 percent by 2030 and achieve net-zero by 2040).

To achieve these objectives, FIS is taking (or aims to take) several actions to complete 26 by the end of 2024 and release an Impact Report in 2025. One of their first initiatives was to gather data to calculate and estimate the . For events, participant travel contributes 88.9 percent of carbon emissions.

Using this data, FIS is now maximizing the use of renewable energy at its headquarters, making every other FIS Congress remote and allowing judges from some disciplines to work at home during races.

FIS is also looking at a modified events calendar to reduce travel—”a balancing act between growing snow sports, by bringing events to as many viable locations as possible, while minimizing the season’s carbon footprint,” FIS said in a statement. For the 2024/2025 season, alpine skiers will only travel to North America once during the regular season—for the Killington, Mont Tremblant, and Beaver Creek World Cups. Sun Valley is hosting the World Cup Finals in March. Still, only 25 men and women qualify to compete in each of alpine ski racing’s four disciplines, reducing by about half the number of people who have to travel back to the U.S. from Europe.

“ForÌę as much as most elite athletes are based in Europe, we are an international sport,” said FIS General Secretary Michel Vion. “If a venue in North America presents ideal conditions at the time when our Finals take place, we would be remiss not to consider it as a strong candidate to host the event.”

FIS is currently working on a plan to start the Alpine World Cup a week later. They also eliminated early-season World Cup downhills in Zermatt—what Arvidsson described as a thorn in both FIS’s and the athletes’ sides. The race was canceled for two consecutive years, and photos of excavators digging into the glacier to build the course were not a good look for ski racing.

“[That race] forced us to be ready to race over a month earlier than normal, which increased the amount of international travel that we had to do leading up to that race, which, from a climate and from a personal standpoint, didn’t really feel necessary,” explained Morse.

To further reduce ski racing’s carbon footprint, FIS has listed several tools and projects to implement as part of the impact program, some more vague than others. Two concrete projects: create a to support local organizing committees and national governing bodies, and create a sustainable car/travel policy for FIS activities. But as Morse pointed out, U.S. alpine skiers are already doing their best to reduce transportation emissions. The team flies commercially, not by private jet like pro athletes in other sports, and once on the ground, the team travels as a group—“packed into vans,” he said, “not in our own sportscars.”

FIS also partners with global organizations, like the World Meteorological Organization, to provide data and expertise about climate change and raise awareness.

Could FIS Do More?

The Impact Programme is a positive step toward reducing ski racing’s carbon emissions. But Arvidsson and Morse likely speak for many ski racers and snow sport athletes who want FIS to do more. Some of their ideas are low-hanging fruit, others more far-reaching.

Shortening the Alpine World Cup season would be one easy way to reduce team travel even more. In its first season (1967), the World Cup tour started in January and ended three months later in March. While the tour still concludes in March, the front end gradually crept into the fall months, first December, then into November. Currently, the season starts in late October with the Sölden giant slaloms.

The early-season World Cups are important for the ski industry, generating excitement and thus increasing equipment and ticket sales. But Arvidsson thinks it’s worth examining the trade-offs. Rather than traveling to the Southern Hemisphere in August and September to prep for the early-season races, skiers could wait to train closer to home later in the fall.

“I recognize that having those early races is important for the business side of things,” Arvidsson acknowledged, “but depending on how important [the business side is] deemed to be, moving the race season to start around Christmas-time would dramatically impact the travel that the national teams would do in the off season.”

Limiting the race season domestically, especially for younger ski racers, would also help reduce the sport’s carbon footprint and the financial burden on parents. This type of change starts from the top.

“One way that FIS could do that is by restricting the [junior] race schedule to be from January to March, and incentivizing clubs and youth programs to take advantage of when they have natural snow available to them within a more reasonable radius in November and December,” said Arvidsson.

“There’s no reason that kids from Vermont who are flying all the way out here to Colorado right now and training here with us need to be doing that,” added Morse.

Policy Changes

But reducing a few hundred ski racers’ airplane flights is a drop in the bucket against the firehose that is climate change. Facing the challenges of a warming world requires dramatic, systemic change on a policy level. And this is where Arvidsson and Morse would like FIS to step up. Ski racing—with its visibility on the global stage and very existence threatened by a lack of snow—could be the face of climate change. As one of the world’s largest sports governing bodies, FIS could unite with the outdoor industry to make a big impact, challenging fossil fuel businesses, and significant greenhouse gas emitters to make dramatic changes to reduce emissions.

