Sorry, but to all the climbers aspiring to be green out there, you won't get kudos from me. My respect for you does not increase, particularly when your preaching pays lip service to the cleverly marketed moral pretenses of your new sponsor. That Patagonia patch on your chest ain't a Sheriff's badge, and self-benefiting subterfuge ain't a way to be respectable.
Which is why, once and for all, let's drop the grand moral pretense from climbing. All together, let's jettison the quest for ethically justifying what we like to do. Read this five times over: there is absolutely nothing ethically or morally redeeming in climbing (that's good, now four more times). Climbing is a nasty habit, and all the grousing about ethics and morals in climbing amounts simply to the lies we tell ourselves to keep on doing what we like doing.
We'd do better to take climbing off its lofty mantel and think of it as the equivalent, morally and practically speaking, of golf. That way, when we ask "What is ethical climbing?" or "What is green climbing?" it's just like asking "What is ethical golf?" or "What is green golf?": totally absurd.
In the same way most folks think of golf, let's take climbing for what it is: leisure, pure and simple. It's nothing more than a pleasurable replacement for work, a luxurious freedom from duty or obligation.
Climbing "green" is just the latest symptom of our uneasy moral relationship with climbing. We know it's a good-for-nothing leisure activity, but we don't want to admit it. So we inoculate ourselves against a guilty verdict with crumby little admissions of guilt, and cute articles about how to carpool to the crag, or how to work a route on bolts then lead it on gear.
These inoculations won't work. The idea of morally good climbing retains all the integrity of a chossy crag held together with glue, bolts, and the competitive angst of questionable humans from Colorado.
If we really considered the full environmental and social price of our frivolous leisure, the good moral response would be to quit climbing.
But since no one's going to quit, can we just get on with it, guilty as charged, without the fucking pretense?
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For a blog about climbing and love, a lot of these posts seem to be pretty negative. Without getting too negative myself, I have to question your conception of what moral and ethical actions are. If we can't climb or golf in a moral manner, then how do we act morally when doing anything? Now I'll be the first to agree that the "green climbing" thing was a really stupid, essentially an ad campaign to get you excited about some hard free climbing that you'll never be able to do. But what actions are inherently moral? Helping other people? What if you're helping them as a corporation that is only trying to boost its image to protect itself from later immoral actions? Then we have to add a qualifier that actions don't need to be inherently moral, rather just done in a moral way, evaluated holistically. Viewed in this manner, climbing can be done morally; don't leave tick marks, don't chip holds into the rock, etc., just like picking up your dog's poop when you walk down the street- it's the moral thing to do.
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