Forget new Year’s resolutions that will fall by the wayside by the time February rolls around. Instead, Protect Our Winters (POW) is inviting you to join its 12-month Climate Challenge.
POW athlete Greg Hill is leading the campaign to help outdoor enthusiasts make changes to their lives in 2021.
“This year-long campaign invites you to make real changes to your lifestyle, rewire your habits and decrease your carbon footprint through committing to a new challenge each month of 2021,” Hill said in a release.
Participants sign up online and receive a monthly challenge along with activities to complete it. Once a month, Hill will host Zoom après for questions, discussions, and guest speakers.
At the end of each month, participants can submit a short reflection exercise for a chance to win monthly prizes from Arc’teryx or Suunto.
Locally, Mike Douglas, board chair for POW Canada, is taking part and hoping other Whistlerites will join in.
“I think the biggest thing about this is to raise awareness of what the issues are,” Douglas said. “Where is your carbon footprint? What are things you can do? Those are the questions we get through POW. What can we do?”
For his part, Douglas is expecting that April’s “say no to single-use plastics” month will be the most challenging in his household.
“I tried a couple of years ago,” he said. “Some friends of mine started plastic-free Fridays and I found it next to impossible. It meant I didn’t buy anything that day, but I bought it the next day, so it felt silly.”
Still, it highlighted for him the importance of change at higher business and policy level.
“I think as long as people are going to want to drink drinks and eat things, if it comes from plastic packaging we’re never going to solve the problem,” he said.
That’s part of the value of taking part in the 12-month challenge, he added. It will help individuals learn more about where they can do better.
November’s challenge of “nothing new November” could also be particularly eye opening for Whistlerites buying their new ski season gear.
“The way I like to look at that is focusing on quality,” Douglas said. “Because I have items in my closet that are 10, 15 years old. Even though they might have cost twice as much, I’m using them and we’re stopping that process.”
Douglas said he’s hopeful Whistler can be a leader when it comes to climate change and moving towards green solutions.
“People who generally go out in the outdoors will care about the outdoors and the natural world,” he said. “It’s never been more clear what needs to be done on a big scale than in this year 2020. The first thing people pick on with me, as a professional skier and filmmaker, is how did you get to Europe last month? Who are you to tell us to reduce consumption? The fact is I haven’t been on an airplane since Feb. 2 and carbon emissions have gone up. We need to get action happening on a larger scale.”
The first challenge kicks off in January with “re-use, reduce, recycle, re-learn.” To sign up, visit protectourwinters.ca/the-12-month-challenge.
