We are three: the president of one of America’s oldest ski areas; the president of one of America’s top-five ski and boot companies; and myself, editor of America’s oldest ski publication. As we stood together at a joint NSAA/SIA gathering, the ski area president told us of a recent visit a government official had made to his office. The president had invited this official to his office to review the area’s plans for a new base lodge.
As the review commenced, the president had taken care to demonstrate that the base lodge plan showed sensitivity to the ecology and landscape aesthetics of the ski area’s locale. The state official had remained officious—not much enthusiasm, but no voiced hostility either. As the meeting concluded, the ski area president trusted that, at the very least, he had taken a positive first step in creating a dialogue between the ski area and the official’s agency.
This trust was misplaced.
The area president found out a few days later that as soon as this official returned to his government desk, he had promptly dialed up representatives of three of the most preservation-minded environmental groups in our eco-political system, telling them of the ski area’s as-yet-unannounced plan to develop a new base lodge.
When word got back to the ski area president that the dogs of eco-war had been let loose on him and his project, he called the government official and asked why he had turned what had seemingly been a budding dialogue between the ski area and the government into what would surely become a polemical shouting match between the ski area and the environmental groups.
The answer: “Because I thought they [the environmental groups] needed to know about this.”
This official clearly felt moral and political obligations to environmentalists, but what obligations did he feel to skiers? Chances are he felt little in the way of political or moral obligations to skiers because he had never been lobbied by skiers, only by ski area developers.
Share of mind proceeds from share of voice, and it is share of voice that has given preservation groups their greatest power. Moreover, they have succeeded in large part because they present themselves as something other than as a lobbying group— presenting themselves as a collective of individual citizens acting out of pure moral impulses. Moral piety is a potent source of energy and suasion. It precludes scrutiny, often even defines rational argument. It is stubborn.
It has the sound of a constituency—the sound of votes.
All of which begs these questions:
- Does the sport of skiing not have positive moral attributes?
- If skiing has moral worth—the opportunity for families to come together, for friends to unite in new experiences—do skiers not have the right to argue for their rights as skiers on a moral as well as a political basis?
- If skiers have the right to argue, on a moral basis, for their rights as skiers, should their voices become essential to the public hearings on ski area development?
Put more bluntly, why should ski area operators fight lonely battles against the opponents of ski area development when their voices can be joined with the voices of at least some of the 10 million American skiers who stand to benefit through ecologically responsible ski area development? Skiers are, after all, just as well educated, just as media sophisticated and often more affluent than the environmental preservationists who would confine skiers to ever narrower spaces on the national recreation map.
We in the ski industry may be all over the ethical map when it comes to gun control, but there’s no question that we can learn a great deal from the National Rifle Association. The NRA has become a ferocious—some might say frightening—force when it comes to fighting for the rights of gun owners. The NRA’s power derives in part from the cash that its PACs bestow on political and media campaigns, but its power also comes from its ability to mobilize gun owners, to compel gun owners to make their voices heard.
Could skiers be similarly mobilized? Perhaps if we appeal to them, not as political abstractions, but as skiers. How would skiers answer if asked:
- “Would you like your ski slopes to be safer and more pleasurable for you and your children by being less crowded, by being more expansive?”
- “Would you like your ski slopes to be safer and more pleasurable for you and your children by being covered with better and more machine-made snow?”
- “Would you like your on-mountain lodge facilities to be more comfortable, without imparting undue ecological harm?”
Skiers would most likely answer these questions in terms that would place their political and moral will behind the efforts of responsible ski area developers.
The major ski publications—chiefly Ski, Skiing and Snow Country—have all attempted to educate their readers to the efforts of ski area developers to be responsible stewards of the mountain ecology. But in recent years has anyone—publishers, ski area operators or NSAA—successfully summoned skiers into action when arguing in various public tribunals for ski area developments? Yes, public relations efforts pertinent to ski area development have been directed at skiers, but have there been calls to action—calls in which skiers have been asked to make their voices heard?
What are the key steps in mobilizing skiers as a force to argue for their rights as skiers? Who would the key players be in such a mobilization effort? What sort of communications infrastructure needs to be in place for skiers to be heard?
I don’t ask these questions rhetorically, because I don’t know the answers. But they are questions that need to be wrestled with, and I’d like to hear from anyone who has thoughts on how we proceed on this issue. I can be reached at Ski Magazine, 2 Park Ave., New York, N.Y. 10016.
