Going towards green

Japan, USA, Chile, Morocco, China, and Tasmania; the more little flags we add on our world map, the more gaps we notice in between. James and I began travelling because there were climbing destinations we wanted to discover: Ha-Long bay, Rocklands, Indian Creek… Climbing is a sport that makes you travel, and from your very first travelling experiences, you keep wanting more and more. Climbing often begins as a sport, or a hobby, but it soon becomes a way of life, and every 3-day week-end begins with a map and a travel.

Why do climbers travel so much? Because every crag is different: from the rock and the style, to the people you’ll meet along the way.

You love the sport, the opportunity to get out there, to try your hardest, to learn. Climbing changes you. It changes the way you know yourself.  You learn that you are capable of trying hard, fighting fear, and passing boundaries.  You learn that you can handle difficult situations, and you start re-define things that seemed so clear and certain before.

©Coll. Ciavaldini/Pearson

Little by little, the things around the climbing become more and more important: Coffee in the morning or the after-climbing beer, the community you get to meet, the stories you hear. You hear of adventures in far away lands, and before you know it you’re waking up in Antalya, Kalymnos, or maybe Bangkok! 

You become friends with climbers from Turkey, climbers just like you.  One day you meet them again somewhere out there, or perhaps you invite them to visit you and discover your home… Your world opens up, and it gets bigger, yet smaller at the same time. Being climbers makes our connection obvious, but that connection is just one of many that we share… first and foremost, despite creed or colour, we’re all human after-all.

James and I travel for the rock, but also for the place. We travel for the projects, but also for the rest days. We travel for the friends we will make, and the strange, surprising things they will show us along the way. A real Turkish hamam, women in flowery trousers selling pomegranate juice at a market behind Istanbul, the desert landscape behind the cracks of Indian creek, the delicious and spicy Thai soups that never taste the same in Europe. We have a myriad of random memories that have nothing, and everything to do with climbing.

We have discovered a world most people only know through their TV, and the reality has little to do with the distant, detached information you see on a screen.  It is one thing to know that the Philippines is a 3rd world country, it is another one to go there and live with the locals, to realize the struggle people live everyday, and that your new friends dream of travelling just like you do, but for them, most likely they will always remain dreams. 

Our luck to be born in the EU is unquantifiable, and with it we have the financial and political freedom to travel the world. Sure, we can find plenty of things to moan about at home, but the reality is we can trust in our judicial, educational and health care services, and in general if we’re in trouble we wont be left to die in the street – not something that can be said for everyone, everywhere.

Whilst these are all things we “knew” before, we didn’t really “know” them until we travelled. There’s something about sitting down face to face with someone and hearing these things first hand that makes them real. Perhaps it’s the emotion behind the words, the eye contact or the body language.  Communication and compassion are intertwined.

James Pearon in the Philippines. ©Francisco Taranto JR.

It seems quite ironic to be writing an article on the subject of how reading about something doesn’t quite cut it, yet here I am, doing it anyway.  Perhaps I’m lying to myself, and this is only an excuse to put words on paper, but I like to believe it’s with the genuine hope of planting a seed that might one day have the chance to grow. 

Climbing makes travelling easy! To this day I can’t say I’ve ever had a bad experience when reaching out to a local climber for help or advice. We might have only a few words in common, but something connects us deeper than that, and somehow it always works out.  If I had to give one piece of advice to anyone anywhere, it would be to get out and see the world. I mean really see it. Not from some hotel room or all inclusive resort, but from the eyes of the people who call that place home, for it is only when you understand their lives that you will understand them.

Never has it been easier or cheaper to hop on a plane, and with 24 hours of travel there are few places on this planet one couldn’t be. What an opportunity we all have to get out there and explore, to open our minds, question our pre-conceptions, and perhaps even shift our brains into a different gear.  So what are we waiting for… lets get out there and rack up those air miles! 

For the last few years James and I have been off-setting all our carbon from our climbing trips by planting trees through a company called Mossy Earth, and together with the sustainability department at The North Face, we helped them come up with a calculator to offset the carbon footprint of all The North Face’s athlete run expeditions. It’s a step in the right direction and (provided you trust the organization providing the service) brings a lot of good, on many different levels, but ultimately remains a fix to damage already done.

So what’s the answer… stop travelling all together? As professional athletes with a large part of our careers based on exploration, travelling is an integral part of our jobs.  It would be professionally very complicated for us to stop travelling, and even if it wasn’t, for all the reasons listed in the beginning of this piece, I don’t think it’s something I’d like to do.  We’re back to irony here, but without travelling I’m not sure I’d be so aware that this world of ours was worth fighting for.

We thought long and hard about this over the last year or so, about if there was a solution, and what exactly we’d be prepared to do. The more we looked into things the more we were surprised how many options and possibilities there were, and how many different solutions to the same problem there seemed to be. Technology in this area is moving fast and solutions are becoming more viable and accessible by the day, yet at the same time on closer inspection they often bring with them other problems

We knew we wanted to continue travelling, but where the option presented itself, perhaps consider doing things in a different way. Sometimes we felt like we’re going around in circles, and when we though we were close to a solution, we were actually only discovering a whole new set of questions! At the end of the day, we realized that (for the moment) there is no right or wrong, only educated compromise.  Living and breathing by its very essence creates CO2,  and all we can do is to try to be aware of the problems and solutions and try to do things in a slightly better way than we would have before.

To summarise in a few words, here’s a few sentences shamelessly stolen from Matt Davies, one of the founders of Mossy Earth:

We are of the firm belief that travel can unlock the key to world peace, breaking down that ‘them’ and ‘us’ attitude. We hope that one day, all transports will be cleaner and that carbon offsetting will be a thing of the past.