A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it

It takes a lot to get me to read a piece about skiing. Like many who didn’t grow up around the sport, I’ve always regarded ski culture with a wariness bordering on resentment.

But I have to admit: I found Eric Margolis’s piece about what climate change may do to skiing, and how the ski industry is responding, fascinating. As the Winter Olympics continue this week, the women’s skiing competition airing on NBC tonight at 9:30 Eastern, it’s a timely moment to take a closer look at the article, published Monday.

Eric writes that we may not have too many good seasons left:

The American West has … been hit hard, with the mountains there losing 20 percent of their snowpack since the 1970s. By the end of the century, the Rockies, the Sierra Nevada, and the Cascades could stand to lose another 50 percent. Mario Molina, executive director at nonprofit climate advocacy group Protect Our Winters, based in Boulder, said these changes are already apparent. “What we see is the unpredictability of the winter season across the country. We’re no longer able to rely on the onset of winter toward the end of November,” said Molina.

Snow, and its absence, is going to be one of the most obvious symbols of global warming in the coming decades. And so another thing Eric focuses on is how snow-lovers are learning to balance appreciating the moment and fighting for change.

That’s a theme a lot of TNR contributors have pointed to over the past few years. Reading Eric’s piece, I thought of Aaron Regunberg’s article on child-rearing during the climate crisis: “Of all the disastrous lessons a parent could transmit to a child born in 2021,” Regunberg wrote, “teaching them to avoid the light that exists now because of the darkness that may be coming in the future must rank among the very worst.”

I thought of Liza Featherstone’s essay about climate anxiety: “The way out of this confusion is neither feel-good solutionism nor submitting to the apocalypse,” she wrote.

And I thought of Audrey Gray’s report from Line 3 in Minnesota, where an activist enjoying the Willow River despite pipeline construction spoke about this kind of balance: “I acknowledge what you are doing here on this site, I see you, and I can be present with the beauty of what’s around me.”

Fighting climate change effectively, without becoming overwhelmed, is tricky. As the first Winter Olympics with no natural snow continues, that’s something a lot of viewers may be starting to appreciate.

—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor

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