Climbing, ethics and environmental sustainability

Sports performance is just one of the many aspects that are part of climbing. In particular, in nature, any type of activity should first and foremost be based on respect for the environment and other people.

There are excesses, typical of a lack of psychophysical balance, both among some protectionists and among some climbers. For a certain type of environmentalist, any human activity, even the most sustainable and low-impact ones, are potentially harmful and should be prohibited. Man is seen as an intruder who should remain in his “own place”, in confined and managed areas, where he can be controlled and where the experience of “wild” nature can take place with due detachment, to avoid any disturbance, especially to fauna. According to them, access to nature should be the exclusive prerogative of a new elite of researchers and environmentalists, the only ones who “know” and have the right to decide for everyone what is right, necessary and what is not. So, while on the one hand studies and research reveal the damage due to the “lack” of nature that afflicts children and adults in cities, these “environmentalists”, instead of educating people to respect and teaching them how to behave in the environment, starting from school, prefer to prohibit, forgetting that man is also part of nature and needs, at a more or less profound level, a true and unmediated contact with it. Even without going to these extremes, it is a fact that most people, even if they go on excursions and “trips” in nature, actually do not know how to move on an unbeaten path, do not know how to orient themselves, are “afraid” of a forest or a mountain slope. And in the meantime, stress and neuroses increase…

Prohibiting or severely regulating activities such as mountaineering, climbing or ski mountaineering, while doing nothing to prevent much more harmful actions, is the latest paradoxical trend that is spreading in our protected areas. Of course, it is a problem of numbers, but not only because the number of practitioners (and therefore the supposed disturbance) of these activities has increased, the fact is that we are always too few, while the economic and numerical interests that move the rest of the world are much greater … alas!

But it is also true that some climbers and mountaineers have harmful and deviant attitudes that often derive from a mythomaniac vision of this discipline, generated by unqualified instructors who reduce climbing to a maniacal pursuit of overcoming difficulties. In these cases, climbing becomes a sort of nightmare, like a Dantean circle aimed at an unattainable result as an end in itself, in which all the salient elements of climbing are put aside, including environmental ones.

Some behaviors typical of this degeneration of values, both sporting and cultural, are unfortunately increasingly frequent and identifiable:

• scream, especially when falling or when getting into a chain
• mark handholds or supports with strips of magnesite or chalk
• occupy a route for hours and hours, as if you were the master of that route or the cliff
• taking advantage of the bolting work of others, publishing guides or inserting routes and crags on their own web pages without even asking and informing the discoverers of the crag and the respective bolters

These are all attitudes that derive from a lack of education and correctness, but also from a sense of presumption and arrogance in which the people in question think they are the center of the world. It could be said that these two deviant categories, of protectionists and exalted climbers, exist to balance each other out, and if they could cancel each other out we would all benefit greatly. It is logical to think that if schools and instructors, but also magazines in the sector, were prepared to the point of transmitting a correct approach to climbing, also based on healthy and normal principles of good manners, it would be much more difficult to “give footholds” to the “Taliban” environmentalists who would like to introduce bans everywhere.