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a pink background with temperature guagues going up and some upside-down mountains.
People who spend time in the mountains can see the snow melting before their eyes (Image: Tom Hadley, with additional design by The Spinoff)

SocietySeptember 19, 2024

The snow is melting – so what are skiers and mountaineers doing about it?

a pink background with temperature guagues going up and some upside-down mountains.
People who spend time in the mountains can see the snow melting before their eyes (Image: Tom Hadley, with additional design by The Spinoff)

Trampers, skiers and mountaineers are among the first to see the climate changing, but are they making their own changes in response?

Tom Hadley and his partner Tōrea knew exactly where they wanted to go. They had pored over maps, called people for information about the incredibly remote area they were visiting, and plotted routes over toothy ridges and into valleys carved out by glaciers. But the reality wasn’t quite what they were expecting. 

Days into a trip in Te Rua-o-te-moko (Fiordland) at the start of this year, they had to reroute a previously simple descent. “We had some photos we had seen from three or four years earlier at the same time of year, showing a ramp of snow that would let us descend easily,” Hadley, a long-time fan of trips deep in the mountains, says. “But the snow was gone, leaving a challenging system of bluffs we couldn’t get down.” They ended up taking the long way around.

a white many with a silly expression on his face stands on a very muddy, rocky bit of land with a retreating tongue of glacier in background
Tom Hadley near the base of Te moeka o Tuawe (the Fox Glacier); glacial retreat makes travel to remote places much harder. (Image: courtesy Tom Hadley)

For people who spend time outdoors, there’s no way to ignore that a warming climate is happening now. If you go skiing every winter, you might notice more rocks and tussocks poking up through thinning snow cover. If you’re climbing mountains, you might have to change access routes as crevasses yawn open on melting glaciers. As Hadley found, if you’re plotting complex trans-alpine routes, you can’t rely on the topographic maps being accurate, as reducing snow leaves cliffs where there had once been frozen water. Everywhere in the world, high-altitude mountain areas are warming much faster than the global average. 

At the same time, outdoor activities can generate lots of emissions, especially in the transport required to get to these areas. Activities like skiing and multi-day tramping are often undertaken by people with higher incomes (as research commissioned by DOC in 2020 has found) – people who could skip out on the melting frontcountry to go heliskiing or take a trip to Canada to do some ice climbing instead. So what is New Zealand’s outdoor community saying – and doing – about climate change? 

“We go to these places because they’re beautiful and special – global warming puts everything we love about the mountains, from snow cover to the health of rivers, at risk,” says Megan Dimozantos, president of the Federated Mountain Clubs. It’s something she’s observed herself: on a 2021 trip to the Snow White glacier deep in the Olivine Wilderness Area, she got stuck with her companions after discovering that a photo she’d been sent of the glacier was now 500 metres of bare rock. 

two pictures of the same alley , one with a fat healthy glacier, one with a small thin glacier
Right, the photo Dimozantos had been sent of the Snow White glacier in the 1990s. Left, the same glacier, a fraction of its previous size, in 2021. (Image: supplied)

The business of skiing in a warming world

Snow sports are another particularly obvious place where the reality of a warming world is visible. North Island skiing has a limited lifespan at the current rate of warming; three particularly warm years pushed the previous owners of the Ruapehu commercial skifields into voluntary administration, before the government bailed the company out for $7m. 

Without government money, but even more affected, are the small club fields on the slopes of the volcanoes. Tukino on Ruapehu and Awakino on Taranaki didn’t have enough snow to run their full tows this year. Porters Pass skifield in Canterbury has already closed for the season; so has the Rainbow Ski Area near Nelson, Temple Basin and Mt Cheeseman ski field. “The snowline retreat is real,” reads a post on Craigieburn ski field’s Facebook page, where only two of the tows are operating due to reduced snow. 

a sunny day on a snow field with lots of tussock protruding above the snow pack
Tussock appearing through the snow at Canterbury’s Broken River skifield in early September 2024 (Image: Shanti Mathias)

The bigger, more southern skifields have fared better. Treble Cone received 48cm of snow in the Otago storm last week; the field above the sparkling Lake Wānaka should be open well into the school holidays. “In the short term, it’s the increased volatility of weather that concerns us – we had a drought, nearly a month without snow, then a big dump at the start of July and August. Little and often is what we’d prefer!” says Ewan Mackie, Treble Cone’s manager and the sustainability lead at parent tourism country Real NZ, which also owns the Cardrona skifield. Climate change will cause extreme winds more often in winter; a snow field can’t open if everyone on the chairlifts is going to be rattled in the icy blasts. “We’ve had to be flexible with our operations,” Mackie says. If it’s windy, for instance, they might close the upper basin. 

