By Daniel Plourde, Ottawa Citizen, December 11, 2017
With the ski season rapidly approaching, many resorts across Canada are beginning to prepare to make artificial snow, a process that has become an annual tradition. Although snow-making has been used extensively since the early 1970s, we now see it used more and more because of climate change and declining annual snow cover across the nation. In fact, according to Statistics Canada, the mean annual snow cover in Canada declined by 5.1 per cent from 1972 to 2010.
Unfortunately, the process of snow-making is a very environmentally demanding one, and it seems to be often overlooked when we talk about human processes that are detrimental to the environment. This issue begs the question: Do we really need to be making artificial snow?
http://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/plourde-making-artificial-snow-is-a-very-slippery-slope