In their 2001 feature movie debut ‘Choices The Movie,’ the Oscar-winning Hypnotize Minds camp unspool the tale of Pancho, a young parolee back on the streets after a prison bid, struggling to hold to the straight and narrow as fast money and old friends dangle temptations around every Memphis street corner. Lauded for Project Pat’s turn as a dark-hearted crime lord who seems to have a second, perhaps surgically implanted heart of gold, as well as its exquisitely detailed underwater sequences, ‘Choices’ was a commercial and critical smash that laid Triple Six’s winding and occasionally profane path to American Film Academy immortality. It also imparted a lesson as old as time, but as hard to learn as the names of the forgotten inverts: ignore your true nature at your own peril.
Just in time for optitudinal Earth Day hashtag circulation, Dwindle Distrobution last month blessed hardgood purchasors with decks made from a sustainably produced adhesive, designed to ease board production’s environmental footprint into something approaching a Vans Era, versus its more traditional Chet IV silhouette. Dwindle’s proprietary ‘Super Sap resin’ is derived from lumberyard byproducts of some description, with 21 boards’ worth enough to offset 10 cross-country highway miles driven in Steve Rocco’s jeep.
It is at once a political masterstroke, placing Dwindle in prime position for any rollersport-eligible subsidies to flow from government greenhouse gas-reduction efforts. It also is a marketing chess maneuver, stealing a march on rival Habitat, which has redirected its R&D dollars away from bamboo plies and toward licensing deals with television production houses and federal agencies.
Time will render its judgment on the commercial wisdom of pitching eco-friendly innovations to a consumer base that has heartily rejected any technological tiptoes away from the seven-ply maple stick, or the fiscal soundness of Dwindle’s guarantee against the sustainable sap’s ‘breakage.’ Of course, Dwindle and all others involved may be courting a deeper doom. Whereas the board biz has made environmental strides — its fragmentation and subsequent profitability collapse has meant swapping road-trip jet fuel for unleaded, and trading in continent-hopping filming expeditions for one-spot vids like Challers’ enjoyable Van Nuys City Hall meditation — the inconvenient truth may be that skateboarding and the natural world fundamentally stand at odds.
None other than Rocco, who issued a Kinkos-quality call to arms in favor of slaying all marine mammals, saw the ugly truth of the thing, urging the skateboard industry to embrace its core identity as the planet’s foe and dominator, while promoting in videos the wanton focusing of decks that served to line the World coffers. This soot-darkened vision portrays skateboarding’s true nature as a Onceler-style devourer of forests, resting atop processed petroleum, turning upon Isengard-ready furnaces and forges that melt the planet’s iron veins into shapes of our own choosing.
Are the 85 servings of water saved with each syrupy gallon of Dwindle’s Super Sap resin offset by the additional acres of farmland and metric tons of irrigation water needed to raise the cotton required to meet consumer demand for Polar’s denim-hungry ‘Big Boy Pants,’ possibly the ‘Thneed’ of the 2020s? Will more nameplate pros follow Stevie Williams’ lead and ditch print photos and mags in favor of the tree-friendly NFT? As carbon sequestration pledges transform hardwood forests into emissions sinks, will the industry at last migrate toward Lib Tech’s fiberglass-ply decks?
Tags: Challers, Chet IVs, Dwindle Distrobusion, Earth Day, Habitat, Lib Tech, NASA shirts, Oscar season, Pancho, Project Pat, Sarumon, sawmill coproducts, Stevie Williams NFT, Super Sap Resin, the Devilman's Gambit, thneeds, Triple Six, Van Nuys City Hall, World Industries
boil the ocean 
May 19, 2021 at 10:22 pm |
I’m not so sure about how tree-friendly NFT’s are: https://decrypt.co/63621/cryptos-carbon-emissions-problem-and-the-projects-trying-to-solve-it