October 15, 2004

MAA's plans deserve this black eye

By Jay Lininger
Ashland

When the Ski Area Citizens' Coalition issued a report card giving Mt. Ashland a D‚ for poor environmental performance, the Tidings criticized it as a "flawed test (that) gives flawed results."

The Tidings said the report presented a no-win situation for the Mt. Ashland Association because "there is no right answer. Any attempts to reduce the environmental impact of a ski area expansion will not help the score."

That is exactly the point. Ski areas proposing expansion into pristine wildlands deserve bad environmental ratings. If you think expansion is good for business and you covet a "green" image, as the MAA obviously does, then you would expand in a place where the environmental costs truly are minimal.

Instead, the MAA and U.S. Forest Service pushed expansion into the Middle Fork of the East Fork of Ashland Creek, a place recognized by literally tens of thousands of people as inappropriate for industrial development.

Expansion in the Middle Fork would destroy old-growth forest and critical recovery habitat for threatened northern spotted owl. The destruction would be permanent. If we clear-cut the forest now, it will not grow back.

Development of roadless lands also would be irreversible. Apologists say expansion only affects 60 acres, less than one percent, of the McDonald Peak Roadless Area. Any single incursion of roadless habitat may be viewed as small and insignificant. But, if we broaden our view to consider the whole landscape, we see that roadless lands are rarer and more important than they used to be. The science of conservation biology teaches that all remaining roadless lands should be preserved in order to maintain functional living systems on Earth.

Almost all of the Middle Fork expansion overlaps roadless lands, old forest and riparian areas with actively flowing streams and wetlands that feed our drinking water supply.

Mt. Ashland will earn a better grade if the MAA pursues expansion options that avoid environmental impacts rather than trying to mitigate them. The report card authors stated their intent to discourage resorts from doing harm in the first place.

The community offered several good expansion alternatives that would help Mt. Ashland avoid this black eye. One offered by a group of ski area users and Headwaters would expand downhill and to the west of the current development without impacting the Middle Fork and associated wetlands.