The North Face

Feb 22 | What are your #ClimateConfessions ?

By The North Face

 

 

At this year’s X Games in Aspen, The North Face and Protect Our Winters (POW) asked attendees for their “Climate Confessions” and to take the POW Seven Pledge.  Over 600 visitors to the North Face booth took the pledge.  POW and The North Face have also produced several short videos to distribute throughout their respective social networks and online communities to promote the POW Seven Pledge. 

The POW Seven is a list of seven important ways that individuals can fight climate change.  The list, compiled by some of the world’s foremost experts on climate change and sustainability, was created in response to a lack of credible, results-based action items and the need for individuals to become more directly involved in the fight against climate change.  Protect Our Winters is asking the snowsports community to take the POW Seven pledge, thereby committing to do each of these seven items on a regular basis.

Tell @thenorthface and @protectwinters your #ClimateConfessions on Facebook and Twitter, then take the pledge to make a change for the environment. Take the pledge using POW's Facebook app for an opportunity to win prizes from Protect Our Winters.

 

Feb 08 | Pete Athans: refuse, reduce, re-gift, reuse, repurpose, and recycle: all in a smart phone app!

By Athlete Parents

It all started at the beach, with my 4 and 6 year olds, as they were building a magic beach house on a beautiful Pacific Northwest beach. As they collected wood for their house, they started to notice the plastic. There was just as much plastic on the beach as driftwood. In fact, what they thought was wood often turned out to be long pieces of PVC pipe. We made a movie about our discovery and the resulting awareness-raising art that came out of it: http://teamcora.com/about/

 

Two years later, we’re working with a team of innovators to help solve this problem. We’re developing a smart phone app to help people re-think their stuff, step in to a more sustainable frame-of-mind, and get closer to zero waste. A zero waste lifestyle isn’t as hard to achieve as some might believe, and it has an immediate impact on the environment.

 

The aim of the CORA (which means circle in Tibetan) app is to help people positively change their habits, simplify their buying practices, and re-think their stuff. We’re pioneering new paths through our overwhelming material culture to help people pare down, avoid excessive packaging, and reduce the amount of waste we generate. I’d say it makes sense to take note from the lessons learned while on expedition: pare down so you tread lightly on the Earth. It’s more efficient. You’ll have less baggage, too.

 

CORA will be a free resource, providing great tips on how to refuse what you don’t need, reuse what you have, repurpose it into useful things, fix those items that are broken, or gift them to those who could use them. Most of what you don’t want can benefit those in need, or could even be repurposed by an enterprising Etsy artist or local business. These are the connections we’ve created, linking you and your neighbors to each other, keeping thousands of items out of our landfills.

 

How Does A Mobile App For Zero Waste Work?

Your broken ceramics may be a treasure to a nearby mosaic artist, or the woven plastic bag your cat’s food comes in is coveted by a small business that makes reusable bags. Don’t throw your hard-to-recycle ice trays and shower curtain rings away: your local humane society needs them. Turn your plastic mesh produce bag into a great pot-scrubber. You’ll never need to buy ziplock bags again if you learn the easy way to wash and dry them. The CORA app will help you see your stuff in new ways and connect you with neighbors near and far who could use what you’re trying to get rid of. We can also tell you exactly where just about anything can be recycled, so your waste footprint can get closer to zero.

 

If you want to start a small business that upcycles a certain material people normally throw away, we’ll connect you with folks happy to give you their unwanted stuff. Or, if you simply want to know where your nearest landfill is so you can trash your unwanted things, we’ll take you there, through images, video, and articles, so you’ll know exactly where your stuff ends up and how it gets there.

 

CORA Means Circle in Tibet

Imagine a world where all the waste loops in your community are connected to benefit everyone. We could stop the use of fossil fuels to make virgin plastic pellets that are used to make unnecessary new and single-use plastics. If we refuse those plastics, and reuse what we already have to make better products and benefit others, we might even make a dent in the amount of plastic pollution found in the environment. If, as NOAA claims, millions of pieces of plastic enter our oceans every day, we can each do something to stop the flow of plastics into our waters. Most of the plastics are unnecessary packaging or single-use items like straws, water bottles, plastic bags, and bottle caps. Mixed in with the common debris are items we find in our homes, cars and offices: pens, plant pots, tampon applicators, lip balm, yogurt containers, light switch covers, and baby binkys.

