Alpine Logistics

Not a dinner with friends goes by that we don’t talk about what a strange winter we’re having this year. For the climbers amongst us it makes life much easier…no frozen fingers on frigid rock…but when I think about what it could mean it’s hard to believe.

Winter 2005/2006 was long and very cold. This winter however nature seems to be on strike. People here in Italy have never seen such little snow…the valley floors are bare and the mountains are splattered with patches of rock or grass where the wind has blown away the meagre snow cover. The ski slopes are all open, but the ski mountaineers and ice climbers are sad and outraged…what’s going on?

At university I studied environmental science. Climate change was one of the topics I found most interesting; learning about how the earth’s climate has been influenced by the evolution of life and visa versa. This of course includes the inevitable topic of how humans have influenced the planet…global warming, melting ice, changing sea currents, climate patterns and species’ habitats.

I ploughed through endless journals with graphs and diagrams showing the results of complex experiments on the effects or predictions of change. Of course it all sounded very dramatic but somehow seemed far removed from real life. This winter has struck a poignant note here in the local community. Will all winters be like this from now on or is this just a freak? What will happen to our glaciers, mountains, streams, forests and meadows if the climate here becomes drier? Will they become like the deserted Andean mountains of South America? It’s a terrifying thought…not that the planet shouldn’t evolve as it always has done, but that we’re all contributing to such dramatic changes. So what can we do? Do I have to stop using my car? Stop flying abroad? Consume less energy?

The planet and the universe are huge but the big picture couldn’t exist without the contribution of its individual components. Each one of us is a small yet essential component; just as ‘en mass’ we have managed to create such huge scale changes, we now each have to do our bit to put things right.

If every person made one less car journey a day and one less flight a year for example, multiply that by the number of people in the western world and we’d have avoided a lot of pollution. It doesn’t have to mean a complete change of lifestyle, regression or massive sacrifice.