‘Delay is the new denial’: Mountain communities want to take the lead on combating climate change
The third year of the climate solutions summit seeks to bring education, collaboration and inspiration around climate action
Ali Longwell/Vail Daily
VAIL — “We have to shift the energy here,” said Vail Mayor Kim Langmaid on Wednesday as she welcomed over 500 representatives from over 40 global mountain communities to the Mountain Towns 2030 climate solutions summit.
“I’m a third-generation Vail kid, so I’ve seen so many changes here in Vail, and I want to see some more, and I want to see this kind of change here, I want to see more climate action,” Langmaid said. “We need to change our systems and work together.”
Langmaid, alongside Eagle County Commissioner Matt Scherr and Avon Mayor Amy Phillips, kicked off the summit — now in its third year — at The Hythe in Vail.
On Wednesday and Thursday, attendees — which represent resorts, governments, nonprofits and businesses — will have an opportunity to hear from climate leaders, participate in workshops as well as share ideas and knowledge.
The goal of the summit, according to Andy Beerman, a founder of the summit who also serves on its board, is to “bring like-minded mountain communities and resorts together.”
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“We wanted to share ideas, to build collective courage and to set ambitious goals,” Beerman said of the event’s start. “I think many of us have done that since then. And hopefully, you will leave this summit inspired by some of our great speakers with some great tools.”
The 2023 summit includes presentations from former Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, who currently serves as the director for Colorado State University’s Center of the New Energy Economy, and KC Becker, regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency. There is also a closing event with Patagonia President Jenna Johnson and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee.
There are also panel discussions with the Mountain Collaborative for Climate Action — a coalition that includes Vail Resorts, Boyne Resorts, Alterra Mountain Company and POWDR — with mountain mayors — including Eagle’s Mayor Scott Turnipseed, and more.
Eagle County’s municipalities, businesses and nonprofits are engaged directly in the conversations, hosting numerous workshops on waste diversion, building codes, sustainable tourism, land use planning, electrification, and more.
“We all look forward to learning something. I know I’m going to learn at least one, if not two, tools to put in our toolkit,” Phillips said.
Mountain communities coming together
Mountain Towns 2030 originated from Park City, Utah, out of a grassroots effort that demanded the municipality take more aggressive action on climate change, said Bryn Carey, another one of Mountain Towns 2030’s founding members.
After it became the first mountain community to commit to net-zero carbon emissions by 2030, the group of founders saw an opportunity to broaden outside of Park City, outside of Utah and collaborate with other mountain towns to achieve that same goal. The first summit was hosted in 2019 with around 200 people from 23 communities.
Mountain communities are the perfect communities to take the lead on climate action for various reasons, Beerman said.
“If you look at our residents, they move to these towns because they’re closest to the natural environment. You look at our economies; they’re tied to snow. We’re rich in resources; most of our towns have enough resources to solve the challenges before us. We are in an ideal position to lead and we have no excuses,” he said. “So I want to urge you: Be brave, be bold and take on big goals.”
The time is now
While the summit serves as a platform for sharing innovation and ideas, it also seeks to serve as a conduit for solutions and action — something that most speakers noted was urgent at this moment in time.
“Our time as a human species is right now to shift this conversation and accelerate the climate action,” Langmaid said. “We need to shift things in just a couple of years, really. We don’t have much time left. We’ve been working at this far too long.”
With that, Langmaid made the call to action to fight for the future of the planet.
“We also need to collaborate and be inspired and get educated, but how do we fight? We need to fight from the heart,” she said.
Beerman put it this way: “Delay is the new denial for climate change. You have a window, and that window will close.”
The work on climate action has certainly accelerated in recent years but requires vision and intention going forward.
“When a lot of us started this climate work years ago, we were responding to an existential threat. It was a real flight or fight moment, and obviously, we chose to fight,” Scherr said. “Real sustained climate action is not reactionary, but visionary. It’s policies that center around people, systems that abhor waste and communities that embrace prosperity over profit. These are all choices that we make.”
Scherr added that this conference and other similar collaborative efforts offer a path toward this.
“The visions that emerge from these creative super colliders like Mountain Towns 2030 are lighting the path for how we will get there,” he said. “We are thrilled to see the visions that emerge from this conference.”
Reframing for hope
However, even with this urgency looming, the event’s first presentation sought to reframe climate action around hope. The presentation was given by Molly Kawahata, a former White House climate advisor under the Obama administration and the subject of the Patagonia film, “The Scale of Hope.”
Psychology shows that fear, guilt and shame are “antithetical to human motivation” and can create a “trauma response in people,” Kawahata said.
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These emotions, she added have “dominated the climate narrative for decades.”
“They’ve been making people feel fear, guilt and shame and then yelling, ‘Why aren’t you acting? People who do this research actually say we are taking away their ability to act,” Kawahata said.
Hope, on the other hand, offers a different framing and a different path forward, she added.
“What if we can use the power of hope to change how people see the climate crisis, to change how they feel about the climate crisis, (and) to change how they address and act on the climate crisis?” Kawahata said.
“That’s what all of us are here to do.”
