Washington Post - Denise Hruby
‘If we don’t start taking action now, then when are we going to?’
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10min 44sec
![Windmills power part of the Lachtal ski resort in the eastern stretches of the Austrian Alps.]()
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Windmills power part of the Lachtal ski resort in the eastern
stretches of the Austrian Alps.
(Denise Hruby for The Washington Post)
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OBERWÖLZ, Austria — At the Lachtal ski resort, high in the eastern Alps
of Austria, skiers immediately pull out their phones after sliding off the
chairlift — not to take selfies, but rather to snap pictures of the windmills
that have become part of the mountainous vista.
When the first windmills were built here in 2002, at about 7,290 feet, many
tourists saw the massive blades as an eyesore. But as the wind park grew and
expanded, so did skiers’ environmental conscience. Today, locals and tourists
are proud to ski among the backdrop.
“When I ride up with them and eavesdrop, they’re usually impressed,” says
Rudolf Wiesnegger, who maintains the wind park and adjacent solar panels.
“They comment that it’s great for the environment,” he says.
There are few places where climate change is as tangible as in the Alps;
Europe’s largest mountain range has been warming at
twice
the global average.
Snow has become scarcer, and glaciers are
receding dramatically. Skiers see it when they ride down slopes sprayed with
artificial snow, and they are increasingly concerned that their favorite sport
helps damage the very environment they’re seeking.
Skiers and spectators have been flabbergasted by this year’s Winter Olympics
in Beijing. Just as the LED snowflakes that sparkled during the Opening
Ceremonies weren’t real, the snow that skiers and snowboarders are competing
on isn’t natural, either.
The Alpine competitions are held in the
brown mountains around Zhangjiakou, on white bands of snow entirely created
with machines that need massive amounts of water and electricity.
“It’s just crazy,” says Cécile Burton, a French-British national who grew up
skiing but switched to snowboarding when she moved to the village of Morzine,
a popular ski destination in the French Alps.
Burton heads Montagne Verte, or Green Mountain, an association trying to make
skiing more sustainable. She is among those who have begun to counteract the
sport’s impact on the planet. In making their favorite sport more sustainable,
an increasing number of skiers are hoping to secure its future.
“We’re definitely seeing that people worry about this, that they are aware
that ski holidays are not very sustainable — but [they] can be,” the
30-year-old says.
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A windmill in the eastern Alps of Austria. (Denise Hruby for The Washington Post)
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Counterproductive’ Winter Olympics
The Winter Olympics, once a flagship ad for winter sports, have an
increasingly negative reputation among skiers (and not just because the Games’
leaders ignore hosts’ human rights records).
Conditions during the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver and four years later
in Sochi, Russia, were “
too warm for even advanced snowmaking technology,” so snow had to be trucked or flown in from elsewhere.
Zhangjiakou, where the climate is so dry it basically never snows,
might be the worst advertising for winter sports thus far, says Peter
Zellmann, head of the institute for leisure and tourism research in Austria.
Instead of inspiring amateur athletes, “holding Olympic Games the
way this is happening in China is counterproductive and has a negative impact
on [winter] tourism,” Zellmann says.
And yet it might be a glimpse into the future.
Previous host
cities already belong to the fastest-warming locations worldwide, and if
greenhouse gas emissions aren’t dramatically reduced, 20 of the 21
destinations that have previously hosted the Winter Olympics wouldn’t be able
to do so by the end of the century, according to
recent research, led by the department of geography and environmental management at the
University of Waterloo in Canada.
The only exception would be
Sapporo in Japan.
“In terms of the climate, it’s complete madness,” says Laura Gantenbein, a
28-year-old who saw the images of Zhangjiakou on TV in her home in
Switzerland, where she grew up skiing and snowboarding. Hefty ticket prices
already keep the budding lawyer from hitting the slopes as frequently as she
used to, but increasingly, she says, she’s also worried about the impact on
the environment.
Even in the mountainous Engadin valley,
birthplace of Gantenbein’s mother and of Alpine winter sports, she now finds
that snow cannons are ubiquitous. “And all that does make you think: Is that
still ok?” she says.
The industry is feeling that pressure, too, says Robert Steiger, who
researches winter tourism at the department of public finance at the
University of Innsbruck in the Austrian Alps. Though skiers aren’t yet
dropping their favorite sport, “it’s going to be a big topic in the future,”
Steiger says.
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The Lachtal ski resort in Austria.
(Denise Hruby for The Washington Post)
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Solar, wind and the world’s shortest subway If you
visit the ski resort of Morzine, you can stay in hotels that have installed
solar panels and dine in restaurants that serve local produce rather than
over-harvested fish — all thanks to help and nudging from Montagne Verte, the
sustainable skiing association.
On a cable-car ride to Matterhorn, the iconic Swiss mountain shaped like a
jagged tooth, you’ll find solar panels reflecting off the
base station. And if you turn on a television in See, a municipality in Austria’s narrow
Paznaun valley, you’ll learn that the hydropower plant along its mountain
brooks generates enough electricity to run the cable cars and produce snow.
The excess of about 9.5 gigawatt hours, enough for more than 200
households, is fed into the grid.
Not just ski resorts, but the International Ski Federation (FIS) is taking a
different tone, too. Just three years ago, Gian Franco Kaspar, then head of
the FIS, said “there is no evidence” for “so-called climate change” in a
Tagesanzeiger interview.