 

Your First Step: Help CORA

With your help, our CORA app can fill the gap and enlighten people across the nation. Please come learn more about CORA at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/464119894/cora-transform-your-trash-to-treasure. Help fund, with like-minded people, our effort to tackle the stuff of our lives, divert it, and prevent unnecessary new plastics from entering the oceans each day. In the meantime, you’ll feel good about reusing what you thought was trash, or passing your unwanted things on to those in need or someone who can transform it into a treasure. Spread the word and share our Kickstarter page on your Facebook page!

Jan 30 | TNF Sustainability ambassador james balog on the continued success of feature film chasing ice

By The North Face

Whew! The wild ride continues. “Chasing Ice” continues to show to sellout crowds and standing ovations. The insight into climate change provided by the film has been inspiring and uplifting for the audience—and for those of us in the field and creative teams, seeing our handiwork on the big screen is FANTASTIC!

As of today, the film has shown seven times, with one more screening tomorrow. New friends, passionate about the cause and the art, grow out of every presentation. At one special screening for 350 high students, a poll showed that essentially ALL of them left the auditorium with a profound understanding of how real climate change is.

Hollywood Reporter gave us a terrific, thoughtful, well-written  review: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/chasing-ice-sundance-film-review-284913.

 

Team members left to right: Adam LeWinter, Dr. Tad Pfeffer, James Balog (with one of our time-lapse camera boxes), film director Jeff Orlowski, Svavar Jonatonsson.

To learn more about The North Face's sustainability efforts and ambassador James Balog please visit http://expeditionsustainability.com/

Jan 27 | PRO SNOWSPORT ATHLETES VISIT SCHOOLS TO DISCUSS EFFECTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE

By The North Face

Nick Martini

Winter is finally kicking into gear but the effects of a shortened season have already taken a toll on snow-based economies across the country. The widespread lack of snow wreaked havoc on mountain town businesses and ski resorts that generate an estimated 50 percent of annual revenue during the Christmas, New Year’s and MLK holidays.

This week,  while Aspen hosts Winter X Games 16, Olympic and X Game medalists are speaking out on climate change and sharing their unique perspective on the economic, social and intangible values of winter with students at Colorado high schools as part of nonprofit Protect Our Winters’ Hot Planet/Cool Athletes program, in partnership with The North Face.

Hot Planet/Cool Athletes is a partnership between Protect Our Winters (POW), the environmental center point of the winter sports community, and Alliance for Climate Education (ACE), the national leader in high school climate education.  The program pairs famous pro snow sport athletes with ACE educators to deliver an award-winning multimedia assembly on climate science and real-world solutions. The assembly features athlete’s personal stories about climate change, specific local consequences related to lower snow levels and inspires students to take action against climate change.

Hot Planet/Cool Athletes is part of a host of special events happening in Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley high schools leading up to Winter X 16 in Aspen. During the four-days, Hot Planet/Cool Athletes is slated to reach 1600+ students. 

To help students create meaningful actions after each assembly, Bob Marley’s 1Love.org and POW will be providing starter grants to the Aspen-area students who submit results-based, sustainability ideas to POW.  Together, they’ll be awarding $250 per school to individuals and/or groups of students who submit their best ideas to POW by March 1st, 2012.

 “Part of POW’s mission is to make sure that the next generation is better equipped to address climate change. As athletes, we now have a relevant platform to reach young students and create a movement of passionate youth leaders,” said Jeremy Jones, POW’s Founder and professional snowboarder.

Since its launch last year at Winter X Games 15, Hot Planet/Cool Athletes assemblies have reached 10,000+ students at high schools in Colorado, Utah, California, Vermont, Massachusetts and Nevada.  With help from influential snow sport athletes, 

and partners such as The North Face, Clif Bard, Backcountry Magazine, The Quiksilver Foundation and 1Love.org, the assemblies have inspired students to lead environmental action teams that implement impactful climate-related projects in their schools and communities.

 

Jan 25 | James Balog :: "it looks like the world is hungry for a clear and compelling story about climate change"

By The North Face

 

It looks like the world is hungry for a clear and compelling story about climate change. 

 

"Chasing Ice," a 75-minute documentary about the Extreme Ice Survey, had its world premiere Monday night here at the Sundance Film Festival. The film reveals the immortal beauty of icy landscapes in Greenland, Alaska and Iceland at the same time it shows how fast they're being altered by climate change. 

 

27-year-old, first-time feature director Jeff Orlowski created the film. He is one incredibly tenacious, persevering guy--a truly extraordinary individual.

 

It was overwhelming...awe-inspiring...exhilarating...humbling to see and hear the passion in the audience's reaction. We had two standing ovations (Sundance regulars tell me that one standing ovation is rare and two are unprecedented). What a wild night! 