As businesses, skifields are particularly exposed to the existential risk of warmer and less predictable weather, making advocating for climate change a good business strategy. The skiing industry in the US has lost more than $5 billion to climate change in the last two decades, and ski destination Switzerland will have 80 fewer snow days per year by 2071.

On the Cardrona website (also owned by Real NZ), it’s already possible to toggle between a “summer” and “winter” mode. In a single click, images of billowing snow powder melt away, replaced by mountain bikes, go-karts and dry hills, like watching what climate change is doing at an ultra-fast speed. It’s a move attempted by ski fields around the world as an attempt to diversify their businesses in a warming world. 

a white woman with blonde hair you can only see the lower part of her face because there is so much snow in the background and she is wearing reflective goggles and a light blue jacket
Advocate Marian Krogh has made skiing her life, and she sees how it flows through the rest of the economy. (Image: supplied)

Cold winters with steady snowfall are important for lots of reasons, say Marian Krogh– including economic ones. She works as a physio: less skiing and snow means less work in the clinic. (Arguably a positive from ACC’s perspective). Physios with less work spend less money in the cafe’s. Hotels are unfilled and hire fewer workers. “Every day it rains, not snows, there is less work; the outdoor community is a canary in the coalmine, it’s really impacting our livelihood.” Krogh lived seasonally in Colorado for years as a ski guide, where she saw the work of Protect Our Winters (POW), an organisation founded by snowboarder Jeremy Jones.

POW does climate advocacy in different countries, with a focus on snow sports.  “My flatmates and I would sit on the couch feeling sad about the climate – I wanted to do something, so I started the POW New Zealand chapter,” Krogh says. She’s the organisations’ lead advocate in New Zealand. 

How do you reduce emissions when you use high-carbon transport? 

Cardrona and Treble Cone have undertaken detailed carbon accounting over the last half decade. Skifields are particularly high emission businesses. “We rely on fossil fuel powered technology,” Mackie says. “Fuel combustion is the biggest source of emissions by far, we groom the slopes with snow groomers, people, goods, materials all have to come up the mountain in vehicles.” The field also relies partially on diesel fuel to supplement the electricity it gets from the power grid, to fuel the snow makers that supplement the increasingly unpredictable cold stuff from the sky. 

Ironically, efforts to reduce the overall emissions of the field can make it directly responsible for more carbon dioxide: the fields run free buses from the base of the mountain to reduce the number of car trips. By the conventions of emissions accounting, this actually increases the amount of “scope one” emissions the company is directly responsible for. “But we choose a holistic understanding of climate impacts, so we can’t just wash our hands of it.” They’ve also banned non-recyclable waste on the mountain, as emissions from waste was a place the field could have direct impact.

a white man holding a slightly startled looking hawk and wearing a treble cone tshirt
Ewan Mackie with a kārearea, part of Real NZ’s work to restore biodiversity in the Cardrona Valley (Image: supplied)

Mackie can’t ignore that most people get to Queenstown to go skiing in a plane, especially the “high value” international tourists. The business model of New Zealand’s skifields is basically built on this assumption; without people flying from Auckland and Australia during the pandemic, all major skifields lost millions of dollars

Tramping clubs, which are more local, have more opportunities to change the transport emissions of their clubs. The FMCs member clubs, which include caving, canyoning, paragliding, packrafting, skiing, mountaineering as well as tramping clubs, have started efforts through their “recreation transition” campaign. “We’ve started doing ridesharing or shuttling together, so people don’t individually drive to road ends,” Dimozantos says. This could have other benefits by lowering costs: the expense of transport is a major barrier to New Zealanders taking part in outdoor activities. 

The whitewater clubs are experimenting with doing shuttles past rapids on bike or foot, rather than using cars; collapsible, lightweight packrafts mean that exciting trips down rivers don’t depend on helicopter drop-offs. The group’s “love our huts” campaign also carries out work maintaining for huts and tracks that would otherwise be done by DOC with a helicopter. 

a woman in a red jacket with a patch of snow in the background
Megan Dizamantos spends time in the hills as a tramper and with Search and Rescue. She’s seen the mountains change dramatically as the climate warms. (Image: supplied)

So… what are outdoor businesses and communities doing about climate change?

While climate change is clearly an existential threat to the snow sports industry, it might seem surprising that more organisations haven’t signed up to advocacy like Protect Our Winters. “I wonder if the personality of someone who spends a lot of time outside is not the personality of someone who spends a lot of time engaging in the civic sense – ‘I want to be by myself in the hills, not in the city talking to people’,” says Krogh. Politicians are happy to talk about how Aotearoa’s remarkable natural landscape is a draw for tourists or an asset to protect – but the people leading climate groups don’t often talk about their love of snowy adventures when they’re giving speeches or presenting to select committee. 

