The future of snow in Park City, and the future of our habitable global climate in general, is in more peril than ever. It is our responsibility to stand together against a changing climate to protect our winters.
“It shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful that you can imagine.”
Last year, we spent some time exploring the future of Park City in the face of human-driven climate change. A Park City without snow is an increasingly probable outcome of our continued pressure on a fragile world. As devastating as that would be for the local ski resorts, restaurateurs, and hoteliers that make their living on these white Wasatch slopes, it is just one of the many millions of tragic consequences that humanity will have to confront if we do nothing to change the path we are on.
“That beautiful, warm, living object looked so fragile, so delicate,”
Sadly, many of those most capable of affecting policy on the global scale necessary to combat human-caused climate change are unaware of the danger or unwilling to alter the—often lucrative—status quo. We, who are unable to accomplish our goals alone, must stand together to show those in positions of power and authority that humanity must do more to stop the march of climate change, and that ignorance and denial will not simply make the problem go away. The global climate will continue to change, whether we acknowledge our responsibility or not.
“that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart.”
The solution starts here. The choices we make now will echo through time in the same way that the actions of the last century have brought us here. By starting down the road to change now, we will forestall—and possibly even reverse—the grave perils that await our planet mere decades from today. The loss of our winters, and further degradation of our tenuously balanced environment, depends on our ability to collectively look outside ourselves and think of the legacy that we will leave for the generations that must follow after us. It depends on our desire to do what is right, and our commitment to ideals that will safeguard the precious gifts of this remarkable world.
“Seeing this has to change a man.”
That is why we stand with Ski Utah and Protect Our Winters in urging lawmakers and politicians to seek out new ways to save our precious winters by combating climate change and promoting ecologically sustainable policies. The clock is ticking. There is no time to waste, and everything to lose.
After all, we all need winter.
It shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful you can imagine. That beautiful, warm, living object looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart. Seeing this has to change a man.
James B. Irwin, Apollo Astronaut
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