Blue Pages

How Green Is That Scorecard?

The Ski Area Citizens’ Coalition (SACC)’s annual Ski Area Environmental Scorecard has created more than its share of headaches for ski areas lately. First, previous years’ scorecards were used by two university professors to evaluate the effectiveness of NSAA’s Sustainable Slopes program. The professors used the SACC data from 2001 and 2002 because they considered it the only available source of unbiased third-party information, but they backpedaled some after their report was criticized by areas on several grounds: first, SACC data does not reflect the environmental activities fostered by Sustainable Slopes, second, because the data is often based on inaccurate estimates made by SACC, and third, SACC is not exactly unbiased.