What Happens When Nature Changes?

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Rosalie Lipfert is a Cornish resident and recent Dartmouth graduate. She spent this past summer in Bern, Switzerland’s capital, working on a climate change through storytelling project as part of a Swiss research grant. She interviewed mountain guides in the Valais region on the changes in the landscape they have witnessed throughout their lifetimes. The idea behind the project was to set aside political differences and make the topic of climate change approachable to a larger audience. Here is a segment she wrote as part of a larger document describing her findings, the geologic history of the area, and her own personal reflections throughout the summer.

People say that long travel journeys have four stages: the Honeymoon Phase, the Frustration (or rage) Phase, the Understanding Phase and the Acceptance Phase. Throughout my travels, I’ve noticed that no matter how aware I am of some theory trying to tell me how my life is going to pan out, this evolution of mindsets proves to be true.

The Honeymoon Phase of travel is that initial stage when just walking around soaking in all the new sights, sounds, and smells makes you smile. For me, this involved evening walks across Bern’s Kornhausbrücke, glancing down at the Aare and the swimmers floating by below me, then looking up to see rows of medieval houses. Hikes in the mountains through rolling lush green, then deep coniferous forests, and finally bare rock and snow. Smelling the cool and dry mountain air while being soaked by the sun and hearing the sound of cowbells ringing in the distance. Trips to the grocery store staring at the overwhelming yogurt selections. Biking through Bern and enjoying the double S-turn downhill on my way to work, smiling all the way.

Eventually, this stage comes to an end. All the newness becomes less new, the excitement less exciting, and the beauty less beautiful — or at least more normal. You begin to notice the less glamorous aspects of a place and its people and find flaws in the government and how the country runs.

My entry into the so-called frustration stage hit me all at once. Realizing that I miss my friends dearly and can count on one hand the number of people I know here, coming down with a cold, and experiencing multiple running injuries, occurred nearly simultaneously. That was certainly enough to bring me down from my seemingly never-ending high of fairytale-esque bliss.

As with all injuries, feeling these pains in my legs created mental repercussions. I became irritable, sad, lonely and critical. I noticed things that I hadn’t yet before. Or that I hadn’t allowed myself to notice:

There are bugs here. Not just non-biting flies near cows, but also horseflies and mosquitos. 

There is graffiti all over — mostly near train stations. Not necessarily a bad thing — but enough to prove that Switzerland is not absolutely pristine. 

The buildings in Bern were built at a time when wealth was supposed to be hidden, so while they are pretty in their antiquity, they also lack color and ornateness. 

The bike path along the river either smells like garlic or sewage, or depending on where you are, sometimes alternates between the two.

In comparison to tracts of conserved and preserved U.S. land, there is no real “wilderness” here. According to my flatmate, Switzerland is like one big park. The land is either inhabited, farmed or forested. And according to him, the trees in the forests have been pruned and nearly “hand-selected.” 

Let me expand on this point. The more you look around, the more you notice that man has touched, walked on, carved, crushed, drilled, chopped, exploded or “corrected” nearly every bit of nature here. Rocks lie at the bottoms of mad-made lakes, dams stand beneath these lakes and control the water level for rivers below, retaining walls hold up soil layers, and fences and netting surround buildings and line the sides of roads to catch falling rocks and boulders.

Turning the rugged landscape of the Swiss Alps into your home is not easy. It takes a certain type of person to withstand the harsh conditions of mountain living — someone with a tough body and perservering mind. And these harsh conditions are nothing new; they have existed for thousands of years. Because of this, mountain dwellers have developed an intense faith in infrastructure. Exploded rock tunnels, dams for glacial runoff, retaining walls and highway netting — these are all engineering inventions that have saved the lives of mountain dwellers and that allow for the continued inhabitation of these areas. 

But what happens when nature changes? 

Unfortunately, man-made structures do not change with it. Or rather they change, but they do not adapt.  As John McPhee astutely points out in his The Control of Nature, when the Army Corps of Engineers attempted to straighten the Mississippi River in the 1950s, floods resulted when water levels ran high and the river was not allowed to follow its natural curving path. Today, the city of New Orleans sits atop the silt that is deposited from the Mississippi. 

Much of the work that civil engineers do nowadays involves making corrections to current infrastructure that is no longer able to withstand the needs of nature. For instance, after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, engineers realized that the levees were not built high enough. The solution: build higher levees.

The same thinking goes on here in Switzerland. For instance, my flatmate’s engineering company was responsible for protecting a house near Gstaad from being hit by falling boulders. Their solution: surround the house with a protection wall. (And not to figure out why more boulders may be falling now than ever before). He also mentioned how some rivers that were straightened in Switzerland must now be further widened. 

So now, with some knowledge regarding the Swiss landscape, I cannot look at agricultural plots with my New Hampshirite eyes without wondering when the land was deforested, where the water comes from —and whether there is enough of it. I cannot hike a mountain without noticing the railings and netting that line the sides of steep cliffs. And I cannot help but feel that something — other than the rocks and dirt below my feet — are holding me atop this mountain.

So how do I change the mindsets of Vallaisers? How do I, a 22-year-old American outsider, try to convince these residents that the floods and droughts and mudslides they are witnessing are more than just another hardship to adapt to? That if part of the mountain slides down towards the village below, the retaining wall is coming with it? 

Like the human body, nature is constantly searching for a place of balance in order to stay in check. If too much stress is placed on it, it will react. 

As I swallow herbal remedies for my sore throat and work through a series of physical therapy exercises, I can’t help but notice the simplicity of a common cold and a sore IT band in my leg in comparison to a changing climate. More often than not, these two symptoms can be resolved by getting to the heart of the matter. In the case of a cold, by accepting that there are over 31,000 strains of cold viruses in existence, and by letting the virus run its course. In the case of an injury, by figuring out the root cause and stretching and strengthening to prevent such an injury in the future. 

Unfortunately, climate change is not quite so simple. Inputs and outputs are no longer related to one being, but instead to the Earth. It’s tempting to want to patch a mountain’s wound with a wall and to block a river’s artery with a dam. But like the human body, the earth beats to a rhythm worth listening to.  

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I step outside my apartment, take in a breath of air, and head to Bern’s Kornhausbrücke bridge. It’s dusk and the last swimmers of the day are taking a final float down the river. On the east side of the bridge they hug the right shore. I turn around, look both ways, and cross the tram tracks and bicycle lanes to the west side of the bridge. The swimmers have begun to float towards the river’s left bank, and as they drift away into the distance, I am grateful for the Aare river’s meandering curves.