But the group’s new president, Johan Eliasch, a Swedish British billionaire,
told The Washington Post that skiing needs to “act in harmony with nature and
not against it,” and that he feels “a personal responsibility to reduce the
impact of our activities on the climates.” Aside from buying a rainforest to
protect it from logging, Eliasch also pledged that the FIS will cut its
emissions by half by 2030.
The key will be to no longer chase wintry conditions across the globe, and for
the race schedule to be optimized.
At least one site — Zermatt in
Switzerland — will now begin to accommodate year-round training for all ski
teams, and next season, Eliasch says, races will also be held by regional
blocks to decrease travel.
That would address the single biggest source of emissions caused by the
world’s 135 million skiers: Depending on the mode and distance to the
destination, traveling accounts for up to 86 percent of emissions from a ski
holiday, according to a
report
published in the journal Mountain Research and Development.
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The Lachtal ski resort.
(Denise Hruby for The Washington Post/FTWP)
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Some destinations have begun tackling that problem through electric
buses or bicycles.
Skiers in Serfaus, Austria, can board the
world’s shortest subway
on one of four stops through the 1,100-resident village. And the Swiss village
of Saas-Fee was already car-free when Wham filmed the music video for “Last
Christmas” there in 1984.
Generally, however, visitors still get to both destinations by car and park in
one of thousands of designated spots. Emissions from traveling to Morzine had
Montagne Verte pondering, too. Most of its tourists are young Brits who fly to
nearby Geneva, with round-trip fares going for less than $100.
To
get people to opt for the pricier but environment-friendly railroad, Morzine
now offers train travelers discounts for ski lessons, drinks and dinner — and,
next year, even for expensive lift tickets.
That, however, addresses only the extra costs of train travel, not the
nuisance of having to swap trains several times.
Looking at the
rail network, Burton and her colleagues realized that a direct connection from
Lille, a major hub for the Eurostar, would be possible. Next year, Montagne
Verte plans to charter a train and fill it with 500 skiers.
“You want to go to the mountains on a ski holiday? Well, make sure it’s still
there in 25 years. Start changing the way you do things,” Burton says.
With a successful pilot run, Montagne Verte hopes to convince the national
train services of France to create a direct connection. It’s an uphill battle,
Burton admits, especially given the vast subsidies granted to
fossil-fuel-burning industries like airlines.
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Tauernwind boasts a total of 10 windmills, each with a rotor
diameter of 367 feet.
(Denise Hruby for The Washington Post)
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Power in numbers It’s these bigger-picture
policies on which local efforts often hit a wall, says Jeremy Jones, who
founded Protect Our Winters (POW), a U.S.-based association trying to get
politicians to take action.
Jones, a former professional snowboarder, became engaged in climate action
after a 2005 trip to Prince Rupert, Canada, where locals showed him a small
ski area that had been forced to stop operating.
He started
switching to more efficient lightbulbs and saving water but soon realized that
the sweeping changes necessary to reach climate goals had to come from
politicians.
To get them to act, POW aims to “unify the outdoor state” — or the roughly 50
million Americans who ski, hike, surf or take part in similar activities. That
potential voter base, Jones says, is 10 times larger than the National Rifle
Association’s active members.
“There are a lot of politicians that are afraid to cross the NRA because they
are afraid they’ll lose their job, that they will not get reelected,” says
Jones, now 52 and a father of two.
“We need to make it so that
politicians view climate in that same manner, where when they take a bad vote
on climate, a pro vote for fossil fuels, they will lose their job in the next
election,” he says.
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Windmills in the eastern Alps. (Denise Hruby for The Washington
Post)
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Ski idols like Mike Douglas, known as the godfather of freestyle skiing
— now an Olympic discipline — have joined POW, as have younger, emerging
talents, like the teenage skier Kai Jones and snowboarder Bea Kim, who hopes
to compete in the next Winter Olympics.
In the last national
election cycle, POW’s nonpartisan “pledge to vote” campaign reached 30,000
people, many of them nonvoters or considered unlikely to vote.
“If we don’t start taking action now, then when are we going to?” Kim says.
In the 2018 election in Montana, POW pushed for climate coverage in local
papers and helped 800 voters register.
Democrat Jon Tester — who
says
the impact of climate change on his own farm is “starting to scare the hell
out of me” and who campaigned for an energy transition that would create
high-paying jobs — secured reelection with 50.3 percent of the vote.
Across the Alps, too, politicians are increasingly addressing climate change,
Steiger says — especially in areas like Tyrol, an Austrian province where
every fourth job depends on the winter tourism industry. Last year, the state
government ordered all ski resorts to become climate-neutral by 2035.
“The political will is there,” Steiger says, “just how it’s put into action
remains to be seen.”
At Lachtal, for one, that means that the wind farm is going to be extended
within the next five years, and the 2-megawatt solar panels will be increased
to about 10 megawatts.
Four years from now, the Winter Olympics will return to Cortina d’Ampezzo, in
the Italian Alps, which already hosted the Games in 1956. Back then, winter
temperatures remained low, skiing conditions were excellent and the Olympic
flag was framed by snow-covered mountains.
Much will have changed in 2026, when Kim, the POW snowboarder, hopes to
compete. Until then, Kim, now 15 years old, wants to help “convince people to
go outside and just to see how magical it is,” she says.
“Hopefully,
they’ll — out of their own conscious — start trying to protect it.”
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