 

To give you a sense of the response, here are the very first press blurbs: 

 

"Chasing Ice is amazing. Definite Oscar contender for docs." Mina Hochberg / Outside Magazine & AM New York

 

“Beautiful and terrifying." Jad Yuan/New York magazine

 

“Amazing.  Wow. I'm so glad I came to this screening so I could hear the q and a.  It is very well done and powerful.” Jesse Hawthorne / San Francisco Bay Guardian

 

“It was really good. The debate about climate change is over.” Greg Reitman / The Environmentalist

 

“The doc really worked for me. It looks terrific and there's a solid character story as well.” Dan Feinberg / Hit Fix

 

“It is incredible.  It is such an important film.  I'm going to tell everyone about it.” Gilda Brasch/IDA

 

“An amazing film.” Kim Voynar/ Movie City News

 

One of Sundance's lead festival programmers told me "This is the climate change film we've all been waiting for."

 

Need I say more??!! 

 

More to follow in another day, as certain VERY interesting details unfold...

 

 

Nature photographer James Balog, left, and director Jeff Orlowski, from the documentary "Chasing Ice," pose for a portrait during the 2012 Sundance Film Festival on Sunday, Jan. 22, 2012, in Park City, Utah. (AP Photo/Victoria Will) 

 

Jan 16 | the north face sustainability ambassador james balog heads to sundance film festival!

By The North Face

An exciting new development in the life of the Extreme Ice Survey has just happened. The screening committee for the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, the world's premiere indie film event, has honored a new feature doc, "Chasing Ice," with a much-coveted slot at the festival. Created by first-time, 27-year-old director Jeff Orlowski, the film was one of 16 documentaries selected from the 9,000 entered in the competition. It focuses on the human drama behind our four-plus years of work documenting how climate change is causing the retreat of glaciers all around the world. There's a lot of adventure and psychodrama by way of delivering the climate change story in an engaging way. (BTW, the Everest IceCam project with Conrad Anker and The North Face unfortunately started too late for the video team that shot "Chasing Ice" to cover it. But we're getting killer material from those cameras—and you'll see more of it in the months to come.)  "Chasing Ice" will premiere at Sundance on January 23 and be screened almost every day for the next week.  We'll keep you posted.  Meanwhile, fingers crossed for good audience reaction in Utah!

 

 

Nov 29 | Expedition Sustainability

By The North Face

Today we issued our first public sustainability report.  The North Face sustainability report delivers a detailed roadmap of where we’ve been, where we are and where we’re heading on the journey to minimize our company’s environmental footprint.    

 

For 45 years, The North Face has been empowering people to explore the outdoors. This focus on the natural world has opened our eyes to the many challenges facing our planet. It’s not just our responsibility to ensure our products and business practices have the smallest possible impact on the environment — we strive to be a leader in meeting those challenges.   

We are very proud of the accomplishments we’ve made and recognize there are continued areas for improvement.  For example, in 2010 we made great progress on working with our suppliers around the bluesign® standard and we are on track to meet our goals for greenhouse gas reduction. As a global and growing brand, however, we can and will do more to expand our sustainability efforts across the world. 

The full report is easy to navigate and contains graphs and important data points as well as videos from our president, athletes and sustainability team.  You can view the details concerning our global goals and achievements in water, chemical, energy and waste reductions. This is just the first update on our progress; we remain committed to the challenge of seamlessly embedding our commitment to sustainability into every aspect of our business. 

Nov 23 | James Balog- Astounding Action in the Yukon

By The North Face

 

Yesterday, I was having breakfast with a distinguished glaciologist from the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Dr. Martin Sharp. He gave me some astounding beta about glaciers in the Yukon.  

 

If you ever fell under the spell of Jack London stories, sagas of the Klondike Gold Rush, or the TV show “Sergeant Preston of the Yukon,” you know that the Yukon is the epitome of the cold and frozen Canadian northlands. Not any more.

 

Martin and his colleague, Nick Barrand (who now works for the British Antarctic Survey), collected aerial photos of Yukon glaciers documented during the International Geophysical Year 1957-1958 and compared them to others produced during the International Polar Year in 2007-2009.

Here’s what they found:

 

1 glacier advanced.

523 glaciers disappeared.

876 glaciers retreated.

22% of the area covered by ice 50 years ago is now ice-free.

 

OMG!!! Even to me, living and breathing the glacier retreat story of our planet eight days a week, those kinds of numbers are incredible.

 

What happened??? Glaciers are great bermometers (my word, a combination of “barometer” and “thermometer”) of regional climate.

