The Impact of Skiing and Tourism on Mountain Environments - Essay Example

The Impact of Skiing and Tourism on Mountain Environments A few years ago, skiing was an elite game practiced by a small number of hard souls. Hotels had now started to remain open to lengthen the resorts season, mainly for summer holidays, attracting affluent clients that could meet the expense of travel. During the 1920s, the alpine nations started to build ski lifts, which boosted the popularity of skiing to new heights. At the same time, with modernization as well as the progress of new tools and systems, skiing attracted additional fans. In the present day, forty million skiers can travel to any three hundred main alpine ski resorts all over the main mountain chains of forty nations. These figures signify the sudden increase of skiing tourism (Coleman, p. 57, 2004). According to ecologists, the enormous increase in skiing since the 1970s has had several effects on mountain water levels of lakes as well as streams; harmed mountain wildlife by the destruction of surroundings, noise and contamination as well as disturbing yearly weather conditions. Winter is a significant source of earnings and the activities such as skiing; snowboarding, hiking and ice climbing rely greatly on snow. Nonetheless, very few people ever actually stop to think about the impact the activity on the mountain as well as its eco-system. For instance, “orange peel requires more or less two years to break down, butts of cigarette will stay on the hillside for more or less 5 years before the atmosphere breaks them down, when skiing through trees, and one can harm them by knocking off branches as well as killing little shoots beneath” (ETUP, pp. 65-77, 2000). The growing popularity of skiing in addition to concurrent growth of the ski industry has generated a demand to build bigger lodging blocks in the popular resorts but with restricted space for new apartments and chalets, this forces further wearing away of the adjoining hillsides with the purpose of fulfilling accommodation requirements. In order to carry on with the tourist demand for the activity, these days, resorts are in stress to construct more lifts with quicker as well as higher skier ability. This progress in resort amenities eventually generates a 'catch 22' condition as amount of people visiting the resort rises, which in response, generates pressure to develop transport connections to these places and thus, the cycle goes on. The indirect cost of the raise in human wealth and delight is to the detriments of the mountain and its associated environmental situations. Mountains are very receptive to severe alterations that human beings are presently inflicting on them. The recurring harm as well as environmental changes that people impose on the mountains is hard to repair. It will not take a year or two for things to get back to normal (Beniston, pp. 46-57, 1994). Human created environmental harm, which results in unpredictable climate changing patterns, with forecasts together with more rain as well as melting glaciers that will result in attrition and overflows on large scale. Poor snow records, diminishing glaciers and unusual weather patterns are few of the implications of these alterations for the alpine in recent years (Clifford, p. 33, 2003) High temperatures noticed in the summer of 2002 caused a few of the European glaciers to move away by more or less 10 percent creating doubt between some weather experts that in fifty years glaciers could possibly melt away. Since stress rises on the ski businesses to construct higher into the mountains to get to snow consistent regions, receptive high mountainous surroundings influenced eventually. The raise in universal temperatures will have a severe implication for a lot of ski resorts situated at lower altitudes. It is not just as easy as going higher to acquire extra snow. Change in mountain environment is decreasing the snowfall in a lot of previously snow-safe resorts, and scientists have discovered that increasing temperatures are already leading to alterations in snowfall patterns. Alpine regions lower than 1600 meters are currently getting 20 percent less snow. Rising figures of resorts all over the globe are depending on synthetically produced snow. Such as in Austria as well as in Italy, more than 40 percent of ski regions currently have to create their own snow, and even Switzerland, where earlier than 1990 snow forming was more or less unheard of, now utilizes snow cannons in over 10 percent of its ski regions. Basically, at the present, no ski region can carry on without synthetic snow; one will face immense problems if it will not have it. Dependence on snow producing machines carries with it several setbacks. Not just is it an enormously costly as well as exceptionally ‘energy hungry’ procedure, but synthetic snow causes continuing harm to the plant life beneath as a consequence of the chemical stabilizers it includes. The ‘greater than ever’ popularity of downhill skiing makes traffic jam as well as contamination in ski regions, new hotel and chalet expansions spread out across formerly calm rural mountain communities, and the infrastructure of ski lifts wipes out both the visual appearance of the mountainside as well as its habitat (Gossling & Hall, p. 58, 2006). As lower altitudes have difficulties with snow cover, there is a propensity to shift resorts more and more up into the mountains, into regions that are frequently the final stronghold for endangered species of plants and animals. More or less, 12 percent of the world’s human population reside in the mountains, with another 14 percent residing