Yamaha and Vision
Motorsports have recently gotten behind the local youth work of X-Life
Youth Society. Along with donations from some individual supporters, a
total of four snowmobiles were obtained, making it possible to run a
sled safety and winter freestyle program for teens in the Sea to Sky
Corridor. As we all know, snowmobiles emit carbon when they burn gas. In order to offset these
emissions, X-Life is committed to planting trees that will eat the CO2.
On May 3, 2008 we are planting 500 trees, of which 200 are expected to
survive. Dave Williamson, of the Cascade Environmental Research Group
says that this should cover our CO2 emissions for four years. If we
plant trees every year we can stay well ahead of the game and use the
event to reinforce positive values in our kids.
See newspaper article in the Question
here (March 2008).
Some people
might want to ask us, why did you choose Motorsports? Why not
snowboarding or something else that doesn’t require fuel? That’s a
good question and one which we really had to think about. When it
comes to our children, we don’t like having to weigh environmental
concerns against their welfare. But that’s the world we live in.
When considering the options, we made a decision to test unique
sporting opportunities, not otherwise available, to see if they
provided added incentive to the kids to stay off drugs. The deal
would be that kids could come and be involved for free as long as
they stayed clean from drugs and alcohol. We needed unique
programming that kids stood a chance to lose so that a child could
easily see there would be swift consequences to making bad
decisions. Not so with or other outdoor sports such as snowboarding
. Kids who start using drugs could simply go to another existing
snowboarding program that doesn't have our standards. They would
stand to lose nothing. In the summer we offer the only driving
program where kids can learn to drift, do donuts and even race. In
the winter we offer the only snowmobile program where they can learn
free style moves such as wheelies, jumping and motocross style
tricks.
Thus far the results are
impressive. To our knowledge not even one of the kids has started
using drugs after committing to the X-Life motor sports program,
which started in the spring of 2007 with driver training through the
Barely Legal Race program at Pemberton Speedway. We don’t want to
mess with that success but we also want to be responsible with our
environment”.
X-Life's goal is to be a 100% carbon
neutral organization.
