UKC

Of interest:-   https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/25/rock-climbing-damage-cl...

In reply to Toerag:

Tofu eating, Guardian reading Wokeraty!

In reply to Toerag:

Thought it was a good piece.
I certainly went from someone turning up to climb and solely focus on that, to being someone really keen on birds, wildlife, and the environment round where I climbed. Climbers can have a positive affect on the areas we climb as long as we educate ourselves as to what/where we climb.

In reply to Toerag:

Seemed a fairly level-headed piece. I think that I agree with the broad summary I took from the article which was that by and large climbers are fairly responsible and responsive when it comes to species protection and that the overall impact of climbing is very small compared to other pressures on biodiversity.

I'm not sure how helpful statistics like "10 million climbers in the US" are - how many of these climbers ever go outdoors after all? And if our primary concern is really to do with opening new routes/crags, then we are down to, what 1% of climbers? 0.1% of climbers?

In reply to Toerag: I read The Guardian every day. It’s a great newspaper but a lot of the articles, in particular the science ones, are like this one: utter shite.

In reply to Wimlands:

Indeed. It always saddens me when I see ‘route cleaned’ posts on Faceache and there entire route has been stripped of every biological entity, whether it affecting the climbing or not. Nothing wrong with climbing a ‘dirty’ route, if anything it gives a better ‘win’ feeling at the end and the added bonus of feeling like you’re doing the first ascent rather than the thousandth. 

In reply to dr evil:

Can you point out which parts are utter shite? Because it seeme to me that quite a few (but not necessarily all) the points are very valid at quite a lot of popular crags.

In reply to dr evil:

Why do you read it then ?  

In reply to Bottom Clinger:

Well he plainly has not read this Grid-iron article.

In reply to mountain.martin:

Your last 2 words provide a solution, popular crags. Stick to climbing on popular crags as the vegetation on these is so denuded that recolonisation would prove lengthy and or difficult. Avoid new routing and esoteric venues. But where's the glory in that?

A plus point could be a future increase in winter routes as the vegetation returns.

In reply to Bottom Clinger:

It is free?
Reading it sends a value signal without actually having to do anything about the issue?
The Blind Date and Dining Across the Divide are great, maybe something UKC could replicate?

In reply to Ennerdaleblonde:

Vegetation and fauna would recolonise pretty much anywhere given a handful of years. Every climber could climb hundreds of routes every year without collectively damaging anything if we all spread out in an organised fashion. But we don't, we gravitate to the same honeypots and leave a denuded landscape in our wake. Take Stanage, both magnificent from a rock climbers eye and a complete and utter shame from a biologists... 

In reply to henwardian:

I’d suspect the environmental impact of heating large industrial units and making 10 million pairs of rubber shoes and driving to and fro are greater than any outdoor climbing impact anywhere tbh. With the possible exception of flying across the planet of course..

In reply to minimike:

Rubber shoes is an interesting one.

The evidence is stacking up that tyre wear particles - microscopic bits of rubber - have really bad effects on some species of wildlife through leachate.

Shoes - be it climbing or hiking - deposit rubber wear particles far closer to nature than car tyres, all be it in far lower quantities.

In reply to mrphilipoldham:

Even on popular crags, vegetation comes back very quickly - there was one year about 10 years ago when the peregrines decided to nest on the Roaches (virtually on Saul's Crack IIRC) rather than Hen Cloud. It was quite surprising how much stuff had grown by the time the upper tier was accessible again in August (or maybe it was even sometime in July - don't know how early they fledged).

In reply to Michael Hood:

I've just been reading about peatlands. When these get burned or otherwise degraded, vegetation regrows but it takes decades for the peat forming sphagnum mosses to re-establish themselves, before which, another damaging event may well have occurred.

Not that this necessarily translates to crag vegetation, but just because stuff regrows after being disturbed, doesn't mean that the communities that were there before have come back.

In reply to minimike:

Yep, would suggest the environmental impact of driving a couple of hours to a crag for a days climbing probably outweighs any other impact. Saying that as someone who has done this, and appreciate it probs doesn't make sense to compare emissions with ecological impact.

Article was relatively balanced overall, but was definitely framed to get those 40-50 million climbing clicks

In reply to Inspate:

This I think is the large end of the wedge https://www.instagram.com/reel/CuFLNFbrCTR/ 

Bat/bird roosts, cliff flora....etc

In reply to Michael Hood:

Yes indeed, and as happy as well all are to see the ring ouzels every spring it does make you wonder how many there’d be if the entire crag was left alone. Far more than the handfuls of pairs that manage to cling on despite all the disturbance, I’d wager.

In reply to mrphilipoldham:

Certainly if we left the crags alone for a couple of years there would be more successful nests but for how long, since it's almost certain that it's us climbers who by the erosion we cause have somehow created the correct habitat for Ring Ouzels to nest on Eastern Grit.

Interesting article but very focused on the US (no doubt more data and infrastructure to research this) - would be interested in something here.

In reply to Michael Hood:

Also worth noting that if climbers act as a deterrent for egg thieves you could wind up with even less Ring Ouzels.

The BMC is a bit more proactive on sustainability than the USA based access fund in terms of trying to inform the climbing public about wildlife stuff (RAD, the white guides, winter condition monitoring stuff etc etc). I suspect this is largely because they have a lot less crags to worry about and in a much smaller area and the less fragmented nature of representation in the UK (given that they have organisations that represent at a state level while access fund is often more federal stuff).

In reply to mrphilipoldham:

When I went up to the Roaches immediately after the foot and mouth restrictions were lifted I was amazed by the number and variety of birds nesting all over the crag.  We're kidding ourselves if we don't recognise the amount of disturbance we cause simply by being there.

We're pretty good (most of us anyway) at avoiding specific areas once we are aware of nesting birds, but it's obvious to me that far more are disturbed by our presence while they are looking for nest sites, and we never notice.

In reply to Dave Garnett:

Just being devils advocate here but having a think about a witty equivalent. If I go into a toilet and it's got 16 urinals, the one I pee in hardly makes pretty sure that no one pees in the adjacent ones. Have I reduced the number of people peeing? Only if every single other urinal is full... 

Are we really impacting bird numbers or just redistributing nesting sites? (I obviously don't know how many alternate nesting sites there are)

In reply to Dave Garnett:

The flipside is the question (and it's a genuine question) of whether we're discouraging plants and animals that specifically live on the sort of significantly tall and steep cliffs that are interesting to climbers, or whether they could live in a wide range of outcrops, trees or building and the loss of some relatively small areas to climbing isn't going to make much difference. I've gardened a few little heather plants in my time and never felt any great guilt about it, I'd worry a lot more if there was some hyperspecific alpine plant that only lived on that specific bit of cliff.

In reply to timparkin

There is a limit on how much redistribution you can do because birds have nesting territories which are based on suitable nesting sites and, crucially, sufficient food resources.

They cannot just move over a bit, squash up etc.

Some territories might overlap a bit, but not by much (same species).

Where I work they cut a mountain bike track through a long but narrow piece of woodland. It devastated breeding opportunities because it fragmented all the territories.......

In reply to minimike:

And if all those hours were spent 'normal' gyms or the many other activities a person would take up instead (I for one leave my heating off at home on wall night and cycle to the wall)

In reply to top cat:

fair enough....