adjacent to or very near mountain regions and reliant on their resources. “Of these individuals, almost half are concentrated in the Andes, the Hengduan-Himalaya-Hindu Kush system and a range of various African mountains” (Godde & Price, pp. 30-41, 2000). Despite the fact that mountains in the northern hemisphere occupied not intensively, a number of tropical mountain regions have inhabitants’ densities of more than 400 people per square kilometre (Godde & Price, pp. 30-41, 2000). For the most part, mountain communities are rural, and the majority live in poor quality. These communities usually have little or no political authority and are reliant on financial systems based for the most part on barter trade as well as farming. Mountain ecosystems hold significant communal, cultural, environmental, as well as financial importance for the physical condition and source of revenue of these communities, and their close association with the land has facilitated them to develop exclusive cultural individualities, information and expertise. Mountain communities take account of several thousand diverse cultural groups, and the exclusivity as well as range of these cultures is mainly attractive to a lot of travellers. Well-managed mountain skiing can be a supporter in safeguarding local culture as well as standards, though at the same time recovering the communal situations of the underprivileged and local communities. Poorly managed mountain skiing, on the other hand, can put in to the loss of cultural integrity as well as individuality by means of cultural incorporation (Chon, p. 87, 2004). Mountain landscapes are mainly fragile and at risk of alteration and dreadful conditions. Avalanches, storms, lava flows, earthquakes, torrents (Sandford, pp. 23-39, 2010) along with rock falls can modify the countryside all of a sudden. Mountain ecological units take account of an extensive sort of small and exclusive environments, with bionetwork that may have extremely short rising and reproductive terms, and may be predominantly receptive to interruption by human activity. Mountain skiing activities often entail the progress and extreme use of tracks, paths along with sports slopes by means of transport, non-motorized transport as well as pedestrian traffic (Sandford, pp. 23-39, 2010). Tourist existence is as well regularly concentrated in small regions, chipping in to increased noise and ravage. The harmful environmental effects of badly supervised skiing activities can take account of vegetation clearing and soil wearing away, elimination of limited habitat, changing of significant landscapes as well as water flows, water and air contamination, and flora and fauna replacement or behavioural alterations. The introduction of unusual as well as persistent species and ailments can as well have a major harmful impact on local plant and animal species. Mountain communities can as well be very vulnerable to impacts and alteration from skiing activities. The harmful communal impacts of badly managed skiing can take account of troubles from high levels, as well as concentrations of tourist noise and movement, and reduced accessibility of resources such as wood, fish and fresh water. Additionally, contact to and implementation of distant customs, standard of livings and products can cause a risk to the exclusive culture, customs, knowledge and source of revenues of mountain populations, mainly in secluded and aboriginal communities (Hechenblaikner & Weski, p. 99, 2009). At the same time, as skiing can offer important local employment, if not appropriately managed, this employment can be temporary as well as seasonal, providing little expertise building or training to local individuals. Working circumstances can be meagre, and income can simply leak out of local financial systems to externally owned businesses. On the other hand, well-managed tourism can play a significant role in attracting profits and sustaining poverty improvement. It can as well develop infrastructure, provide community services and aid expanding local financial systems. Employment as well as profits can sequentially develop the independence and sustainability of mountain communities. Mountain based skiing operators can have substantial power in reduction of harmful impacts and endorsing positive impacts by implementing high-quality environmental and communal ways in their tour procedures. Responsible practices can facilitate in increasing the superiority of tourist experiences and maintain the practicability of tourism businesses by sheltering the biodiversity; maintaining the habitats as well as landscapes and sustaining the communities that tourists are coming to see (Hudson, p. 65, 1999). References Beniston, Martin. 1994. Mountain Environments in Changing Climates. Routledge. Chon, K. S. 2004. The Tourism and Leisure Industry. Routledge. Clifford, H. 2003. Downhill Slide: Why the Corporate Ski Industry is Bad for Skiing, Ski Towns, and the Environment. Sierra Club Books. Coleman, Annie G. 2004. Ski Style: Sport and Culture in the Rockies. University Press of Kansas. ETUP. 2000. Resort Management in Europe. Cengage Learning. Godde, Pam & Price, Martin F. 2000. Tourism and Development in Mountain Regions. CABI. Gossling, S. and Hall, M. C. 2006. Tourism and Global Environmental Change: Ecological, Economic, Social and Political Interrelationships. Routledge. Hechenblaikner, L. and Weski, T. 2009. Off Piste: An Alpine Story. Dewi Lewis Pub. Hudson, S. 1999. Snow Business: A Study of the International Ski Industry. Cengage Learning Business Press. Sandford, Robert W. 2010. Our World’s Heritage. Athabasca University Press. Read More