Arizona Ski Resort’s Sewage Plan Creates Uproar

The following is an excerpt from an article in:


The New York Times
Thursday, September 27, 2012

Arizona Ski Resort’s Sewage Plan Creates Uproar

By LESLIE MACMILLAN

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. — Klee Benally, a member of the Navajo tribe, has gone to the mountains just north of here to pray, and he has gone to get arrested. He has chained himself to excavators; he has faced down bulldozers. For 10 years, the soft-spoken activist has fought a ski resort’s expansion plans in the San Francisco Peaks that include clear-cutting 74 acres of forest and piping treated sewage effluent onto a mountain to make snow.

But he appears to be losing the battle.

In February, a federal appeals court ruled in favor of the ski resort’s upgrade plans, ending a legal saga fought by a coalition of environmental groups and 13 American Indian tribes, which consider the mountain sacred and view the wastewater snow as a desecration.

This coming ski season, the resort, Arizona Snowbowl, will become the first ski resort in the world to use 100 percent sewage effluent to make artificial snow.

“It’s a disaster, culturally and environmentally,” said Taylor McKinnon of the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the plaintiffs. He worries about the impact on the delicate alpine tundra and to human health should skiers fall into the treated sewer-water snow and ingest it.

The United States Forest Service, which owns the land where the resort is, says the treated water meets the highest standards — just below drinking water — and is already used to irrigate golf courses, soccer fields and parks, according to Corbin Newman, a regional forester.

“Snow-making has become necessary because of climate change,” he said. It allows for a more consistent ski season, bringing money into neighboring Flagstaff, which contracted to sell Snowbowl the water from its sewage treatment plant.

The dispute runs deeper than water. It has erupted into protests, hunger strikes and multiple arrests and has become a political jostling point for Senator John McCain of Arizona and the Obama administration. At one point Snowbowl’s owner, Eric Borowsky, declared that if the resort lost its legal bid to make snow, “radical groups would achieve their ultimate goal of control of our nation’s resources.”

Indeed, the battle has put this picturesque city, about an hour southeast of the Grand Canyon, on the frontier of what many say is the new war for the West’s public lands. It does not involve ranchers, miners or loggers, but centers on the burgeoning outdoor recreation industry, which some say is expanding at the expense of the environment.

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