Commodification of everything!

From Mt. Everest to sponsor patches on baseball uniforms and the water we drink. Must everything be for sale?

It’s May and that means the brief window to climb Mt. Everest, the highest piece of real estate on the planet, is open to those who dare.

Dare to challenge the death zone a few thousand feet below the peak at 29,032 feet. It’s so named because at that altitude the human body starts to shut down.

I paid little attention to Everest until I read Jon Krakauer’s seminal book Into Thin Air where he chronicled the tragic events on the mountain in 1996. Eight people died attempting to reach the summit. Krakauer was an experienced high peak climber, a journalist on assignment and was on Everest as events unfolded.

In his book, Krakauer put a spotlight on the fact that a number of those who attempted to summit Everest in 1996 were marginally qualified, but shelled out big bucks to guiding companies to get them to the top.

There were multiple contributors to the tragedy and one was that some of the guided climbers lacked the skill required by the mountain when conditions became unbearable. Or when they couldn’t or refused to recognize their limitations and the need to descend while they were still able.

Thus began in earnest the guiding industry that has mushroomed in the last 30 years, with multiple companies collecting fees from $50,000 to $150,000 depending on the service and amenities you want.

The commercialization of Mt. Everest, my term, is chronicled over 30 plus years in Will Cockrell’s 2024 release, Everest Inc. The book’s subtitle speaks volumes; The Renegades and Rogues Who Built an Industry At the Top of the World.

To fully understand the complexities, and there are many, of Everest’s commercialization it helps to start with Karkauer’s Into Thin Air. But Cockrell’s Everest Inc. includes the basics on Krakauer’s work if you want to take a shortcut.

The essence of Everest, Inc. is that Mt. Everest has become a de facto corporation with all the good and bad aspects that come with corporations.

A subset of Everest’s commercialization is the disrespect for the mountain in that it has been trashed, literally.

Those deep-pocketed wanna be climbers left behind their empty oxygen bottles, trash and human waste as they descended. Only in recent years has there been an Everest clean up campaign mandated by the Nepal and China governments. The Everest summit is accessible from both countries but via Nepal is the preferred route.

Uniform patches

In spite of the magnitude of Mt. Everest, followers of the climbing season and its commercialization are few compared to major league baseball, where commercialization has been on steroids.

Every team now has a sponsor patch on its uniforms, once considered off limits. For the Detroit Tigers it’s Meijer, the grocery “supercenter stores.” For the two most iconic teams, Yankees and Dodgers, it’s the patch of an insurance company and financial adviser firm respectively.

I can think of only one reason for a sponsor patch on a major league baseball uniform: money. It’s expensive to field a World Series winning team like the Dodgers who are paying 14 of their players over $5 million per year in cash salaries. And there will be more via deferred compensation.

What about college sports? Surely esteemed universities would hold the line on commercialization. But no!

The NCAA, governing body for college athletics, recently approved sponsor patches on uniforms. And high profile football programs including Penn State, Ohio State, Georgia, Alabama and more have sold sponsor rights to the playing surface. The University of Michigan remains a holdout, at least for now.

But surely our taxpayer funded national parks like Yellowstone would be free from blatant corporate funding and commercialization?

Not exactly.

Corporate funders to Yellowstone among them ConocoPhillips (oil) Coca-Cola, Canon, Michelin and Toyota channel their contributions through Yellowstone Forever, a 3rd party non-profit philanthropic entity.

Props to those companies but they’re not poets. They see value for their brands by associating with Yellowstone with hopes that it will put them in a favorable light with customers. .

Water

Water for sale? Surely, we as a self-declared civilized society wouldn’t sell our water. Setting aside that the public pays for the water consumed daily.

We already do. The sale of water that’s supposed to be held in trust by governments for the people is easily acquired for a song by bottled water companies to be packaged and sold to, the public.

Go to any big box store and there will be an aisle or two dedicated to water for sale in various package sizes. And the public willingly pays or the store wouldn’t dedicate the space to it.

Meanwhile Michigan for example, has a drinking water affordability problem where some significant number of citizens can’t afford the water that comes from the tap. Efforts to remedy the problem have languished in a dysfunctional legislature and executive branch.

Even the Great Lakes may be for sale as Dave Dempsey has written in two editions of his Great Lakes for Sale book.

In fact, Lake Michigan water is already being sold and it’s all legal. By geography, much of greater Chicago wouldn’t be allowed access to water from Lake Michigan. But a decades old Supreme Court decision allows Chicago to draw water as can a certain and increasing number of suburbs.

And Chicago will be selling water to an exurb city with hopes of more to come as it seeks revenue sources to bolster its struggling finances.

And what about that Supreme Court decision? While it limits the amount of water that can be diverted from Lake Michigan, recent Supreme Court decisions have proven that nothing is forever. It’s not hard to imagine arid areas far from Chicago and the Great Lakes wrangling to get a case before the Supremes in hopes of tapping the Great Lakes.

My point in this ramble is that little is sacred now in our society that’s fixated on consumption and politicians who measure success based on economic growth.

Revenue generating patches on baseball uniforms may be harmless but despoiling Mt. Everest by ego-driven amateur climbers isn’t. Neither is the blatant tolerance of commodification of water to sell in plastic bottles when many can’t afford essential for life drinking water.

Since 2016 and especially since early 2025 there’s ever-increasing chatter from credible observers that the U.S. is in decline. That its star that has shone brightly for a hundred years on the world stage is dimming. For proof, look at the way long time neighbors and allies Canada and Europe are distancing themselves from the U.S. And how quickly it has happened.

The dimming star theory may or not be the case. But our everything for sale, gross consumption and disregard for the rule of law mindset is an indicator.

I’ll close with this. Noted Canadian water rights activist and author Maude Barlow’s new book will be released soon. Earth for Sale: The Fight to Stop The Last Plunder of the Planet.

It doesn’t get more dire.

~ gw

Post script: For an insider’s look at the 1996 Everest tragedy, I recommend a 2020 interview with Neil Beidelman who was a guide on the mountain assisting clients and lived the experience.

Beidelman describes in detail what happened, who was accountable and talks in depth about the efficacy of guiding novice climbers.