Snowboarding Can Teach Us How to Be Green—Daily Journal of Commerce

Seattle is such a great place to live and work, especially right now — it’s snow season! This is especially exciting for me, because I love to snowboard. I know we have a bad rap; crazy speed, rude passing habits, and yes, we do scrape the snow right off the slope.

But that is a superficial evaluation of snowboarders, because we have a code to our craft. There are some guiding principles that really good snowboarders always follow:

• First, always spot your line and look where you want to go. Never look at the trees, look at the gaps! Because if you look right at something bad while flying down the slope, it’s a guarantee that’s where your board will go!
• Second, know what you are about and always stay on the edge that leads you there. If you’re not on an edge, you’re going to end up flat on your butt.
• Last, if you don’t know the terrain, set up your board with your feet ducked out. That way, if you get into to trouble you can jump and ride switch — reverse your direction without reversing your board! Throw a turn! Shred it!

It’s an easy code: Line, edge, shred!

Sustainability imperatives

Wouldn’t it be great if we had a code like that for sustainable development? I think about little codes like that a lot. Sometimes you can borrow codes one realm and use them in another. And it seems like we really need a code right now. Think about some of the recent trends we have all heard about:

• For the first time in human history we are beyond peak oil
• Saudi Arabia is our biggest wheat export market, and our biggest oil import market
• China has surpassed the U.S. in oil use for the first time
• Over 90 percent of all large ocean predators are fished out
• For the first time in human history food and biofuel compete for land use
• Over half the world’s population will experience water shortages in their lifetimes
• The last 10 years are the warmest decade in human history
• In 2004, the U.S. saw four of the 10 most costly hurricanes ever, and 2005 saw Katrina

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