Skiers, we have two important news for you. The good news: the snow, which was cruelly lacking since the beginning of the winter, finally fell on our mountains, just in time for the school holidays of winter of the French… The bad news: the ski is a devastating leisure in terms of environment, by the massive consumption of mountain space, natural resources and energy which it implies. During the weeks to come, hundreds of thousands of holiday makers will fill up the stations, with strong repercussions. Your stay with the winter sports, if it makes you the largest good, is likely to represent a small ecological catastrophe. You however do not cover the head of ashes, that would harm your future bronzing; rather try to follow this series of councils.

Flee the giant skiables fields, announcing hundreds of kilometers of tracks: the pleasure of anything is not bound, one knows it, with the size… The tendency marketing of the industry of the ski, it is “the interconnection” of the stations. In fact, a trap with gogos: the price of the fixed prices explodes, the tracks of connection is often punts, tedious and requires work of ski lifts and artificial snow to the terrible effects on the fragile mountain ecosystems. Even the very good skiers do not manage any more to cross certain fields in one day: where is the interest? Better is thus worth to choose the stations villages and averages, not the large towns of altitude whose population explodes each winter without the infrastructures being inevitably adapted, in particular in terms of station of purification. The Arcs, in Savoy, for example, pass from 900 permanent inhabitants to 30.000 inhabitants of passage in high season. The great stations all are in a logic of expansion in the name of sacro-holy “the request”. You will thus play, by choosing family stations with human size, an essential role. The ski is often better there, the more human reception, the landscape more respected.

With the garage, the car! To cross France in the car, to risk the stoppers, to encumber the disgracieux carparks, to contribute to the serious air pollution of the principal valleys… The culpability could corrode you well on the chair-lift. Use public transport, the train in particular, to return to you in the solid masses. From the stations, buses always bring you in station at moderate price. On the spot, of the systems of shuttles are in place. If not, dare the covoiturage: it is much less complicated than that has the air thanks to Internet of it and certain stations grant reductions to the courageous one.

Snow is not a Continuez dustbin to sort in station! Encourage the stations which jumped the step. Especially, take care anything to leave behind you in the mountain. Orange peelings very as much as the quills of aluminum, energy papers of bars like cigarette ends. Think how the mountain medium takes longer than other natural environments to digest waste, and than the frequentation of the same sites of picnic, winter after winter, is enormous! Smokers, welcome on the opened increase, but you provide imperatively with these ashtrays of pocket sympas on sale in all the good stations: association Mountain Riders (to read below), familiar of tiresome cleanings under the chair-lifts the come summer, ensures to have collected a record of 30.000 cigarette ends under a chair-lift.

Tartiflette house For your food, privilege the local or regional products (reblochon, cheese of ewe of the Pyrenees…). The effort is paying: it allows the reduction of pollution related to the road transport and the local agricultural production must be at all costs constant, so that the ski seasonal activity is not the only resource of the mountain dwellers.