In modern times, skiing was considered a natural sport by which the people who practiced it interacted with nature. Today, the postmodern technological paradigm has transformed the mountain landscape through the incorporation of trails, housing developments, lifts, artificial snow systems, and grooming machines. The mountain is adapted to the users’ needs through the modification of the terrain: it is flattened, widened, free of trees, and built; in short, it is urbanized.
However, the mountain has transformed us into postmodern individuals: instead of climbing the mountain by foot, we now utilize ski lifts, from rough slopes to ‘groomed’ runs, to artificial jumps, trampolines, and ‘half pipes’ in ‘snow parks’.
In modernity, skiing was done on natural winter snow on a remote mountain. In postmodernity, skiing has become an urban sport, since it is practiced all year round on any hill on artificial slopes or in the renowned ‘Indoor Ski-centers’, which are nothing more than gigantic sheds with a sloping surface, artificial snow and lifts.
Skiing has evolved from being an ecocentric practice in modernity to an egocentric one in postmodernity. Nature is there, but we are so immersed in ourselves that we do not notice it, let alone protect it. Under the Heideggerian conception, skiing is basically an egocentric practice because our primary objective, instead of promoting an authentic relationship with nature, tends to be to appropriate, illusorily, the mountain by gliding over it.