“I would say that it’s time to end the finger-pointing and work together with FIS to demand that they become a leader in the climate change conversation,” stated Arvidsson. “The primary skiing and snow sports organization in the world has a responsibility to ensure their future in the next 50 to 100 years. They can form a really strong coalition that can have a dramatic impact on policy levels in Europe, in North America, around the entire world.”

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I’ve read more books on climate action than I can count. So I don’t say this lightly: I’m obsessed with the one I just finished, byÌęAyana Elizabeth Johnson.

In it, Johnson, a marine biologist and co-founder of the nonprofit think-tank , conducts interviews with 20 experts in everything from finance to farming to film and asks them to imagine what a replenished and healthy world might look like if we use the collective wisdom we already have to combat climate change.

I read this book in mid–November, right after the 2024 presidential election, and I was pretty gripped with climate anxiety.

This is not another preachy enviro-book. It’s not pushing hope for hope’s sake down our throats. Instead, it spotlights innovative solutions that are already working—like an increased reliance on renewable energy, greening up transportation and buildings, regenerative agriculture, and reducing food waste—and urges us to consider the possibilities when these things scale. Interspersed throughout the interviews are lists of jaw dropping facts, poems, and essays. And plenty of calls to action.

There was one paragraph that really hit me. In her interview with Paola Antonelli, senior curator for architecture and design at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Johnson asks her a question that recurs throughout the book: “How can we be part of the solutions we need? Is there a call to action?”

“The call to action is really to be better humans,” Antonelli says. “I don’t know how else to put it. Be better humans by understanding that we live for others. Otherwise we don’t have much reason to live. And when I say ‘others,’ I mean also the rest of the environment, all creatures and things. The answer is love.”

I decided to reach out to Johnson for a climate pep talk. The book hit shelves in September 2024, and we’ve had a presidential election—and a lot of global unrest—since then. I was curious how Johnson felt now, and whether her attitude or ideas had shifted with the socioeconomic and political tides. Plus, I just really didn’t want the book to end. Johnson’s casual, conversational style of writing left me feeling like we were already friends and hoped I could glean even more insight from one of the most exciting minds in the climate movement.

OUTSIDE: Talk me off the ledge: the book’s premiseÌęponders what theÌęworld would look like if we get climate action right. But can we actually get it right? In the time that we have? How?Ìę

JOHNSON: I have a lot of angsty journalists on my calendar right now and I’m just like, at what point did I become everyone’s climate shrink? How did I become the pep talker? It’s sort of funny because I am decisively not an optimist. I’m well aware that this climate scenario could very easily go even further off the rails. But it has literally never occurred to me that we should give up because that’s absurd, right? You don’t give up on life on earth.

And so it just always comes back to the question of what can we do to make it better? Because not trying is not an option. I was raised by two people who were in various small ways active in the movement for civil rights. At no point did people in that movement say, “This is too hard. Let’s just give up and be unequal forever.”

Sometimes I think there are a lot of people out there who are just quitters when it comes to climate change. They think the odds are too long and they’ll be gone anyway. But that’s a very weak and sad response.

Part of the problem is that we’ve been told that we have to stop or solve climate change. And those verbs are clearly delusional because we can’t solve it and we can’t stop it. But we can make things much better than they otherwise would have been if we didn’t try.

People just need to roll up their sleeves and get their heads in the game. I don’t really know what to say about the anxiety that most people are feeling except to say this: you will feel a hell of aÌęlot better if you’re doing something about it.

Most of the people reading this interview care and want to take action. But unfortunately there are so many who don’t, who just go about their lives, and intentionally or unintentionally don’t think about what the world will look like in 50 years. What would you say to them? Wake up! As the saying goes, if you’re not part of the solution,Ìęyou’re part of the problem.

You use a Venn diagram exercise to help people find their niche in the climate movement. Can you explain how it works? To ensure a livable future on this planet, we need to move beyond the platitudes of reduce, reuse, recycle. There is no one person or one entity that can fix this problem. We need to create a culture where everyone has a role to play. Are we gonna put our heads in the sand or pitch in?

The Climate Action Venn Diagram is a tool that helps everyone find their unique role by finding the intersection of three questions. 1) What brings you joy? 2) What are you good at? 3) What work needs doing?

