/PEOPLE What are the sustainability questions people should be asking today, particularly related to the outdoors? JH: “There’s a lot of thought right now about the difference between resilience and sustainability, and whether sustainability is the right term. What we’ve seen in the outdoor industry, and consumer products in general, is that sustainability becomes an adjective - it ends up becoming a state: Have you achieved sustainability? This places the focus on an environmental footprint, but sustainability has three legs - social, economic and environmental. By focusing only on a state of sustainability, the critical social and economic elements get left out. And we then think of sustainability as an endpoint.
RESILIENCE From Stress Comes Transformation
Joel Hartter is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Masters of the Environment professional graduate degree program at the University of Colorado Boulder. Joel is a National Geographic Explorer, and for the last 20 years has worked as a researcher, consultant, engineer, and educator focused on sustainability and resilience.
Resilience is more important right now because it’s the concept that systems are constantly changing. Resilience is about being able to anticipate, cope, mitigate, withstand and react to shocks in the system. And that is the best description of what is currently happening in the outdoor industry, and it is what has happened because of COVID. And I think those are questions about resilience. I teach students to look beyond just bouncing back to where we were, because that’s not where we’re going. After COVID we are going to be fully transformed. That includes supply chains, national conversations, business, higher education - you name it. And so the focus should be on bouncing forward. It’s the old Wayne Gretzky adage - you don’t skate to where the puck was or where it currently is, you skate to where it’s going to be. And that’s what we’re working on here at CU - being able to anticipate
26
what’s going to come next. The same thinking applies for the outdoor industry - where does the industry need to be? Because it’s not just about creating a better widget, it’s about answering what needs to come and transform the industry. That’s the kind of thinking that gets me excited. Beyond that, the critical next question is getting people involved who are not inside our own circle; people who don’t look like me or have the same experience or educational profile. If you’re solving environmental challenges you can’t just put a bunch of environmental specialists together. That’s part of it. We need many different skill sets and people who understand water, forest management, business, community, as well as local, state and federal policymakers. Without that we can’t get the whole picture. It’s the same for the outdoor industry. We need to bring different people with different backgrounds, lived experiences, skills, and assets to bear to innovate and truly transform the industry and be better prepared for a post-COVID world.”
There’s consistent growth of people recreating outdoors - which is amazing - but can there be sustainability / resilience in that? JH: “This is really challenging, particularly on public lands. But I firmly believe that we should always get more people outside, and everyone should have access. Here on the Front Range of Colorado we need to account for the changing demographic. By 2050, the population will be much older, and the Latinx population is going to increase substantially. So we have to think about how people are going to recreate, but we also have to think beyond the people 27
