Trail Sports in a Changing Climate

This talk will take a closer look at trail sports – hiking, running, off-road cycling – and how their increasing popularity in Western contemporary societies impacts the environments where they take place. These sports are often celebrated as ways to immerse oneself in “wild(er)” landscapes and to measure personal endurance against nature. But the climate crisis has begun to unsettle this relationship. The landscapes these trails move through are increasingly shaped by loss – of species, stable seasons, biodiversity – and by futures that fracture before they fully arrive. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork with trail sport communities in Belgium and the UK, I will examine the duality between the growing desire of trail sport participants to engage with “wild(er)” landscapes and the ecological pressures these activities put on those landscapes and their consequences.

Dr. Eilis Lanclus is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Loughborough University and the University of…