THE SKI STORE AND THE REAL COST OF FUN
A 17-year-old friend convinced me to take her to a ski store on a Saturday
afternoon right before the supposed start of the supposed ski season. I guess
it's been 20 years since I was last in a ski store.
This one was a happy place, full of torchy colors and young, energetic people.
It was packed, but my companion was blonde and tall and slim and beautiful, so
three young, energetic salesmen buzzed right up to us.
During the next hour, as she questioned and pondered and tried on and rejected
and enthused and racked up many bucks on her papa's credit card, I absorbed the
modern world of skiing.
"Are you an aggressive skier?" they asked, and when she said she liked to go
really fast, they led her off to the aggressive skis, the aggressive boots, the
aggressive bindings. These are made of supermetals and superplastics and
superfabrics, bonded in layers with superglues. "Imagine all the toxics," I
thought. "And that layered stuff can never be recycled. And it will last in a
landfill for a million years."
I must have been the only person in the store with such thoughts. My companion
had long conversations with the salesmen about shaped skis, cutting edges on
sharp turns and what an extra quarter-inch of height in the bindings does for
maneuverability. She picked out equipment of steel gray and flaming red.
I pondered, "What if all this care and design, this cleverness, these exotic
materials, this money went to ending hunger? Or solar collectors? What if
these great young people poured their boundless energy into reforestation or
insulating the houses of the poor or at least the kind of skiing where you have
to haul yourself to the top of the hill?"
I shared none of these dark thoughts with my bright friend. But all the next
week, a week in December during which the temperature in New England hovered
between 40 and 60 and the ski areas couldn't even make artificial snow, all
through that strangely balmy week I was in a bah! humbug! mood. "They load
their pricey skis into their gas-guzzling vans," I harrumphed to myself. "They
drive to mountains covered with effluent from diesel-belching,
stream-destroying snow guns. They use still more fossil fuel to pull
themselves uphill so they can slide down. Then they're surprised when global
warming comes along."
Finally I turned to some wise 23-year-olds for enlightenment. "Why is this
high-tech, high-expense, high-emission kind of skiing fun?" I asked them. "Or,
no, cancel that, I can see why it's fun. But why isn't cross-country skiing
just as much fun? Or snowball fights or skating or snowshoeing or any of the
less destructive ways to play outside in the winter?"
"Because they're not IN," my friends explained patiently. "Because you can't
compare your flashy equipment with your friends' flashy equipment. Because the
good parties are on the ski slopes. Because no one sells designer clothes for
snowshoeing. Because it's fun to go really fast."
I listened, and then I dug out my copy of Brave New World (written in 1932 by
Aldous Huxley) and found the place where the Director of Hatcheries describes
why his society programs children to hate nature.
"'Primroses and landscapes,' he pointed out, 'have one grave defect: they are
gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to
abolish the love of nature ... but not the tendency to consume transport. For
of course it was essential that they should keep on going to the country, even
though they hated it. The problem was to find an economically sounder reason
for consuming transport than a mere affection for primroses and landscapes. It
was duly found.'"
"'We condition the masses to hate the country,' concluded the Director. 'But,
simultaneously we condition them to love all country sports. At the same time
we see to it that all country sports shall entail the use of elaborate
apparatus. So that they consume manufactured articles as well as
transport....'"
Old Aldous got our number 66 years ago, didn't he? But he did not foresee the
possibility of environmental backlash.
It's easy to label environmentalists as anti-fun grinches. It would be easy to
label my young friend as shallow or gullible. Neither she nor I deserve those
labels. There is nothing I want more for her than that she should have fun.
And she would never deliberately hurt other people or the earth. She is just
doing what I did when I was 17, going out with friends, having fun. In my day
we had lots of fun without much in the way of fossil fuel, fancy equipment, or
credit cards. But the economy had not yet perfected the art of conditioning us
to buy elaborate apparatus and consume transport.
She's not to blame. If blame is useful here, it should be directed toward an
amorphous system that charges her papa a high price, but gives neither him nor
her any sense of real, full costs.
And I'm not a killjoy. I've just been educated to see the whole system, to see
how those real, full costs fall upon the air and the waters and the land and
the climate in ways that will ruin the very fun that is causing the damage in
the first place. And I'm old enough to know that there are far less costly,
far more sustainable kinds of joy and fun.
(Donella H. Meadows is an adjunct professor of environmental studies at
Dartmouth College.)
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Wednesday, December 16, 1998
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