The book is the result of my Venn diagram.

The Biden-Harris administration has arguably taken more climate action than any in history. A lot of environmentalists are bummed—even scared—about the results of the recent presidential election. You wrote the book before it happened. How did the election impact you personally and how will it impact your work and message moving forward? The last Trump administration rolled back well over 100 environmental protections and we don’t want that to happen again. In this current environment, I think we may need to do some reframing. We may get more traction if we talk less about “climate change” but keep pushing on the solutions. For example, there may be some openings in just the basics like the government protecting clean air and clean water, and we can reframe a lot of climate stuff in those terms because all Americans care about that.Ìę

When you feel like you’re banging your head against the wall, stop doing what you’re doing and find a different way. Because if yelling climate facts at people was enough, we would have solved this already, right?

I also think it will be really hard for the Trump administration to turn its back on the economic benefits we’ve seen from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Especially when so many red states are benefitting the most. Texas and Iowa lead the nation on wind energy. Not because they’re a bunch of hippies but because the finances just make sense. As of 2022, the clean energy sector employs more than 3.3 million people, over three times more than fossil fuels.

My reaction to this election was OK, what does this mean for me and my work? My answer, after reevaluating all my projects: I just need to double down. That includes focusing on what city governments can do to adapt to climate change, via my think tank Urban Ocean Lab, and supporting the next generation of climate leaders through teaching at Bowdoin college, and consulting with corporations that are trying to get it right since the federal government isn’t adequately regulating their climate impacts.

But overall, the role that I see for myself in climate work is to welcome more people into it. We need way more people working on climate solutions. So how can I help people get creative and find their own personal approach?

Was your book tour, which really wasn’t a book tour in the traditional sense, part of that approach? Yes, the Climate Variety Show, which we put on in Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and Portland, Maine, was born out of my own complete lack of desire to read my book aloud in bookstores across the country. What could be more boring? People are already bored of climate change, so how do I entice people in? I feel like there are things we haven’t tried yet as far as communications and influencing our friends and family.

So the was all about taking climate seriously without taking ourselves seriously. It was basically like a high school talent show—comedy, dancing, hula-hooping, poetry, games, music, puppets, and magic all mashed up into an evening of delightful chaos.

And everyone there filled out their Climate Action Venn Diagram in real time. If you want to get a sense of what it was like, you can hear audio clips in and see a in my Substack newsletter.

In What If We Get It Right?, you end each chapter by asking your interviewee the top three things they wish everyone knew about their particular area of expertise. So I’d like to ask you: What are the top three things you want everyone to know about your book?

1. It’s quite a fun, spirited read. I’ve been told the vibe of the book is like eavesdropping at a dinner party with me and 20 dear friends and colleagues, because the book includes interviews with these brilliant folks who are showing the way forward to their “visions of climate futures,” as the subtitle puts it. And if you listen to the audiobook, you get to actually hear these conversations.
2. There’s magnificent art and poetry mixed in.
3. I envisioned this book as something that people would read and discuss together, so, for book clubs and teachers, I made .

Oh! And as a bonus, the very last page has , which I spent an inordinate amount of time putting together and includes anthems for victory, love songs to Earth, tunes for tenacity, and sexy implementation vibes.

Kristin Hostetter is șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű’s sustainability columnist. This column is the result of a similar Venn diagram exercise she did several years ago when she became a founding member of the . Follow her journey to live more sustainably by for her twice-monthly newsletter.

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Auden Schendler, one of the biggest climate advocates in the outdoor industry,Ìędoesn’t start his new book, Terrible Beauty, with any of the myriad lessons he’s learned over decades of environmental work. Schendler, who is vice president of sustainability at Aspen One (parent company of Aspen Snowmass), doesn’t drop into scare tactics, or data, or the myriad ways global warming is harming recreation, business, and our ability to thrive. Instead, he opens with a camping trip in the Utah desert with a couple of buddies, chasing down dirt devils for the sheer glee of being outside in a storm.

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The book goes on to examine the ways we need to approach environmentalism if we want to experience that joy in the future. In his 25 years heading up sustainability initiatives for one of the ski industry’s biggest corporations, Schendler has been at the forefront of climate action. He converted Aspen’s utility to renewables, convinced its tissue supplier to stop cutting down old-growth trees, and led the outdoor industry in political lobbying. But he says we need to do more. A lot more. Corporate sustainability is failing, he says, and individuals aren’t leveraging enough of our personal and political power because we’ve been cowed into thinking we don’t have any. And now, the clock is ticking. According to Schendler, modern environmentalism is broken—but he has some ideas about how to keep it moving forward.

