Climber Will Gadd combines passion for high altitude adventure with concern about climate change
Climate change isn't debatable from the top of our highest peaks, says climber Will Gadd. It's reality.
Scientists and academics wielding charts with hockey stick-looking bar graphs are one source of expertise, when it comes to the impact of climate change on our planet.
Canmore, Alta., ice climber Will Gadd — the man who climbed a frozen Niagara Falls — thinks there's a need for a different sort of messenger: someone who experiences climate change in a way that's up close, personal — and business.
The United Nations agrees with him.
Mountain hero
Gadd, who spoke with Doug Dirks on the Homestretch Monday, was recently named a UN Environment "Mountain Hero" for his environmental work, which he does through public speaking, appearances on film and TV, and through guiding and teaching.
The Mountain Heroes campaign, which is a joint project under the UN and the International Climbing and Mountaineering Foundation, honours extraordinary athletes from around the world who spend time raising awareness about environmental issues.
"I'm not a scientist," Gadd said. "I do work with a lot of scientists and help research projects. But what I do is go outside in the mountains a lot.
"And when you go out there and you see how quickly that glaciers are receding and how the trees are marching up the hillside, that's not a theory," he went on.
"This is where I live. It has a direct economic impact on me."
World wide phenomenon
What mountains and glaciers around the world are revealing is not some regional phenomenon driven by seasonal El Nino currents or warm chinook winds, Gadd asserted.
"The seasons are shorter for ice climbing globally, and you know that that's important. But the bigger picture is they're also shorter for things like rains that affect harvests globally," he said.
"I talk to people in Tanzania and Kenya, and then what I see on top of Mount Kilimanjaro directly correlates to the lower levels of moisture that they're receiving.
"I hope people can just look at my images and stories and make a judgment on their own."
Lifelong passion
Gadd's love of mountaineering dates all the way back to childhood.
"From just being a kid in the mountains all the way to now, this is where I've spent my life," Gadd said.
"My parents would take me to the Athabasca Glacier."
What's changed is that it's a longer walk from the parking lot to the base of the glacier than it used to be.
"You'd go to the car back then and it was a very short walk to the glacier," he said. and now, you're kilometres from the glacier where you park," he said.
High altitude
Nowhere are the effects of climate change more pronounced than at high altitude, Gadd said.
"That's where things seem most obvious to me," he said.
"I'm in Alaska, and you can see just an amazing amount of ice that has been lost," he said.
"Climate change happens. Things come, [and] they go. This is normal — but not at this speed, and that's the big difference," he added.
"I can see that and can look at this glacier [that] used to be literally 1,300 metres thicker than it is now — and this has happened in my lifetime."
Seasons are different now
Gadd said life at altitude has changed dramatically over the course of his climbing life.
"You see trees getting ever higher into the alpine. And things that didn't used to grow at altitude are now growing at altitude. And then some of the animals are moving into higher and higher terrain.
"But the biggest thing that I see that's just wild — because [it's] all over the world — is that the seasons are noticeably different now," he said.
What used to last from November to the end of March now lasts from December to the end of February, he said — a pattern that he encounters everywhere he goes, whether in Alaska, Greenland, or Sweden.
Gadd has been helping researchers get underneath the surface of the Greenland ice sheet and the Athabasca Glacier in order to do monitoring and measurements that he says almost no one can get to.
As far as his duties as a UN Environment Mountain Hero, they are basically communications-oriented.
"I think my responsibility is to show people that change in a way that's not a research paper," he said.
"I can show the images and tell the stories and reach out to maybe a bit of a wider and more diverse audience," Gadd explained.
"Most people get that climate change is real and happening and is something that needs to be planned for, from the military to big business," he added. "Everybody gets this. But what I'm hoping to do is share these images in these stories and make it tangible to people and just show it.
"That'll have the greatest impact on making it a policy change at a government level and an international level."
With files from the Homestretch
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