Walking Mountains Sustainability recently launched a campaign titled “Trends with Benefits: Making Remote Work.” You may be reading this (if you’re familiar with Walking Mountains) wondering, why does Walking Mountains care about working remotely? Well, that answer is simple.
While working from home comes with numerous benefits for work-life balance, and the checkbook (let’s be real I haven’t filled up my tank in a month), the biggest benefit is the positive impact working remotely has on the environment. Believe it or not, when we don’t drive our cars to and from work each day, we are cutting down significantly on carbon emissions and air pollution in our community. And each ton of carbon emissions we are able to avoid by staying out of our cars is making a difference for the climate.
The Eagle County Community has a Climate Action Plan that outlines goals to cut our local carbon emissions to 50% by 2030. Achieving this goal will not be easy and will require us to rethink our business-as-usual approach to everyday life - just like the global pandemic has forced us to do.
We recognize that not everyone has thrived working from home over the last year (looking at you, parents), but we also think everyone has found at least one moment of gratitude when you realized you could simply roll out of bed, hair's a mess, grab some coffee, and start emailing in 5 minutes (rather than the shower, breakfast, and 40 minute commute into the office). Trends with Benefits is not about staying at home for work forever. Instead, this campaign is about empowering folks to work from home when it works for them. The ultimate goal of our campaign is to get Eagle County workers out of their car 2 times per week on their work commute. Doing so would save about 72,000 metric tons of carbon from entering our air every single year. And while we still love biking, walking, and riding the bus, working from home is a trend that’s here to stay - and we want our community to take advantage of all the benefits it brings.
So why should you check out Trends with Benefits? Because not only is working remote a trend that comes with amazing benefits for you, it also benefits Mother Earth. We know the impacts of climate change are only going to get more severe if we don’t change course quickly. As a community, we can take advantage of this simple solution to reduce carbon emissions and protect the future of this place we call home.