Is anyone else getting a bit fed up of reading weepy newspaper stories about how the skiing industry is being killed off by climate change? Apparently, 80 ski resorts in the Alps have already closed for good due to a lack of snow, and according to the OECD only 400 of the 666 ski areas in the Alps will remain viable if global temperatures rise by 2º above what they were in the mid 19th century.
If we lose 250 ski resorts that would be a gain for the mountains, as far as I am concerned. I suspect many people who visit the Alps in the summer will agree with me. There is no fairly tale charm then, just a mess of pylons and wires. Want to know what those manicured pistes look like when the snow is gone? Underneath, they are crudely bulldozed trackways, with inconvenient rocks shunted out of the way. Come June and your typical Alpine ski resort looks like the HS2 construction site – but where construction never ends.
Skiing didn’t begin like this. It started with locals strapping on skis and going out into the landscape, as they found it. Even when downhill skiing started to become popular in the 1930s it was small-scale, taking place on natural pistes. What’s more, it was accepted that you were limited by the weather, and there might not always be enough snow. Many of the ski resorts that have closed in recent years have been at altitudes no higher than Ben Nevis – one of the recent closures, La Sambuy, near Albertville, is at 1,200 metres. You can’t expect reliable snow at that level, at a latitude of 45º north, with or without climate change. Only greed ever made the operators of these resorts think they could run a lucrative ski industry from November to April.
I have no issue with cross-country skiing, or with ski touring, where adventurers head off over the mountains – and the glaciers in summer – leaving no trace of where they have been other than a pair of temporary ski tracks in the snow. But the mass-market downhill ski industry is horrid. Why can’t these coiffured fools in designer ski gear walk up the mountains before they ski down them? Then at least we wouldn’t have to put up with the ski lifts. As for the middle-class skiers bleating that they can no longer show off their environmental credentials because Eurostar has withdrawn its ski train and now they must fly, how utterly hypocritical. There is nothing environmentally-friendly about a downhill skiing industry, ever. It amounts to no less than the rape of the mountains.
I am concerned about rewilding of productive farmland and what it means for the security of our food supply, but here is a case where we really should have rewilding. Pull out those ghastly ski lifts and return the slopes to nature. Turn the lower slopes back into flower-flecked meadows and the upper slopes into the boulder fields they want to be. You could still go skiing if you wanted to – only you would have to pick your way through a natural, or lightly touched, landscape.
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