Case study: Protect Our Winters (POW)
Protect Our Winters (POW) is a grassroots movement with its initial foundation in 2007 in the USA. Its history (see following quote) reminds us about the “victim” status of tourism and/or outdoor recreation and how it may motivate individuals to act on the climate problem, even if it would require considering tourism as both “part of the problem” and “part of the solution” (Aall, 2014).
In 2007, pro snowboarder Jeremy Jones saw that more and more resorts he’d always counted on for good riding were closed due to lack of snow. Something was clearly going on, and he felt the need to act. But he couldn’t find any organizations focused on mobilizing the snowsports community on climate - there was a gap between the impacts that climate change was already having on our great escapes, and organized action to address it.
So Jeremy founded Protect Our Winters.
(POW, 2020a)
Ski tourism is the fust and the most climate change-affected tourism type (Scott, Hall, & Gossliug. 2012), and a plethora of studies (Demiroglu, Dannevig, & Aall. 2013; Steiger, Scott, Abegg, Pous, & Aall, 2019) have assessed the mostly negative impacts on ski destinations and areas around the world. To no surprise, a high-risk perception and actual observation, and perhaps high expectations on efficacy (Roser-Renouf, Maibach, Leiserowitz, & Zhao, 2014), have triggered climate change activism among the ski tourism industry and the community. Adaptation efforts, such as snowmaking, have already been put in place by the industry, but also collective, albeit voluntary, mitigation action has become common among members of the National Ski Areas Association in the USA. Likewise, similar initiatives have come into existence in the European Alps, especially through leadership of the International Commission for the Protection of the Alps
(CIPRA) (Demiroglu & Sahin, 2015). and farther projects, such as Smart Altitude supported by the European Regional Development Fund (Polderman et al., 2020), are promoting energy efficiency and transition (but being limited to ski area operations are missing the major emitter - the transit space).
Nordic Europe is one cradle of skiing with traditions and artefacts dating back millennia. For centuries, skiing has been a major object of transport, combat and hunting, but also a leisure activity for sports and recreation, especially from the nineteenth century onwards. Accelerated by post-WWII developments, skiing has become one of the most iconic objects of mass tourism consumption in both its Nordic roots and elsewhere, including but not limited to established destinations such as in the Alps, North America and Japan, and emerging ones in Russia, China and Turkey (Demiroglu, 2014; Demiroglu, Lundmark, & Stromgren. 2019). Vanat (2020) reports that around 135 million people engage in snow sports worldwide. Sweden, Norway and Finland are home to more than 500 downhill ski areas, and national participation in skiing is among the highest in the world. Iceland and Greenland also offer few local and exotic ski areas, whereas Demnark is mainly a skier generator to its Nordic neighbors and elsewhere (Demiroglu, 2014; Demiroglu et al., 2019, 2020; Vanat, 2020).
Vanat (2020) notes that 20% of some 2,000 ski resorts in the world attract at least 100,000 skier visits per year each and thereby represent 80% of the market in total. Such industrial clusters receive criticism for monopolization and urbanization of mountain landscapes to the “Aspen effect”, where the local and working populations become displaced due to increasing prices, further contributing to transport congestion (Clifford, 2002; Stoddart. 2012; Lasanta, Beltran, & Vaccaro, 2013; Park & Pellow, 2013). The documentary film Resorting to Madness (Coldstream Creative, 2006) tells of the negative societal and environmental impacts of North America’s large ski corporations’ business models based on aggressive, continuous growth goals. Somewhat similar corporatization and resortification patterns are also found in Nordic Europe, especially following the growing dominance of some companies in Swedish and Norwegian markets since the 1990s (Demiroglu et al., 2019, 2020).
Contrary to neoliberal business practices, environmental and climate activism from the ski community has also been on the rise in Nordic Europe (Demiroglu & Sahin. 2015). Dining 2008-2012, the Norwegian Ski and Biathlon Federations as well as the Ski Association ran the “White Winter” program to communicate then- environmental and climatic guidelines with their 216,000 members registered in some 1.200 clubs. While its outcomes were meant to institute permanent measures, they have rather been put on the shelf, but other initiatives such as supporting research and development for sustainable snowmaking have been on the agenda (Ski Sport, 2019). In Sweden, the Save Our Snow (SOS) organization has initiated climate awareness and called for increased activism in the industry and among skiers. Tire SOS, founded in 2014, was also the antecedent of POW's Sweden branch founded in 2016 (POW Sweden. 2020a). In fact, the international extension of the US-based POW (2020b) to Nordic Europe included Norway in 2013 (POW Norge, 2020a) and Finland in 2015 (POW Finland, 2020a).
As of mid-2020, the US-based parent accounts of POW on Facebook and Instagram had 111,500 and 209,000 followers, respectively. Along with its chapters in Canada, the Alps (France-Switzerland-Austria-Germany), the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Nordic Europe, POW now can claim to be in the midst of a spectrum between the locally engaged grassroots activism organizations and the globally institutionalized mainstream (Salazar, 1996). However, for POW, holding on to its grassroots character is critical as, at different regional scales, it needs to deal with different perspectives and challenges. For example, while in the USA the mam agenda may be geared towards lobbying against a federal government in denial of anthropogenic climate change, in the Nordics and other regions where the climate crisis is relatively much better acknowledged at the political levels, the main concern could be about the "how” of transformation. We briefly examine the plans and activities of POW’s Nordic chapters, based on their web and social media conununications and in a Nordic context of traditional values connected to environmentalism, sports (the “idrett/idrott” philosophy) (Lund. 2007) and outdoor life, i.e. “friluftsliv” (Aall, 2014), and any efficacy attributed to or anticipated for such activist and lobbyist efforts. In doing so, we also try to identify what sustainability transition discorrrses the Nordic POW narratives are heading.
In 2019, all of the eight European chapters of POW assembled in POW Europe to develop a common strategic plan (POW Europe, 2020a), similar to bitt differentiated from its US version (POW. 2019a). This four-year roadmap (2020-2023) identified the three mam goals as “inspiration and engagement”, "mobilization” and "leverage”. These goals are connected to different strategies, tactics and actions, with some country-specific tasks, and depart from POW’s mam framework called the "Theory of Change”. We briefly summarize these concepts and practices as follows, taking account of the similarities and differences among the Nordic and other contexts.
