On the World
I
2020
I
Opinion
I Won't Let Trump Bully Our Mountains
If you see something you know isn't right, you don't hide and cower. You stand up and demand change.
I've been an activist since I was eight years old. I grew up in Minnesota, a kid of Polish descent with a funny-sounding name, and other kids teased me for it. I could sit there and take it, or I could stand up. I chose to stand up, and I have been doing it ever since.
The reflex came first. The causes came later, and they came from wherever I was standing at the time. In my twenties it was the mountains, because that was where my whole life had gone. When I became a climber and a guide, I became an advocate for the outdoors too, because you end up fighting for the places you are lucky enough to spend your life in.
“In order to show up on our home turf, we also have to show up to the world.”
Ice is where I first saw the climate change. Perched on a frozen sheet with an ax and crampons, I watched the melt swing harder year to year, the winters shorten, the freeze turn unpredictable. You do not read about it in a report. You feel it under your tools. And once you have felt it, standing by is not an option.
Then Irenna and Kaz were born, and the whole thing became a question about them. They are going to spend their lives putting back together what my generation broke. I was raised knowing that civic engagement is the price of wanting the world to change, and I am not going to teach my kids that lesson by hiding from it. So I wrote this, out loud and under my own name.
The politics of the moment are in the piece. The reason underneath it has not changed since I was eight.
