Here’s Where the Revolution Starts

I don’t want to think or write about climate change, and I know you don’t want to read about it in Adventure Journal. Adventure, outdoor recreation, and AJ are supposed to be escapes from the buzzkills of daily life, or so you’ve told me. One day, I received an email from a ranger in Texas, who shared she often cried on her long drives to work because of grief over the changes in her park; Adventure Journal, she wrote, made her feel better and gave her hope. In that moment, I vowed that if we were going to cover hard issues, we would only publish stories offering solutions and possibilities.

But adventure—those delightful, challenging, sometimes perilous interactions we chase in the mountains, canyons, and waterways—doesn’t take place in a world separate from the material concerns of weather, heat, and fires. Adventure as play offers an escape, but it is a temporary one, and mostly in our heads. In the summer of 2024, I spent what I expected would be a delightful week exploring the western Sierra Nevada; instead, I was shocked and depressed by vast seas of fire-killed trees, once-vibrant green slopes charred brown and black. An active fire at the southern end of the range clouded the air with pollution, and, while I was atop Sunday Peak, I witnessed the smoke of a new fire above the town of Kernville.

We have always lived with wildfire in California, but the urban blazes that devastated Pacific Palisades, Altadena, and other communities in Los Angeles in January 2025 were historic. It will be some time before the financial toll is known. It will take many years, probably decades, to tally the emotional and cultural tolls. What’s clear, though, is this is yet another wakeup call—as clarion as the heat wave that seared the Pacific Northwest in 2021 and the rains that flooded Vermont in 2023 and 2024.

In 1949, in A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold argued humans needed a new “land ethic,” one that was obligatory, reciprocal, and less extractive. In 1962, in Silent Spring, Rachel Carson showed the use of pesticides was poisoning America’s lands and waters. In 1972, in a fourteen-page essay in the Chouinard Equipment catalog, Doug Robinson called for a clean-climbing revolution, in which protective devices were removable and gentler on the rock, unlike the iron pitons traditionally hammered into cracks. Each of these changed people’s minds and bettered the world in meaningful ways.

And yet here we are.

Our relationship with the natural world is broken and, crucially, so is our relationship with ourselves. I don’t know how to put it more simply or clearly. Conditioned by evolution, biology, and society, we consume more than any people in the history of people: more square footage in our houses, more things in those houses, more media, more fuel. We view public lands as playgrounds rather than the domain of countless other living things. Can you name the species of trees that line the runs you ski? The sea creatures that live beneath the waves you surf? The first wildflowers to bloom in your area in the spring?

We have to change how we live, and you know it.

We must stop buying things we don’t need and we must stop burning stuff. Nearly as critical, we must clear the clutter from our lives. We are hoarders of distraction and entertainment. The amount we’re online is not okay; it is killing us spiritually and perhaps even physically. We need a radical reboot of how we spend our time, attention, and money; we need to get right with the natural world. We need less of almost everything except real-life human connection and time spent outside. The payoff is neither deprivation nor poverty, but abundance, the abundance of deeper relationships and a fuller sense of belonging. I know this to be true because I have seen it in my own life.

The stakes could not be higher. Our home hangs in the balance, as does our lifestyle. We are so, so privileged to call ourselves trail runners, mountain bikers, climbers, and whatnot, but we’ve all been impacted by declining snowfall, wildfire smoke, and supposed thousand-year storms. An adventurous life can be consistent with a responsible one—it must. But the revolution starts with you, and with me. It’s the only place it can.