When you’re a ten-time Big Mountain Rider of the Year, who’s explored some of the world’s most remote mountains – including a 21,000ft first descent in the Himalayas – you wouldn’t necessarily list spending every winter for more than 30 years in the mountains as your greatest achievement. But such is life for Jeremy Jones, O’Neill rider and founder of Protect Our Winters – an environmental organisation he set up in 2007 after years of seeing snow conditions deteriorate.
Today, with the US government ignoring climate change to an alarming degree, and snow conditions more erratic and threatening than ever before, he says it’s time for us to stop waiting and start acting.
The interview
It all started one January about 15 years ago when it started to rain in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. At first, people were saying, "Wow, this has never happened before," but quickly it started to seem more like a trend. A couple of years later when I was competing in Europe, we visited the iconic Vallée Blanche in Chamonix, France. There, you ride down the glacier and then hike back up to a chairlift at the bottom. Each time I went back, that hike became a little bit longer, until I was saying, "Whoa, we’re walking a lot further than we were three years ago". The reason for that is simple: the glacier is receding. It’s going one way – and that way is the wrong way.
William Curley
I first came to climate change selfishly because I love the winter. The final straw, the thing that made me set up Protect Our Winters, was seeing a resort in British Columbia close because the snow levels were too high. I thought: if these people can lose their resort – their livelihood – in just 30 years, then what am I going to see in the next 20 or 30 years? But I soon realised the least of our worries will be if it no longer snows. If that happens, it has a much more far-reaching effect beyond just the skiier, snowboarder or the resort.
William Curley
The biggest hurdle for us is that, in the US, more than half of our elected officials think climate change is a hoax. It’s devastating. The first thing we need to do is to all get on board and say "this is a problem"; to realise that ignoring climate change is a dead-end street; to start making our voices heard in smaller, non-presidential votes, and to then start transitioning to a clean-energy society. Small steps like adopting a diet that includes less red meat and using less energy matter, too, but without getting world leaders on board, everyone deciding not to use plastic water bottles isn’t going to get us where we need to get.
William Curley
People in winter sports are like the canaries in a coal mine. They’re the people who are in the mountains all the time. There aren’t many mountain guides in Chamonix – people who’ve spent their whole lives in the mountains – who’d say they’ve not seen extreme changes to winter in their lifetimes. But it’s more than that: you need money to go out in the mountains, and a lot people in power love to ski and snowboard. Those are the people who need to act on climate change, as they have the power to make a real difference.
William Curley
Every time you buy a product, it’s a vote with your money. It’s important to understand what a brand stands for, or where the product comes from, and decide if that purchase is a vote you want to make. Lots of brands are doing great things, but you can’t do it all at once. My new collection with O’Neill has brought in recycled materials: we were able to do that because it’s a smaller part of the line, but in doing so, we’re bringing that into broader aspects of the business.
William Curley
Reducing your personal footprint is vital. There’s no golden process, but there’s always room to improve, in all aspects of life. What’s also important is that we all get out there and experience the mountains and nature. Without doing that, we’re not going to find the inspiration to want to protect it.
William Curley
For more information visitprotectourwinters.org; shop the Jeremy Jones collection atoneill.com
