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Group
working for environment
By Tara Nelson
This
year, millions of gallons of rain and melted snow from
the Mt. Baker foothills will flow to Puget Sound through
Whatcom County rivers and streams, picking up pesticides,
fertilizers and chemicals, as well as oil and grease from
roads, highways and parking lots along the way.
Foothills resident Abby McKinley thinks she has a solution
to that problem. McKinley, a member of the Northwest Straits
chapter of the Surfrider Foundation, a nonprofit group that
focuses on water quality issues, heads up the chapter’s
Snowrider project, a campaign designed to draw attention
to the area’s hydrological cycles – especially
in the region’s ski areas.
Last year, along with a team of volunteers, McKinley set
up a booth at Mt. Baker ski area’s annual legendary
banked slalom, with displays of trash items suspended in
large blocks of ice. Their message, “Garbage melts,
trash doesn’t.”
The strategy is twofold: reduce upstream waste through educational
outreach and set the platform for a new environmental policy
by reaching a younger demographic – namely, the thousands
of skiers and snowboarders who frequent Mt. Baker during
the winter months.
Seeing the connection
McKinley, who grew up skiing and snowboarding in the Blue
Mountains in eastern Washington, said she originally became
interested in Surfrider during a surfing trip with a friend
to the Mission Vellejo area of California. So when McKinley
moved to the Deming area in 2000, she wanted a way to mix
her passion for snow sports with her environmental ideals.
“The beaches were appalling; very disgusting,” she
said. “There was garbage everywhere. You’d fall
off your surfboard and you’d land on a plastic bag.
That was the initiator. I’m also an avid snowboarder
and I thought how does this connect?”
A few years later, McKinley became involved in the NW Straits
chapter of Surfrider, eventually taking over the responsibilities
of the chapter’s Snowrider project in 2004 when Jen
Prince, a friend and chapter chair of the NW Straits, a surfer
and avid boarder who stepped down to pursue her career as
a middle school educator.
Growing numbers
What started as a grassroots effort by a group of four Malibu,
California surfers in 1984 has become a national and international
movement to protect the health and accessibility of the world’s
beaches. Earlier this year, Surfrider counted more than 50,000
active members nation-wide and has more than 60 national
chapters and five international affiliates.
In addition, the project – although initially conceived
to give snowboarders and skiers a vehicle for environmental
activism – has attracted a wider range of participants
and activists than once expected, including kayakers, canoeists,
back-country adventurers and others who appreciate a clean
watershed system.
Cole Kozloff, 27, of One Mountain Clothing, a collaboration
of artists and craftspeople from the Mt. Baker foothills
area, said he likes the idea of the Surfrider foundation
starting such a project close to home. “I think Baker
is an ideal spot to illustrate what the Snowrider project
seems to be all about,” he said. “That is the
hydrologic cycle from the snow pack down to the ocean. The
Nooksack river starts at Baker and ends right where we live
in Bellingham Bay. The whole cycle is there.”
Seattle Surfrider chapter member Mike McCann, agreed.“The
biggest market we can hit is the ski industry because it
has the largest impact on the watershed,” McCann said. “Those
young people are guiding the industry already with their
dollars, and in another 10 or 15 years, who will be working
in and running the industry. If you can show those companies
their customers don’t like where there doing, they
will change.”
Kozloff said One Mountain has supported Snowrider through
direct sponsorship of their organization and projects, including
their annual Surfrider’s Cleanwater Classic surfing
competition, and participating in the organization’s
retail program that offers Surfrider members 10 percent discounts
on their retail items.
Making the triple bottom line
Mike Wheeler, who founded the Northwest Straits chapter of
the Surfrider Foundation in Bellingham in 1998 and the Seattle
Surfrider chapter’s Snowrider project in 2000, said
by forming cooperative relationships with businesses – especially
ski areas – those businesses can often save money,
reduce waste and create a greener image for themselves.
Wheeler, who graduated from Western Washington University
and moved to the Seattle area in 2000, eventually became
the environmental programs coordinator for The Summit at
Snoqualmie ski area after forging a relationship with them
in 2001. His idea was to challenge the ski area to be leaner
and greener.
To Wheeler’s surprise, The Summit at Snoqualmie offered
him a position as the new environmental programs coordinator,
for the ski area. In the first year, he launched a recycling
effort for all the base areas’ cardboard, paper, glass,
tin and aluminum refuse and was instrumental in getting King
County Solid Waste Department to set up a community recycling
center at the summit. In addition, the ski area started recycling
batteries, fluorescent light bulbs, restaurant grease, initiated
a carpool and created water retention ponds to filter out
sediments and oil form parking lots as the snow melts, he
said.
Wheeler said the partnership resulted in a “win-win
situation,” and after his salary and expenses, the
ski area saved $2,000 in offsetting costs for dump fees.
“In Seattle, it’s worked really well to have
Snoqualmie as a partner kind of taking advantage of the ideal
location that ski resorts play in the watersheds because
they’re ideal environments for teaching about watersheds
and the impacts of how we live. So it’s been a great
partnership.”
Challenges
But the NW Straits Snowrider project is still struggling
to get off the ground — namely because of the difficulty
teaching about systems that are less than tangible, especially
when making a difference means influencing peoples’ dominant
thought processes. “Teaching about watersheds is a
difficult thing in terms of actions,” Miller said. “We’re
really looking to create a change of behavior based upon
what they know about the environment they live in. And that
could mean a lot of different things to a lot of people.”
Another challenge has been finding partners for the Snowrider
project in the Mt. Baker area, McKinley said. Last year,
for example, the Mt. Baker Ski Area allowed Surfrider to
have a booth at their annual Legendary Banked Slalom event
but so far, McKinley said they have not expressed much interest
in forming a cooperative with Snowrider. Still, she said
she is hopeful.
“I do want to be partners with the ski area and I want
to show them that this can help them by showing that they
support an environmental group,” she said. “It
could also help us because they can reach a demographic that
may not have reached before.”
McKinley said her biggest goal, however, is reaching people
in the community and recruiting new volunteers. “A
lot of it comes down to getting individuals on a personal
level to change their habits and to be more educated about
things like the synthetic chemicals that have been put into
laundry detergent, dish soaps, hand soaps, shampoos and conditioners,” she
said. “My goal first and foremost, however, is to try
to get more people up here involved because I need more help.
Volunteers are the ones that make things happen big or little
time. Aything is appreciated.”
The NW Straits chapter of the Surfrider Foundation meets
at 7 p.m., the fourth Monday of each month, at Fantasia Coffeehouse
in Bellingham. For more information, visit www.surfrider.org/nws.
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