Dolores LaChapelle and recreation ethics
Last week I spent several days skiing with old friends near Silverton, Colorado. It snowed every day we were there, the Precambrian crenelations of the northern San Juans fading in and out of sight as squall after squall moved up the valley. At the tail end of a dry few months in the Southwest, it was a welcome blast of winter, with good company, in a beautiful place.
Being back in Silverton for the first time in a few years reminded me of a quote by the late Dolores LaChapelle, a long-time Silverton resident, pioneering backcountry skier, and influential figure in the deep ecology movement of the 80s and 90s:
Just before he died, Gregory Bateson said the biggest task ahead is reinserting humanity back into nature. That’s not going to happen through philosophy or science. It happens through direct experiences where you know you are part of nature with no questions asked.
Long before I heard of any of the concepts [deep ecology] we’re talking about, I was experiencing them while skiing and mountain climbing. For years I skied deep powder and had come to know the bliss of interacting with snow, gravity, and humans in a group. It was an experience of ritual long before I had any words for it…Humans get a chance to move like this together only rarely. Like the flock of wild geese Barry Lopez describes at Tule Lake, we were each part of the group yet also part of something larger (p. 163)
Any skier is likely to nod with recognition here—it’s a simple enough idea, and taps into why the sport has such broad appeal—but since skiing struggles with self-reflection and has an underdeveloped literature, it’s always worth noting when someone says something smart about it.
I highlight this quote now, however, because revisiting it helped clarify something for me about the relationship between recreation and environmentalism. Which is that there is a gap between advocacy work engaging the outdoor recreation world with environmental issues, and an environmental ethics that could help guide that engagement and explain why it is meaningful. This gap probably explains the apparent paradox of why people concerned with environmental issues are disproportionately likely to enjoy participating in outdoor recreation, but the opposite is not true—i.e., participating in outdoor recreation doesn’t predict whether you’re likely to be an environmentalist.
The gap is present on a structural level. On the one hand, think tanks like Chicago’s Center for Humans and Nature are hard at work developing a modern ethics for how we should relate to the “more-than-human” world, but seem largely divorced from the outdoor recreation boom embodied by Sprinter vans and Bozangeles. On the other hand, advocacy groups like Protect Our Winters (POW) and Outdoor Alliance (OA) are doing good work to incorporate this demographic into a broader political coalition concerned with climate change and public lands issues, but often lean into a language of naked self-interest to do so—POW’s homepage, for instance, includes a banner that reads “PROTECT YOUR POWDER STASH: Wherever you shred, extreme weather and warming winters are shortening your seasons”.
This approach is understandable and effective—naked self-interest is a remarkably powerful motivator, and our national fleet of Sprinter owners should certainly be separated from their money—but it strikes a profoundly different tone than LaChapelle’s meditation on why skiing breaks down an artificial line between humans and nature, despite their shared heritage in the simple pleasure of sliding on snow. I’ll admit some of this is aesthetics, but I can’t help but wish POW and OA would push their membership to consider outdoor recreation as something more complicated than a threatened birthright.
What might a new environmental ethics of outdoor recreation actually look like? As Brian Calvert has written, it probably means abandoning culture war battles between non-motorized and motorized users in favor of the broader recognition that recreation of any flavor can be extractive. And it probably would not include the dated, appropriative New Age trappings present in much of LaChapelle’s writing. But it might invoke some of her ideas of ritual and connection—that part of the joy and elation of skiing is not merely adrenaline, but the strengthened bonds among humans and between humans and the environment that come with direct experiences; with daily practice. With these bonds comes obligations.