Snow Boarding and Climate Change
13.11.2017
by Marco Smolla
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Christof Mauch
However, people will go to great lengths to defend their ideas of what life is really all about. In other words, they firmly hold onto their life meanings.
(Steger 2007, 783)
Photo Credit: Marco Smolla.
Being a former Snowboard professional and reflecting on my environmental impacts has confronted me with a serious struggle which, in the end, is about the mismatch of my desired self-image and my actual behavior. I realized these conflicts may arise in all sorts of situations and found it very interesting to observe how other people deal with this. After some inspiring discussions two years ago, the outline for my project became
clearer and I decided to interview other professional Snowboarders who are mostly all well aware of their ecological footprint, and might have experienced similar internal conflicts but developed different ways of responding to them. I decided to interview them personally and record their voices without using a camera to allow for a very honest and open dialogue. With these records, I could then provide a condensed version of their interviews together with some more background information in a textual format. This is achieved by offering a longer version as a paper and another as a poster which was presented during the Ecopolis exhibition at LMU. The target audience for my work is basically anyone interested in the area of conflict between
personal values and practical behavior. It is by no means restricted to Snowboarders as these actors only serve as an example for a more general approach to life.
Final Project
- Smolla_Final Project (2 MByte)