Cody Townsend is Right: The Climate Campaign Movement is F*****
Cody Townsend, the renowned freeride skier and filmmaker, recently posted a very good article on his website, The Fifty+, about the death of the climate campaign movement (behind an e-mail registration paywall). I’ll go into what he said a bit more later, as I confess I didn’t read it straight away; instead, I caught a glimpse of it on his Instagram story and instantly remembered an argument I’d had in my head several times over, several months ago.
Both Cody and myself refer to campaigns by Protect Our Winters (or POW for short), one of the biggest climate campaigning groups worldwide for particularly skiers and snowboarders, but sharing space with the entire outdoor industry. After all, we only have to look at summer 2026 to see how climate change is affecting all our outdoors spaces with drought and wildfires raging across all parts of the UK.
POW is run by country-based chapters, with each bringing on board ambassadors for their communities; current and past Olympians including Matt Weston and Chemmy Alcott, instructors like Warren Smith, and broadcasters and personalities like Ed Leigh all lend their presence, support and time to the organisation.
I’ve done plenty of work with POW UK and have a lot of respect for the work of the team there, so this is in no way a sleight against any of them.
Back in the spring of 2026, Protect Our Winters UK launched a campaign called the “Clean Miles” campaign. It encouraged outdoor users – skiers, cyclists, hikers and climbers – to lobby the UK government for better public transport access to the UK. So far, so good; the more you can travel to the Highlands, Peak District, Dartmoor or Yr Wyddfa without flying or driving, the cleaner and greener the world becomes for everyone.
But I have a serious problem with how the Clean Miles campaign was marketed. POW did their utmost to drive home the message that nowhere in the UK was accessible by public transport. MPs joined members of the POW team in the Scottish Highlands for the creation of the launch marketing, talking about how it is impossible – not simply difficult, but impossible – to access outdoor spaces in this country by public transport.
Sorry, but that is utter bullshit and has made me irrationally angry.
In the last 12 months alone, I have:
Skied a week in France
Skied a weekend in Scotland
Hiked the Yorkshire Dales
Hiked along the West Coast of Ireland
Hiked the West Highland Way in Scotland
Hiked all around London and the Southeast.
All without flying. All without driving.
In the past I have hiked the Highlands (regularly), the Pembrokeshire coast, and skied all over France by train and public transport.
And yet somehow the UK (and Irish) countryside is completely inaccessible by public transport?
Nitpicking aside, there is a point to POW’s campaign – for cyclists (particularly), access can be difficult, and there is plenty of the UK that, indeed, is inaccessible by public transport.
But branding the entirety of this country’s infrastructure as not fit for purpose, and claiming it must change for environmental reasons, misses the mark entirely for what “good” climate policy is, and will actively drive people away from using the infrastructure that is there.
Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons is still the same win and, especially with climate, far more attractive to people than doing the right thing for the right reasons. People immediately equate “environmentally friendly” with “shit” – that eco friendly dishwasher tablet you bought once a decade ago that failed to clean your dishes once will have completely soured any and all mental relationship you have with the green movement.
I take the train to go skiing, or hiking, because it’s green.
I like taking the train to go skiing, or hiking, because it’s quieter, it’s calmer, stationers are better than airports, I can do more work, eat better food, take more luggage, not pay for ski carriage, it takes roughly the same time and costs about the same (with a bit of forward planning.)
(And I like taking the train)
So why do we insist on selling green policy on green credentials and not the million other reasons that it is better and more comfortable for us as individuals?
Why do advocate that infrastructure is so broken it is impossible to use, then only advocate for it to be fixed for green reasons?
Why not demonstrate that a modal shift is entirely possible now and for a whole variety of other reasons first?
Why not celebrate that one of the best new pieces of transport infrastructure in the last decade is Ember bus, a network of coaches that link the towns, cities, moutnains, islands and glens of Scotland? It's been a rampant succes, cheap and high quality. Oh, and fully electric, too, but people focus on the former points rather than the latter.
I returned to read Cody Townsend’s article after noting down my rant. POW USA’s campaign, he notes, is in defence of democracy in America and the uplift to climate action that will come with a successful defence. It’s a long way from POW UK’s petitioning of the UK Government for better public transport provision, and Cody’s thoughts are far more well-rounded for a far bigger step-change in climate campaigning.
But I think both campaigns have missed the point in a similar way; rather than advocating for ways that we as individuals can make a meaningful difference, such as a meaningful modal shift or a meaningful contribution to changes in climate policy, instead it focuses on grand ideals without a meaningful gauge of success for marketing reasons that just don’t resonate with a wider audience.
It’s time the climate campaign got its head out of the sand.