The northwestern part of our continent—Alaska, the Yukon, British Columbia—has warmed. In the past half century, winter temperatures in the Yukon are up 3.5ºF, and summer temperatures have risen nearly 2ºF. Snowfall is down and the freezing level has gone higher. So the ice has retreated.

Globally, says Sharp, all the mountain glaciers and icecaps (the sort of large-ish ice bodies found on the Alaska coast or Baffin Island) are losing about 450 billion tons of ice per year. That counts for about half of current, ongoing sea level rise. The enormous ice sheets of Greenland or Antarctica contribute the rest. By the time today’s schoolchildren retire in Baja or Florida, sea level will have risen at least a foot and a half. Three feet is a serious possibility; more is entirely conceivable.

 

Any mulehead can understand what the ice is saying: the climate is changing. It isn’t a computer model or a projection. It’s real. It’s measurable. And it’s astounding. Tell your climate skeptic friends next time you get a chance.

 

For more information, see N.E. Barrand and M.J. Sharp, “Sustained rapid shrinkage of Yukon glaciers since the 1957–1958 International Geophysical Year.” GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 37, L07501, doi:10.1029/2009GL042030, 2010

 

 

 

Oct 10 | James Balog - "Will the U.S ever take a stand for Climate Change?"

By The North Face

 

I’ve been thinking a lot  about how—or whether—the U.S. can possibly break its gridlock and move forward on environmental sustainability, particularly in dealing with climate change. Despair and cynicism come easily on this subject; I keep trying to stay in a place of willed optimism, but it isn’t always easy.

 

As it happens, I attended a small luncheon today (hosted by the University of Colorado, Denver) in honor of the United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon.  I asked him what one thing the U.S. can realistically do to break America’s political paralysis and financial stasis. His answer was not as specific as what I had hoped for, but inspiring anyway:

 

“The U.S., by any standard, is the richest, the strongest leader in the world. Everybody’s looking to the U.S…. The U.S. counts…  You have the financial capacity, the technology, the brains. You have so much capacity!”

 

Frustrated at how little we seem to have accomplished? Keep thinking about what he said. We do have tremendous capability and capacity. We can deal with the challenges in front of us. We must take one step, then another, then another—it’s the same as climbing any mountain—and keep going until we reach the summit.

 

Oct 03 | James Balog - The Aftermath

By The North Face

In January, 2005, I stepped off a plane in the city of Banda Aceh, Indonesia. The famous earthquake of December 26, 2004, magnitude 9.3, had been centered 155 miles directly offshore, at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. In and around Banda Aceh, previously home to 219,000 people, the quake, and the mega-tsunami that followed, killed 167,000 (61,000 others died in Thailand, India and Sri Lanka). 

Why visit such a place? I have long had a profound interest in the great collisions of people and nature, whether it is people pushing at nature or nature pushing back at people. The fifty- to hundred-foot-high wave that hit Banda Aceh would almost certainly be the biggest tsunami the world would experience in my lifetime. I wanted to put it into images. 

Why visit such a place? I have long had a profound interest in the great collisions of people and nature, whether it is people pushing at nature or nature pushing back at people. The fifty- to hundred-foot-high wave that hit Banda Aceh would almost certainly be the biggest tsunami the world would experience in my lifetime. I wanted to put it into images.

 

Seeing what a tsunami could do was one of the most gut-wrenching experiences of my entire life. Surreal. Horrific. Apocalyptic. A vision of what the end of the world would be like.

Photography let me engage deeply with the scenes—yet, paradoxically, I was also hiding behind the camera, as many war photographers do, using it as a shield to protect my heart and mind from what was around me. There were moments of tender compassion, too, when a volunteer search-and-rescue team, comprised of college students, found a live sea turtle miles from the ocean and returned her, still alive, to the sea. 

Back in America, post-traumatic stress syndrome beat me down. A filmstrip seemed to scroll inside my forehead, playing images of horror day and night. A ski mountaineering trip with two long-time buddies, Michael Yaron and Jim Walsh, gave me a chance to talk it out and begin returning to the “real” world.

 

I’ve always wanted to re-visit Banda Aceh. What were my friends there—brave, determined, heroic, spiritual people—doing? How was the landscape regenerating? What would the photos of a world re-born look like? But with the Extreme Ice Survey occupying 95% of my life, there hasn’t been time or money to go back and see it all again.

 

In October, 2010, after giving a speech at the National Geographic Young Explorer Grant Workshop at the University of Colorado (sponsored in part by The North Face), I was approached by Becca Skinner and Chris Michael. These two University of Wyoming sophomores wanted to know if I had any ideas for an environmental photography project they could do.