Krogh thinks this is partially because people are afraid of being seen as hypocrites. “I hear ‘skiing is elitist, when you stop heli-skiing we’ll talk to you, your sport has such a high carbon footprint so you can’t talk’.” Lots of that criticism is deserved – especially because the people who can afford to go skiing (and particularly heli-skiing) are the people who can also afford to lower their personal carbon footprints by taking fewer flights and driving less. The comments under a recent short film POW in the US made to address the fear of hypocrisy make it clear that many people think that individual emissions are still worth reducing while advocating for big-picture change. “It feels really disingenuous to just hand wave any modicum of personal responsibility so long as it’s fun for you,” one commenter says, with dozens echoing similar sentiments. 

the sun setting over the mountains with a big field of snow and a figure appropriately decked out in warm and waterproof clothing walking through some curned up snow
The snow that remains is exquisitely beautiful – which makes protecting it essential. (Image: courtesy Tom Hadley, on the Fox Glacier)

But to Krogh, the focus on systemic change, not individually shaming people flying around the world to go skiing, is essential. “Often the biggest impact is combining our voices – we advocate for strong policies that mean everyone has choices to take public transport, or bike – or drive if they need to.” POW has run several “biking to the skifield” days, and is advocating for a public bus between Wānaka and Queenstown. RealNZ is supportive “It would be fabulous to get off a plane in Queenstown, catch a bus to Wānaka and then to the skifield, use public transport in and around Queenstown and Wānaka, do a whole trip without needing a car,” Mackie says. 

POW has also encouraged skifields to submit on government bills connected to climate change. Mackie acknowledges that Real NZ doesn’t have a set advocacy policy to submit on every single climate-change-related bill they can – but they’re spoken for a number of bills and local government initiatives; the container reuse scheme, public transport in Queenstown, electrification, and more. “As Cardrona and Treble Cone we have a large voice – we’ve used it well, but we could scale that up more, and talk about all the work we still have to do,” he says. 

Being outside is about what’s worth protecting 

There’s a tendency Mackie has noticed in his sustainability work at RealNZ, where the focus is all about reducing emissions: doing less harm (but still doing harm) rather than actually improving the environment. Seeing thousands of native trees slowly growing on Treble Cone’s slopes, with more to come, makes him hopeful. “We don’t plant trees because we’re going to offset emissions, we’re not into that,” Mackie says in his gentle Scottish accent. “Regenerating biodiversity is good for the whenua immediately, it’s not just about getting bummed out because you’ve driven up to go skiing for the day.”

This emotional element is key to the future of spending time in the outdoors, even in a warming world. Hadley has spent years returning to Fiordland, both to go tramping and to do conservation work. Seeing the face of mountains he knows change as snow melts carries lots of grief. “It’s not a human relationship, but it feels like grief, to see these places you love changing,” he says. 

The reality of the climate crisis means that more of his friends are planning trips in Fiordland, rather than further north; a warming planet shapes how he imagines future trips too. “Sometimes I’ll be in a group planning a trip, and we’ll avoid certain places, knowing the travel would be difficult, knowing you’ll feel sad because it isn’t the same.” He hopes that adapting to climate change will be an invitation for trampers and climbers to think more about how they treat the natural world, to engage with mana whenua. “We have to think broadly about what it means to go on trips in the mountains,” he says. 

a snowy day in the mountains that makes you wish you had crampons on and were in the big wide world not looking at a screen; the sky is clear and blue, little cloaks of cloud are draped around the maunga, and a figure walks through a snow field in the sunshine
High in the Fox Glacier/ Te Moeka o Tuawe, the ice is a reminder of what climate action seeks to protect (Image courtesy Tom Hadley)

That thought of the future is what Mackie holds on to, too, although his hopes are person shaped just as often as mountain shaped. “I have a 20-month-old son, I want him to be skiing and snowboarding in 20 years like I did,” Mackie says. “It sounds cheesy, talking about tamariki and future generations – but I think it really plays for people.” 

Joy, outdoor enthusiasts say, is important. “I went skiing this morning, it was so fun, the mountains were beautiful, everyone was hooting and hollering with delight,” Krogh says. Spending time outside reminds her what she’s advocating for. 

Preserving recreational trips to the mountains isn’t the most important reason to do everything possible to limit the extent of climate change and the damage that is already happening. A warming planet impacts every part of life: millions of homes have been and will be destroyed, millions of people need to find new work, thousands of species have been or will become extinct, just to list a few of the impacts. 