Terrible Beauty: Reckoning with Climate Complicity and Rediscovering Our Soul is a book about citizenship, the pursuit of purpose, and uphill battles you might not win but have to keep fighting anyway. It’s a book about right now.

What do you hope people take away from this book?

I want to suck people into the joy of the universe, then give them that technical payload on climate in a way that motivates them. When you ask people, “What do you care about?” It’s things like community and family and wild places. But when you ask them, “What are you doing to protect those things against this existential threat?” they throw up their hands. I wanted to give people tools to figure it out. So there’s a bunch of stuff about banks and how the financial sector impacts climate change, but this is a book about the human experience. I’m trying to say modern environmentalism is failing, but what can replace it? Can it be exciting?

Let’s talk about that failure. You’ve that skiing is toast, and that we’ve failed on climate as a society. How do we go forward in the face of that?

When you’re in a movement that’s losing it’s not glamorous, but this is where I think there’s a connection to the outdoor world. The purpose has to come in the doing of the thing. It’s like type 2 fun. It’s not about winning or losing—I think in any human endeavor it’s very rare to be able to say,Ìę“yes, we won.” Instead, we have to think about it like a practice. We’re improving the world. As much as a day in my life as a climate fighter is depressing, it’s also fascinating and weird and filled with these odd twists and turns and micro wins and crippling losses. There’s a lot of glee in getting into mischief.

You argue that the ways we’ve largely been doing environmental work, particularly corporate sustainability, isn’t actually addressing the root causes of global warming. How do we change?

When we discovered that CO2 was going to be a problem in the fifties, we should have started getting off [fossil fuels], but we didn’t because we were misinformed, or because politicians were bribed, and since then we’ve been working toward targets that are in line with what the fossil fuel industry would want. For instance, in my world, the outdoor world, you could say, “let’s talk about recycled skis,” but that doesn’t really move the needle. Instead, we need to be publicly lobbying our peers and elected officials on climate.

What can someone like me, who isn’t part of a big business or advocacy group, do to move the needle?

My prescription is this: You get a six pack and you get a few smart friends, and you ask each other “Where do we have power?” You come up with an answer, then dismiss it if it’s not to scale.

Think about environmental activist Greta Thunberg, who said “I’m going to sit in this one spot for a year.” That helped. You have to just try some stuff. The question is really: Do we want to be citizens or not? Can you go to a town council meeting and talk about the planning and zoning board? You can’t just sign an online letter and call it good. You have to do real stuff and move your body and get out into society, instead of giving into the inclination to stay in or avoid confrontation.

That requires bandwidth, and there are people who don’t have that, and that’s OK too. Revolutions don’t come from 100 percent of the population mobilizing, it’s typically 4 to 9 percent, and that can make a difference.

Bandwidth, and who has the ability to act on climate, seems like a really big part of the conversation.

When climate is forcing you into survival mode, you don’t have the leisure that humans need to thrive. You can’t just be recovering from the last fire or flood all the time. This is environmentalism writ large right now. You think I have the luxury to care about climate? I can’t feed my family or pay my health care bills. This gets to the broader question of whether we’re actually taking care of each other, and we’re not.

The tension in the book is that the thing that could destroy us is also a fundamental opportunity for change as a society. How do you walk that line?

The cover of the book meant to express that. Like, “Damn, this thing is kind of fucked up, but it’s still beautiful.” I think about Tolkien’s idea of the long defeat, and how we’re in this long battle of good versus evil. We’re slogging through Mordor. I think this is humanity’s biggest project but we’re still making things better. It’s going to be uncomfortable and hard, but it can still be full of purpose and joy.

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For decades, American alpinist Kitty Calhoun made a name topping out on some of the world’s highest peaks, including the West Pillar of 27,766-foot Makalu in the Himalayas. But what stayed with her more than any summit view were the alarming effects of climate change.

At such elevations, she often noticed melting ice, a hindrance to her ascents. But in the high deserts of Utah, the repercussions were causing real daily struggles for those living on the Navajo Nation, something she became aware of while mentoring an Indigenous climber who’d grown up there.

