Ashley Bowen lives and breathes snowboarding. Though the air outside her Santa Monica office may be a muggy 90 degrees and just a five minute drive from the beach, Bowen’s work and play life revolve around carving the slopes on snowcapped mountains.
Bowen runs digital marketing for IMG’s action sports division, which means that if Lindsey Vonn posts a tweet or Kazu Kokubo wins a medal, Bowen knows about it. But her interest in snowboarding has little to do with staying connected, and everything to do with going off the grid to unwind.
“I would equate it to riding a motorcycle, where you’re just surrounded by nature,” says Bowen, describing snowboarding as a cathartic and freeing activity. “It is probably one of the greatest feelings in the world.”
She’s not the only one who feels that way. In California alone, millions of skiers and snowboarders flock to various resorts from early fall to as late as memorial day. Mammoth Mountain, just one of California’s many large scale resorts, gets over one million visitors each year. Aside from a new profile picture and a weekend away, sports like snowboarding give users like Bowen an appreciation for nature and conservation that is quite unique.
“You’re just on the mountain,” Bowen says, “and nothing’s holding you back.”
But mountain-goers are quickly realizing that their pastime has an impact: ski resorts cost millions to maintain; battling warm winters requires tons of fake snow; and all the necessary winter gear that sometimes spends more time in a garage than on the powder is often just one springcleaning weekend away from prematurely ending up in a landfill.
For Bowen, one option to ensure that her childhood snowboard doesn’t retire too early is selling to a corporation like Play It Again Sports. Play It Again Sports buys and sells secondhand sports equipment, preventing products from being thrown away and allowing younger, less experienced athletes an affordable way to start out.
In addition to finding new ways to prevent the premature disposal of sporting equipment like snowboards, some companies are partnering with environmental nonprofits to help develop greener products as well as engage consumers about climate change.
“A lot of the snowboard companies have made that [sustainability] a big priority for them,” Bowen said, “I think that’s sort of engrained in people naturally who participate in the sport.”
Photo: Phoebe Leila Barghouty
One of these environmentalist groups is called Protect Our Winters. Partnered with big companies like Burton and professional snowboarders and skiers around the world, the organization prides itself on connecting athleticism with activism. Their goal is to raise awareness about the impacts of climate change, especially on climatedependent sports like snowboarding.
Chris Steinkamp, executive director of Protect Our Winters, said the driving force behind the organization’s mission is the realization that his and founder Jeremy Jones’ kids may not get to experience the same winters their parents grew up with.
“At this point, we’re on track to leave them a very different planet,” Steinkamp says, “I want to be able to tell them that we absolutely did everything we could to prevent that from happening.”
In order to work towards this goal, Protect Our Winters implements education programs, social media campaigns, and corporate partnerships to raise hype among younger generations. Emphasizing the dire need for conservation through the frame of exciting action sports like snowboarding helps the organization get kids excited about their relationships with their environment.
“Our sports are intrinsically tied to the environment,” Steinkamp says. “We can’t do what we love to do without a healthy and stable environment and ecosystem.”
For users like Bowen and Steinkamp, snowboarding is a way of getting in touch with nature in a unique and intimate way. Wanting to share that feeling with future generations is an inevitable goal, but it’s one that Steinkamp think will help inspire change.
“We absolutely have to care about the environment,” Steinkamp says. “It’s just part of our sport and our lives, probably more than any other group of people fighting climate change.”
Photo: Phoebe Leila Barghouty
For more from Phoebe Leila Barghouty, be sure to read “Taking Plastics Out of the Current,” a story about sustainability in surfing.