Instead, recreation is a starting place: a reminder of how, in a warming world, you can’t run to the mountains to escape the consequences of human damage. “People look at recreation as a selfish thing to do, but it aligns with what we hold dear as a society: wellbeing, appreciation for te taiao, health. Look after nature and nature looks after you – we need to develop that connection,” Dimozantos says. That doesn’t have to look like skiing or tramping: these sports remain expensive, and hurtling downhill with long sticks attached to your feet or carrying heavy packs through snowy forests will never suit everyone. But everyone engages with the outdoors in some way, which means we all have something to lose as the climate heats up. 

People who regularly visit snowy, high-altitude places see these changes already. Ideally, the awe of wild mountains is something they can bring back with them. Hadley has noticed that over years of trips, he’s started to see nature differently. He no longer wonders “how can nature serve my enjoyment” but remembers that the environment is worth protecting in and of itself. “Physical landscapes and ecosystems have their own value, that’s what you learn from time in these environments,” he says. “I come back from these remote places with a different way of thinking about [environmental] crises, a new understanding of why every action is important.”

Family First chief executive Bob McCoskrie, railing against a Victoria University study on paedophilia.
Family First chief executive Bob McCoskrie, railing against a Victoria University study on paedophilia.

OPINIONSocietySeptember 17, 2024

The many complex truths within the paedophilia study saga

Family First chief executive Bob McCoskrie, railing against a Victoria University study on paedophilia.
Family First chief executive Bob McCoskrie, railing against a Victoria University study on paedophilia.

Is Bob McCoskrie a righteous moral crusader? Deeply full of shit? Both? 

You may have missed the ongoing dust-up about a Victoria University study concerning paedophilia. The study explores “stigma and attitudes towards people with a sexual attraction to children”, according to a poster seeking participants, and aims to “understand societal views on paedophilia and was approved by its ethic processes,” deputy vice-chancellor Professor Margaret Hyland told The Post. The study requires participants to complete two surveys and four educational modules.

After being alerted to the poster, Family First chief executive Bob McCoskrie wrote a post on Substack criticising the study, then enrolled himself in it and exposed its contents on his video blog. He argued that the study “rebrands paedophiles as victims” and “normalises sexual attraction to children” through a process of “indoctrination”, “manipulation” and “linguistic gymnastics”. 

To support this claim, he singles out the following passages from the study’s education modules, among others: “Having a sexual attraction to children is not something that is chosen or controlled” and “Having a sexual attraction to children doesn’t mean anything other than just that – they have a sexual attraction to children.” (His full beef is set out here.) 

“The university stands behind [the study] and the researchers involved,” Hyland said.

In the spirit of our brand-new format, here are the complex and competing truths within the Victoria Uni paedophilia study saga:

Truth #1: Globally and in New Zealand, rates of child sex abuse are stubbornly high. More than one in four females (26%) and one in nine males (11%) said they experienced sexual abuse before age 15 in the 2019 New Zealand Family Violence Survey.

Truth #2: Our current approach to dealing with the problem of child sex abuse, centred on punishment rather than prevention and shrouded in shame, secrecy and denial, is not working. Any academic inquiry aimed at alleviating or solving the problem is an unalloyed good. 

Truth #3: In some corners of academia, including within the Victoria University study, there is a concerted effort to reduce the stigma associated with paedophilic desire, and to make it clearer that there is a difference between having a sexual attraction to children and acting on a sexual attraction to children. To do this, academics like US sociologist Allyn Walker propose we replace “paedophile” with language like “person with a sexual attraction to children” and “minor-attracted person (MAP)”. 

Truth #4: Critics like Bob McCoskrie argue that these terms sanitise and normalise paedophilia and child sex abuse. McCoskrie points out that some academics have argued that paedophilia is a sexual “orientation” or “preference” like homosexuality; that paedophilia is not a disorder and should be removed from the DSM5; that adults who have sexual contact with children and teenagers are not necessarily harming or abusing those children/teenagers; and that any harm resulting from adult-child sexual contact is because of the stigma surrounding the act, not the act itself.

Some of these academics are very fringe, others are not: Alfred Kinsey, one of the founders of the field of sexology, argued that children have a sexuality which is not harmed when it is used for adult gratification; Gayle Rubin, a pioneering feminist and queer theorist, claimed that “boy-lovers”, ie “men who love underaged youth”, are unfairly persecuted; and Michel Foucault, the influential philosopher, called the idea that a child cannot consent to sex with an adult “intolerable”

In other words, some academics want to not only reduce stigma against paedophilic sexual desire, but also against child sex offending

Truth #5: Many of the above cases are historic, and today child sex abuse apologists are likely a tiny minority of academics – the small number of galaxy-brained deviants and cranks you’ll reliably find in any large body of people – and do not represent a widespread conspiracy within academia, “elite circles” or elsewhere to normalise or promote the sexual abuse of children. These days, anyone making these arguments is often immediately fired, rejected and (sorry) “cancelled”. 

