Summary: This EcoPerspective takes a critical look at the indirect effects of outdoor recreation on the environment. Large numbers of people are inspired through recreation and related activities to protect the wild and untrammeled places left in the world. But recreation, in itself, has its own environmental consequences. The desire alone to protect these natural playgrounds does very little to address the greater environmental harm that results from work and other day-to-day activities.

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By Scott Lake

The tiny plastic shavings became a thick, suffocating dust, and settled on any available surface. Soon, a thin layer of bizarre, multicolored sawdust covered everything. It left a strange, greasy residue that not even the best dish soap would cut through. The place was a mess. And still the sharp plastic dust kept collecting. It scratched the inside of our throats and plugged our noses. We put up with it. In the early days of the company, everyone was expected to make sacrifices. Generally, this meant long hours and unhealthy working conditions. The plastic dust was just the latest in a long series of environmental challenges that we—as the physical backbone of a struggling small business—had to put up with. Before the dust, I spent hours breaking up chalk, hunched over a fifty-gallon barrel breathing in a different type of suffocating dust. There were no sick days. If you wanted to keep you job, you did not complain. The worst thing any of us could do, as employees, was to make things more difficult for management. Rock climbing, it turns out, is a tough, messy business.

Our company was founded and operated by two men who really enjoyed climbing. They had decided, some years ago, that they wanted to start a climbing company, so they rented space in an old warehouse and began making climbing equipment. We catered to an odd subculture within rock climbing called bouldering. Boulderers—as those who practice bouldering call themselves—do not use ropes. They climb short, relatively technical bits of rock close to the ground. With some exceptions, they rarely climb high enough to risk serious injury. Bouldering tends to be more social than other kinds of climbing. It’s also more accessible than roped climbing, since it requires less gear, and you don’t have to learn how to belay.

Boulderers often fall. To protect themselves, they place pads on the ground below the rocks they climb. The company that I worked for made these pads. In the beginning, I spent most of my days cutting fabric and foam. But soon, we diversified. We began making larger pads and flooring systems for indoor climbing gyms. Later, we made the plastic handholds that indoor gyms bolt onto their walls. The plastic dust came from the handholds. Making holds is a messy process that involves a lot of chemistry and a belt sander. We also dealt in large volumes of other potentially toxic substances, including foam, vinyl, acetone, and many types of glue. We produced a lot of waste; the dumpster in the front parking lot filled up every couple of days. As for the rainbow-colored plastic sawdust, we swept it up and threw it in the dumpster with everything else. Many of those shavings no doubt made it to the river that ran behind the warehouse.

Knowing what I know now, I would hesitate to call bouldering an environmentally friendly activity. Our manufacturing business certainly was not. I think our bosses would have gladly dumped our toxic garbage in the river, if they were not so afraid of getting caught. Most of the people I worked with would have called themselves environmentalists, but they managed to suspend their environmental sympathies between 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. There was work to be done. Our production schedule tolerated only minimal delays on account of sickness and injury; it certainly did not have room for environmental concerns.

Too often, the environment takes on tertiary importance, circumscribed by the persistent demands of our daily lives. When work calls, the earth can wait; even among climbers who look to natural environments for inspiration. Such an approach trivializes the natural world and erodes our connections to it. As historian Richard White warned, we must “come to terms with our work.” We must “pursue the implications of our labor and our bodies in the natural world.” We are not separate from nature; we are part of it. Nature is not just a place we visit in our free time. Everything we do—especially our work—affects the environmental resources on which we depend. White agued that if we fail to acknowledge our “self-deception,” we will “turn [wild] lands into a public playground. We will . . . imagine nature as . . . a paradise where we leave work behind.” I submit that this has already happened. At the climbing company—which shall remain nameless—we sullied our workspace and then drove miles to climb in remote locations.

The question going forward, then, whether the current alliance of recreation and environmentalism makes sense. I believe the answer depends on whether climbers, and others who play in the outdoors, are willing to acknowledge the true environmental costs of their actions. All of us—even those who go on foot into the wild, pick up after ourselves, and take only pictures—must understand that we alter the places we visit. Sometimes, as is the case with bouldering, we leave permanent reminders of our presence. In other cases—as with the manufacturing of climbing gear—we have indirect, but severe effects. I am not saying we should stop recreating, or stay out of the wilderness. But we need to discard the hypocrisy of claiming that we represent a higher, or more forgivable, use of nature’s abundance. The fact that we tread more lightly on our playground does not change the fact that we consider it a playground. Nor does it excuse the indirect consequences of our activities—plastic dust and all.

Scott Lake is a second-year student at Vermont Law School. He will graduate in Spring 2015 with JD and MELP degrees. He is also VJEL’s incoming Senior Article Editor. Before coming to Vermont Law School, Scott lived in Boise, Idaho, where he worked strange, low-paying jobs with peculiar people and played a lot of guitar. He also worked summers as a wildland firefighter with the U.S. Forest Service. He vehemently insists that Idaho has more to offer than potatoes, but so far, we don’t believe him. After graduation, he plans to practice public interest environmental law in the Pacific Northwest, where he hopes to protect wilderness and wildlife from pollution, exploitation, and the Idaho legislature.

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