For over a century, natural resources like oil, coal, and uranium extracted from Navajo land have powered the American West, yet approximately one-third of the Navajo Nation, roughly 13,500 families, live without power. That indignity on its own is hard to fathom, but climate change has also exacerbated the aridity and seasonal heat in this region, forcing families to endure more triple-digit days without respite.

With that in mind, last year Calhoun persuaded Utah-based Lion Energy to donate 35 solar-powered kits—lunch-box-size generators that can be charged in as little as four hours—and raised $32,500 to buy an additional 65 for families in one of the reservation’s most disadvantaged areas, remote Navajo Mountain. Equipped with 100-watt solar panels, a single kit can run a mini fridge for 16 hours, charge a laptop 11 times over, and last up to 20 years.

Calhoun then reached out to Norman Lameman, the Native founder of , a nonprofit devoted to preserving tribal values, to lead the distribution efforts. “I didn’t want to force kits on people,” Calhoun says. “If they were interested, Norman could explain how the technology worked in their language.”

Angelo Baca, a Navajo-Hopi distance runner and filmmaker, and Sahar Khadjenoury, a Navajo-Persian producer and director, documented the project using a grant Calhoun received from Protect Our Winters for a film called Navajo Solar Sunrise.

“It’s important for us to take care of people. From an Indigenous perspective, the people are part of the land,” Baca said. “It’s important to step away from extractive resources—our people are still dealing with the effects of uranium contamination on the reservation. And solar isn’t the end-all solution, but it’s an important first step.”

In October of 2023, the trio traveled with Lameman to oversee installation and document the myriad ways the kits can improve lives. Families were able to run fans when temperatures soared and refrigerate food, medication, and breast milk. They could rely on electric blankets and small space heaters to keep them warm in winter, and access the internet to apply for jobs, government programs, and educational opportunities. They could charge their phones. Before the kits, Calhoun says, many residents relied on car batteries to power such necessities.

“Living simply should not mean living in poverty,” she says.

To donate for more solar generators in the Four Corners region, .Ìę

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The camp chairs are set up. A cracked clipboard rests under my arm. I’m stuffed into my mom jeans. It’s showtime.

June gloom blankets Encinal Canyon in a lush mist. I could be in Narnia instead of Malibu, but I barely notice. My body stands in front of a marooned Airstream, waiting. But my mind is back home, wondering if my 14-month-old is napping as I review the research on my clipboard. Tonight I’ll camp in this patch of Eden with Shailene Woodley, the 33-year-old actor and environmentalist known for her lead roles in The Fault in Our Stars, the Divergent trilogy, and the series Big Little Lies, instead of sleeping at home with my daughter. It’s the first time I’ve been away from her overnight.

“There she is,” a member of our six-woman crew says. An electric sedan with a mint green surfboard on top crunches to a stop. A luminous creature in a pastel silk shirt emerges and wraps me in a hug. My mind freezes. My clipboard is blank on basic human greetings.

“I had to stop at REI and get a new sleeping pad,” Woodley says, rolling her eyes. “I left my old one with my ex.” The actress is no stranger to camping, and remarkably at home in the outdoors. From a young age, she’s felt a kinship with and responsibility toward the natural world. Her lifelong commitment to environmental work started when, as a freshman at Simi Valley High School, she rallied her fellow students to petition for a recycling program. Since then she’s become an outspoken advocate for the climate, working with various nonprofits and NGOs and participating in the Standing Rock protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline.

We sit under an ancient oak tree in collapsible chairs. If Woodley has a phone, I don’t see it. When I ask about it she says, “I guess I’m addicted to real interaction.” She glimpses mine and coos at the wallpaper photo of my baby. When I tell her I met the love of my life at 39 she says, “You give me hope!”

Woodley radiates something I can’t place. Youth and beauty? Sure. But that’s everywhere in Hollywood. Later, when I play back the recording of our conversation, I hear how rushed I sound, so determined to ask all the questions, to get somewhere. But she’s in no hurry. She’s right here.

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Molli Myers was pregnant with her firstborn when the salmon began to die. It was 2002, during the depths of a yearslong drought, and farmers far upstream of her community on the Yurok reservation in Northern California had pressured the George W. Bush administration to divert water from the Klamath River in Oregon to irrigate their fields. Water temperatures rose as the river slowed through the summer, and in September, Chinook salmon returning to spawn began to die, littering the banks with as many as 70,000 carcasses.