Truth #6: In the introduction to the first module, the Victoria University study says, “Some people with this attraction will sexually abuse a child, but not all will – however, bringing attention to this fact does not mean that this attraction should be normalised or that it doesn’t cause harm, nor that sexual abuse isn’t a serious and damaging experience. The researchers reject any attempt to normalise sexual attraction to children and any sexually abusive behaviours that have resulted from this attraction and intend only to educate our community about the attraction and encourage more open and frank discussions on the topic, in order to support help-seeking behaviours and ultimately reduce sexual abuse towards children in our society.”

Contents of the Victoria University study shared by Bob McCoskrie on his YouTube channel (underlining is McCoskrie’s).

Truth #7: It’s possible to draw a bright line between non-offending paedophiles and child sex offenders. 

Truth #8: Binaries – victim/offender, desire/action – are tricky and slippery. 

Truth #9: As a conservative estimate, 3-5% of the adult male population in New Zealand have experienced feelings of sexual attraction to a minor, clinical psychologist Sarah Christofferson told the Guardian

Truth #10: There is some evidence that shame and stigma prevent paedophiles from admitting to their desires and seeking help, driving them to online hinterlands to discuss their paedophilic desire only with people who share it, and experts who have studied this phenomenon claim it can make children less safe. 

Truth #11: Shame and stigma are amorphous, complex forces driving social behaviour in complicated, unclear ways. They are clearly strong forces preventing child sex offenders from acting in the open, and therefore prevent an untold and unmeasurable amount of abuse. How do you remove the stigma from paedophilic desire without softening the stigma attached to paedophilic action? It might not be possible. 

Truth #12: When academics talk about removing the stigma associated with paedophilic desire, I think of Chesterton’s Fence: the idea that, before you remove a fence (ie do away with a tradition, norm or taboo), you need to be sure you understand why it was built in the first place. Are we absolutely certain this is a fence we want to get rid of?

Truth #13: Child sex abuse causes real, serious, lasting harm for victims. 

Truth #14: There should be absolutely no stigma associated with being a victim of child sex abuse. Yet, victims often suffer from such stigma, both external and internal – it seems to bleed over from the stigma associated with the act itself, and can make healing for victims very difficult. 

Truth #15: Even among people who think about sexuality for a living, there are many competing theories about sexual desire, how it is formed, and how malleable and mimetic it might be – and the same is true for other murky epistemological terrains like shame, morality and free will. Therefore, we should consider claims that a sexual attraction to children “is not controllable”, as the Victoria University study states, and that “there is no morality or immorality attached to attraction to anyone, because no one can control who they’re attracted to at all”, as sociologist Allyn Walker said about paedophiles in 2021, as contestable.

Truth #16: It is difficult to solve a problem if you can’t talk about it. 

Truth #17: Some slopes really are slippery, and in this one woman’s opinion, certain debates we should just close the lid on forever. Do racial IQ gaps exist, were there upsides to fascism, is it ever OK to fuck kids: a lot of those galaxy-brained deviants I mentioned earlier are waiting with bated breath to argue the affirmative case, with chilling logic. They’re hard to spot in the wild, for obvious reasons, but you can glimpse them in “MAP” forums or in this video (from 12:07 on). They’ll prattle until the cows come home about “rights infringement”, pederasty in ancient Greece and boys from the Sambia tribe. That’s the Pandora’s box that opens when academics start “just asking questions” about paedophilia. 

Truth #18: No arguments of this nature appear in the Victoria University study materials presented by McCoskrie, or sighted by me (I am midway through participating in the study at the time of writing, to check the wording for myself.) 

Truth #19: The existence of child sex abuse apologists shouldn’t preclude open discussion on how to reduce child sex offending, including in academia. The creepy little tail doesn’t wag the dog.

Truth #20: Despite occasional media dust-ups on this topic, there is a robust consensus today, spanning the farthest reaches of the culture-war divide, that child sex abuse is always wrong; that any sexual contact between an adult and a child constitutes child sex abuse; that it causes real, serious, lasting harm for victims; and that paedophiles should be supported to ensure that their sexual desire towards children never manifests in sexual abuse.

Truth #21: I feel sick and vexed thinking about this, but also a little hopeful. The vast, vast majority of us seem to be on the same page.