Frank Scura’s green ideas are sick
17 Aug 2006
With the recent profusion of green takes on everything from diapers to caskets, Frank Scura’s proposition might sound like more of the same: “We’re about greening the planet, one skateboard at a time.” But Scura, founder of the Bay Area-based Action Sports Environmental Coalition, isn’t your average environmentalist. And action sports — that heavily marketed package of adrenaline-infused competition undertaken on oceans of plywood — is a little different too.
For one thing, it has a cool factor so appealing that mass-marketers can’t keep their TV cameras off it. At the start of August, about 140,000 people saw X Games 12 in person in Los Angeles, and nearly a million households watched on prime-time TV. In fact, 100 million Americans consume some form of ESPN every week. Scura is sure he can use that type of exposure to transform action sports into the vanguard of green consciousness.