Two years later, with her young son in her lap, Myers testified in Orleans, California, before a panel of Federal Energy Regulatory Commission officials charged with renewing the operating licenses of four hydroelectric dams that had contributed to the fish kill. None of the panelists looked her in the eye as she described the structures as an existential threat to the river and the salmon that have sustained her Karuk people since time immemorial.

When the meeting ended, Myers joined a handful of Native people and friends around a bonfire by the river in Orleans to lick their wounds and vent their anger. “That was when we made the decision to dedicate ourselves to dam removal,” Myers recalls. “And that has been our lives.”

The Klamath River flows 263 miles from southern Oregon to far Northern California, through ancestral lands of the Klamath, Karuk, Hupa, Shasta, and Yurok, whose traditions and way of life grew around the river and the abundance it provided. The Klamath once teemed with salmon, but the dams, built between 1918 and 1964 without consulting the tribes, blocked the fish from critical spawning habitat on the upper river and its tributaries. The dams provided no drinking water and almost no flood control. Toxic algae bloomed in their reservoirs, and they accounted for less than 2 percent of the electricity generated by their owner, PacifiCorp. Still, taking them down would involve the largest dam-removal project in American history. The tribes would accept nothing less.

They organized protests at PacifiCorp’s Oregon headquarters, then traveled to Edinburgh, Scotland, to lobby the utility’s parent company, Scottish Power, which proceeded to sell PacifiCorp in 2006. The new owner was Berkshire Hathaway Energy, controlled by Warren Buffett, then the planet’s wealthiest man.

The coalition shifted their protests to Omaha, Nebraska, where Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholders meeting packs a 19,000-seat arena. In 2008, 23-year-old Karuk tribal member Chook-Chook Hillman waited in line all night, then sprinted for a microphone and the chance to question Buffett directly. As Hillman introduced himself in the Karuk language, a stunned hush fell over the crowd. Switching to English, he demanded Buffett sign an agreement to remove the dams as Georgiana Myers and Annelia Hillman of the Yurok tribe unfurled a banner proclaiming: BUFFETT’S KLAMATH DAMS = CULTURAL GENOCIDE.

“The world’s richest man doesn’t faze me at all, because in our culture I’m just as equal as any other being on the planet,” Chook-Chook Hillman recalls. “I got my moment and I took full advantage of it.” After two other Klamath River defenders spoke up, Buffett announced that he wouldn’t take any more questions about the dams, and security hustled the remaining activists out of the queue.

The protesters had made their point and could now engage Buffett’s people in a language they understood: the cost of adding fish ladders and bringing the dams up to spec for relicensing was more than it would cost to tear them down—and more than they’d ever earn back. The smart play for PacifiCorp was to walk away. Over the next 16 years, without easing the threat of direct action, the tribes worked with environmentalists, irrigators, commercial fishers, state and federal governments, and PacifiCorp itself to help the utility company do just that.

In 2010, nearly 50 parties signed a dam-removal settlement and an environmental-restoration agreement, only to watch them both die in Congress five years later. The tribes then took the lead in new talks, negotiating an amended agreement that didn’t require congressional approval. The accord formed the nonprofit Klamath River Renewal Corporation to manage the project, with the state of California contributing $250 million in dam-removal and remediation costs and PacifiCorp rate-payers covering the remaining $200 million.

The last major hurdle was approval by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the agency Molli Myers had testified to decades ago. In November 2022, as officials met in Washington, D.C., Myers joined friends by the river in Orleans, gathering around a Starlink connection to share the historic moment with their children, now grown, who’d witnessed the dam-removal fight their entire lives, and elders who thought they would never live to see it succeed. “We built a bonfire,” she says. “We pulled out all of our old banners from over the years, and we celebrated.”

Dam removal began the following spring and continued in earnest this year. The largest of the four structures, Iron Gate, stood 173 feet tall and 740 feet long. In May, excavators began reducing the earthen formation scoop by scoop, loading the soil into oversize trucks that would return it to the pit it was taken from decades ago. The same day, crews of young people walked the steep embankments, spreading native seeds as part of a habitat-restoration effort that will go on for years. By August, all four dams were gone, freeing the river to carry on the work of healing itself, and providing migrating salmon a clear route upstream for the first time in more than a century.

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