Editor:
I invite the Tetrahedron Outdoor Club (TOC) to make 2024 their last year airlifting firewood into Tetrahedron Provincial Park. Given the carbon intensity of helicopters and jet fuel, and the precariousness of our local and global climate, this use of fossil fuels is egregious.
I also invite their Banff Mountain Film Festival sponsors (including this newspaper) and attendees to reflect on necessary and unnecessary emissions in their own lives and in the organizations they support. How will your donations or fees be used: maintaining a park, supporting youth ski programming? Great, thumbs up TOC! But burning hundreds of litres of jet fuel per hour to make the cabins cozier for a lucky few continues to contribute to our worsening climate disaster.
I enjoy visiting the park and appreciate the cabins and access that TOC maintains and understand helicopters are needed for some maintenance tasks. But continuing to supply firewood (itself an air pollutant) this way for fit outdoors folks is now unacceptable.
If firewood is truly needed in the cabins visitors can obviously bring their own. Or organize a race to the cabins, a runner’s handicap being the weight of wood carried. Or team up with local youth organizations like cadets, Guides or Scouts for their fundraising: community sponsorships for the weight of wood carried in.
Not only is an airlift bad for our environment, it is also the opposite of fitness and, frankly, resiliency and health. Not something an outdoor club should be promoting.
To help our climate, it’s not only the things we do, it’s the things we stop doing.
Nick Westover
Roberts Creek
