July 21, 2024 was recorded as the hottest day ever globally. The record was broken the next day, a fact which will come as no surprise to runners. They experience the consequences of climate change daily as they log their miles, which is why Dr. Madeleine Orr has found them to be the ideal subject for her research into the impact of the climate crisis on athletics, which she writes about in her new book, Warming Up: How Climate Change is Changing Sport.
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Maddy traces her love of the outdoors and concern for the environment to the summers she spent at camp. “I went to summer camp for 17 years, which is just a wild thing to think about. All summer, nine weeks, crazy, like Parent Trap vibes. You’re in a cabin; you’ve got electricity, but it’s not fancy. I grew up doing that and then working there and then I became the director in my early 20s. And I look at that and I think just that degree of exposure, coming from a city like Toronto, being very urban, but spending nine weeks of the summer in the park, basically, was huge.
“I think about what resonated most with me at the time, and it was the nature walk, or the ‘Let’s Go Look at Toads’ hour, or whatever. It wasn’t even the fancy activities. It was literally just like, ‘Let’s go lie on the dock and look at the stars.’ Those were the moments that resonated the most for me. ‘Cause they just felt so profound.”
During the winter, she would ski, and that’s where the impact of climate change really hit home for her. “In my part of the country, we don’t have a ton of snow left like we did. We used to have a lot of snow days. We used to have a season that was pretty reliable. We could ski from the end of November all the way through April, and now you’re lucky if you’re getting on the mountain in January, and if you’ve got till March break, that’s a huge win. So it’s been hard watching that happen over the course of my life. I’m in my early thirties; that’s not a long time.
“That’s what clued me into these things that we love are being impacted. As soon as you see it, you can’t unsee it. And I’m sure other people have had that experience; it’s everywhere. Once you see climate change and sustainability stuff, you see not just the problems everywhere, you see the opportunities everywhere. And that got me excited about it, so that’s what sent me back to school.”
Maddy’s studies, and now her work, focus on adaptation and resilience. “What that means,” she explains, “is I am working with communities that are impacted by climate hazards and trying to figure out how do we continue being healthy and having the safe provision of sport in these tricky environments, whether it’s an environment impacted by wildfire or smoke or recurring storms or whatever.
“I’ve been to every continent except Antarctica, and everywhere I go, I talk to runners because runners are outside every day and they tend to be the most consistent about it. Like if you talk to rugby players, they might have one or two practices a week and a match, but a runner’s probably out most days. And so they’re seeing those subtle changes in their local community at a micro level in a way that if you’re just on one pitch, you’re not necessarily seeing that the same way. I love working with runners, for that reason.
“Some of the best work that I’ve done in terms of being able to make an impact and work with really interesting people has been with runners in places like Kenya and Australia and Fiji. And it’s just been so cool. Puerto Rico after the hurricanes, seeing how people who are runners, who care so deeply about where they run and also that they get to run, how they’re responding to these catastrophic events and finding resilience through running in that moment.”
Maddy’s concern for the environment led to her founding the Sport Ecology Group to accelerate climate action in sport. While she has an academic background in environmental studies, she believes that everyone is in a position to address the climate crisis. “I’d say the two most common things that people use as reasons to not talk about climate change are they feel like they don’t know enough and it feels too overwhelming. So I would say you’re in very good company. Welcome to most of us.
“I’d also say, I feel exactly the same way most days. Yes, I am beyond privileged and lucky to have had the education I have, but I started the Sport Ecology Group as a baby grad student with no enviro background at the time. You just start and you figure it out, and you might get some things wrong and honestly, whatever. I’d rather you try and get it wrong than not try.”
She also points out that you don’t have to take on huge challenges. “There’s this idea that you have to take on all of climate change and all of these issues. No, you don’t. First of all, it’s not productive because you’re going to burn yourself out. I definitely did that for two years, and I was burnt out.
“So take on one piece and figure out that thing for yourself or for your immediate community or whatever level you’re working with. And then once you figure that out, get onto the next thing. It’s kind of like in sports, right? We talk about, ‘Focus on just that next mile. Just that next mile.’ You don’t start a marathon and think through the whole entire race plan of every 42 kilometers. That doesn’t make any sense. You’re just going to drive yourself nuts. So you focus on just what’s in front of you and that next point.
“In other sports, we talk about the next point, right? Like score that next point and then figure out the next one after that. So I’d say that we can apply the same mentality to sustainability. We don’t need you to get to a hundred tomorrow. We need you to do one thing and whatever that is, it’s good. That’s enough, and that’s okay.
Despite all of the hurdles, Maddy remains optimistic about the future. “We are dealing with existential-level stuff. This is like Marvel movie stakes, but real life. And when you think of it in those terms, yeah, it’s going to feel overwhelming. But I feel hopeful in the sense that I know that we can avoid almost every worst-case scenario. I know that we can reduce harm. I know that we can improve people’s lives in meaningful ways. We probably won’t reverse climate change at this point in any kind of meaningful time scale; we can in a super-long time scale, but within our lifetimes, our kids’ lifetimes, we’re probably not reversing it. But we can stop it. We can totally stop it. That’s worth fighting for, and that would be awesome.
“You know, it’s easier to make a mess than to clean it up. That’s the truth, right? We have made a bit of a mess of the planet. It’s going to be harder to clean it. It would have been a lot easier to not make a mess in the first place, but that ship sailed. So I think it’s worth cleaning it up. And I think that that effort is worth it every time. And it doesn’t mean that we can do everything all at once, but you do your bit, I’ll do mine, and we’ll get there. So yeah, I’m hopeful most of the time.”
Resources:
Maddy’s website
Order Warming Up: How Climate Change is Changing Sport
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