FIVE SKATE SPOTS THAT’LL BE STOPPED BY THE CLIMATE CRISIS

Some of skating’s most famous skate spots may never be the same.

Illustrations by Aidan Ryan

It used to be that someone would say the world was ending and they’d be seen as crazy doomsayers. Now, though, you can’t help but see what they mean. The news is filled with signs of an upcoming apocalypse: the bumblebees are dying, the Amazon’s on fire, jellyfish are taking over the oceans, and the weather just seems to hit a little harder than it used to. Scientists and science teachers agree: the climate is changing, and catastrophic consequences are coming–just wait.

Depressing, huh? Usually, there’s been no better escape from the sad state of reality than skateboarding. Whether it’s engaging in the act itself or just dreaming about tricks you’ll do at the spots you’ve always wanted to go, skating has always been a refuge from the worries of real life.

Well, I hate to break it to you, but skateboarding ain’t safe from the climate crisis either, and some of our most hallowed skate spots are under threat of being skate-stopped–permanently. Let’s survey five cities at the top of lots of skater’s ‘must-visit’ list and see how global warming fucking up our chances of ever getting to skate there...

San Francisco, California

The hilly land where street skateboarding started is also a potential hell hole of climate change catastrophes. As global temperatures rise the Arctic ice caps melt, pumping up sea levels and putting lots of San Francisco’s best skate spots along the Pacific coastline under threat of flooding.

The whole Embarcadero area is a high-risk zone, meaning that the legendary brick plaza that’s a Petri dish for skateboarding’s most supreme style icons could soon enough be swampland (talk about drip). The same goes for 3rd and Army and the nearby Rosa Parks skatepark ledges people try to pass off as a street spot. This would be cool if we were skimboarders, but we aren’t, and even Bones Swiss don’t work so great underwater.

At least skaters will be able to take to the hills, right? Maybe not, because those might be engulfed in smoke. The California coastline is expected to face longer and more intense forest fire seasons as temperatures rise and the woods get hit with drought. One lightning strike, gender reveal gone awry, or still-lit roach can lead to whole horizons of suffocating ash cruising into the city, down Lombard and into Soma. Not even an N95 will be able to keep skater’s lungs safe from fumes’ fury. They’ve always said that smoking can kill; it turns out they were right in more ways than one.

Los Angeles, California

You know all those epic Los Angeles schoolyards with the little picnic tables and bank-to-benches? They’re under a thick screen of smog that intensifies the sun and results in a number of negative health effects when inhaled over a long enough period of time.

That volatile mix of ozone and particle pollution is exacerbated by summer heatwaves, and LA is expected to get a lot more of those in the coming decades. The city’s average annual temperature jumped over 4ºF in the last century plus, and it’s only going to get hotter. Some of LA’s less shady spots, like the Venice Beach curbs and skatepark, will become like a frying pan to the flesh, making it hard to survive without air conditioning, and especially hard to learn to skate outside.

As with every other lamentable aspect of life in America, these consequences will hit poorer and more marginalized people more directly. Skateboarding has benefitted in untold ways from the diversity of people that do it, but if skateboarding becomes something that you’re only able to get good at in a private, indoor environment it will become a privilege for the rich, lose its accessibility and eliminate its lifeblood.

New York City, New York

Bad news, folks, I just checked the map and it turns out that New York City is made up of islands–not exactly the best place to be as the oceans are rising. To make matters more dire, the city was built so that most of the urban development–and the most notable spots like LES Skatepark, Pyramid Ledges, Brooklyn Banks, and that bench Dylan. impossibled–are on the lowest-lying land, so they’re going to get flooded more easily and more often.

But there’s another worry much smaller in size but with even bigger potential consequences for the skate scene’s health: mosquitos. The pesky little pests are already as bad in NYC as almost anywhere else in the country, and scientists are saying their party is just getting started. Summers are getting more humid so skeeters are showing up earlier and hanging out later every year, plus they’re inviting new friends to come down from the thawing Arctic ice, asking them to bring extra cases of West Nile, triple E (Eastern equine encephalitis), and any other sick stuff they can carry with them.

Their rager is a nightmare to a filmer sitting at the bottom of Fish Gap waiting for his homie to get the courage to commit as a swarm of the world’s most deadly animal sucks his skin. “Transmission” is a much cooler word when it’s coming from Transworld, not your doctor.

Barcelona, Spain

That’s three of the U.S.A.’s greatest skate cities burned, boiled and battered, but how about Barcelona, that dream destination engrained in skaters fantasies since the early-00s? Of course, being on the Iberian peninsula, it’s bound to face some coastal flooding, but drought and dehydration are actually skater’s biggest impediments.
Even if all your favorite skaters are sponsored by energy drink companies, clean, drinkable water, especially when you’re skating in 100+ºF heat, is the preferred bev of the best. But Barcelona, which relies on just a couple of reservoirs to keep its residents washed and hydrated, is going to start running out of it. Skaters brave or stupid enough to risk it will end up sipping the dregs of their sweatbands as heatwaves hang around like Insta-ams at MACBA. A lot of skaters in Barcelona might benefit from a bit of drying out, but not like this.

Guangzhou, China

This huge city in southern China is home to some of the most incredibly skateable structures seen on Planet Earth, from massive marble plazas to wavy bumps to pump and fly out of. There’s so much there a lot of it hasn’t even been skated yet, but you might not get a chance to anyways, as international travel might not be so easy in a future fractured by climate change.

Human versus nature is a tale as old as time, but so is human versus human. As nature thrashes our global status quo, the latter reveals itself as the more disruptive narrative. Studies show that climate change has a direct linkage to world conflict, causing food, water and energy insecurity as well as mass migrations and ensuing turmoil in domestic and international politics. We’ve already outlined some of the ways in which the U.S. is going to be hit hard, and China’s coastal cities are set for a similar fate. As the U.S. and China enter “a new era of confrontation”, a future where international travel is limited much more than it is now seems too likely.

International security isn’t on the top of most skater’s lists when it comes to skate stoppers, but maybe it should be. For one, skating falls pretty high up on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs pyramid. And two, a troubled world results in fewer skatespots available to us.

WHAT CAN WE DO?

It was extreme when Tony Hawk did the 900 back in the day, and now we have toddlers landing 1080s. Similarly, the weather events we consider extreme now will become commonplace in the future, made to look small in comparison to what’s coming.

The purpose of this article isn’t to be a buzzkill though. Rather, to quote Owen Wilson, it’s trying “to light a fire under you. Make you do some flip-in, flip-out shit” when it comes to thinking about the way the climate crisis will affect skateboarding. While the scenarios laid out above are all very potential realities, they aren’t exactly inevitable. If humans have enough power to fuck this place up as quickly as we did, then we should have the power to rescue it from our own systems.

Any skateboarder that still has spots they want to shred has a responsibility to fight for a more sustainable future, in our own little industry and outside of it too. It may seem like an impossible task, but skateboarders should know that impossible is nothing but another trick to be done. And just like the trick, it’s all about the follow-through.

While individual action, like cutting back your meat consumption and opting for ethically-sourced skate goods, is a good start, pushing the big and bad businesses responsible for nearly ⅔ of all carbon emissions is better. Look into the fossil fuel industry’s outsized damage to our environment, and consider ways in which you can divest from them personally and politically as well.

Saving the Earth is probably the gnarliest trick of all time. Let’s try and land it before climate change kicks us out for good.

CLIMATE CHANGE: THE ULTIMATE SKATESTOPPER