I have not spent time in the Alps; my parents were not skiers (could not afford it anyway), and we only traversed the Alps, visiting over-night now and then. This time, I stayed with a colleague and his welcoming family in a village outside of Grenoble in their single-family residence. From the windows you could see the snow-covered peaks, shimmering, and Grenoble down below. Grenoble is actually smaller than I had thought, with a nice old town, largely taken over by Middle Eastern immigrants offering a diversity of ethnic grocery stores and restaurants. The city is pretty, and has, as typical, surrounding high rises of various qualities and status. There is a new ‘eco’ area that sports solar, on the mall that acts as a fortress in front of the park and new apartment complex that looks very pleasant, with balconies, about 5 stories high. The park attracts families, has a big pond area, and is attractive. The mall is dead. Unless you know the area exists, it is closed off from the rest of the neighborhood by the large shopping complex, which is too bad since the park is very nice, and the housing looks great. Funny ideas about eco districts, frankly, almost everywhere actually.
The family we stayed with has a pretty large house, chickens, a garden and a greenhouse. It gets very cold up there, lots of snow. My colleagues rides his e-bike into Grenoble, an at least 40 km commute round trip, rain, shine or snow. . . and uphill barely describes it coming home (he has two batteries on his bike). It takes genuine dedication. E-bikes are getting very popular though, which is great.
The fieldtrip, beyond my conversations with my colleague about interdisciplinary research and team building, consisted of going up to a disappearing glacier called La Grave, also a famous ski resort. We went with a group consisting of several hydrologists, an energy engineer, a glaciologist, a geologist, a mountain guide, a mayor of a nearby village and an assistant mayor of another, as well as an anthropologist and her Russian companion. The glacier has receded at least by half since the 1980s. The area is a famous ski resort. At the top, Olympians train as the snow gets compacted on top of the glacier by a giant diesel fuming tractor/compactor with a blade, the rest of the area is powder and skilled skiers go a steep downhill. Mountain guides take climbers up the peaks, and in the summer mountain bikers go down the mountain. . . a crazy perilous enterprise.
French mountain guides go through an intensive training. This training, made up of several modules, covers all technical, non-technical and teaching aspects of the activity. It is spread out over 4-5 years and gives rise to many evaluations along the way, culminating in a final exam. The diploma is often awarded after almost 10 years of intensive practice and personal experience as well as periods of learning and training. This an exceptional training, not seen anywhere else in the world in its length and rigor.
Our guide, there to talk about how the receding glacier is affecting people like him, was likely in his late 50s, very slight, with both intensity and composure. He explained that he moves around with clients in Europe, but with receding snows, the mountain is changing. He also told us, as we were going up in the funicular (2 of them), that he went to the U.S. west to climb, including El Capitan, at Yosemite. U.S. climbers are apparently the best in the world and pioneered the use of cracks in mountain faces. It took him at least 2 weeks of practice to be able to climb. He did not climb free! I found him fascinating, a person that radiated calm and confidence, someone you felt you could trust through thick and thin.
The glaciologist took an ice core, about 3 feet long, and showed us the layers of dust in the ice, as well as the bubbles that are used to determine CO2 levels, if I understood clearly. There is an ice cave there, well known, that we entered, but the local mayor critiqued it as letting warm summer air in, contributing to the melting. He was from the other side of the peak, and was going to close the ice cave in his glacier as a measure of prevention. Of course, the big issue was the snow compacting tractor. While it extended the season, and the compacted snow melted more slowly protecting the glacier, its extravagant fuel consumption, fuel that had to be lugged up the mountain, was a big problem. If they no longer compact the snow, they lose the very high chair lift (which needed to be moved yearly as the glacier shifted), and the Olympians. Powder was sought after by other skiers, but it was not the same, and melted much more quickly. Issues of revenue, maintaining the ski resorts and all the employment, weighed heavily on these mayors who were acutely aware of climate change. The new mountain sport was biking down the slope, a vertiginous and very technical ride that sent chills down one’s back.
Like many places, actual precipitation is not going to change with a warming climate, but of course, there will be less snow, and the question of hydropower, which is big in the Alps, is an issue. The valley we were in was the site of early industrialization powered by water. Numbers of smallish hydroelectric plants were installed up and down the valley for steel making, metallurgy, weaving and other industries. We visited one such hydroelectric plant, built by a brilliant engineer who made ductile cast iron. He also built a company town with housing, grocery store, school, community garden spaces and more, necessary apparently, to keep employees. There was a marked hierarchy in quality of housing per trade category. A mini encapsulated story of late nineteenth century paternalistic capitalism. Quite fascinating.
The region had also been mined for high quality coal, lead, silver, cobalt, silicon, graphite, calcium carbide;the silicon carbide used to make carborundum, but no gold. Inhabited for hundreds of thousands of years, it is also a place where sheep, goats and cows are still grazed, and in the old days, buckwheat and wheat were grown on tiny fields. Before industry, men would leave in the winter and peddle throughout southern France. Women stayed and took care of the animals and the children. A really rough, tough life.
Electricité de France, soon to be re-nationalized, has shut down most of the small hydroelectric plants in favor of building dams and large infrastructures. This, of course, raises all the well known issues of consolidation and fragilization. This is far from a distributed energy future. However, one of the mayors was raising the question of whether there should be more distributed hydro, so there is an interesting evolution in thinking by electeds who face the real decision making and the economic and climate changes that threaten the viability of the villages. It must be said at the same time, that many of the villages where there had been real economic activity, are now dead. No bakeries, no grocery stores, no butcher shops. Maybe a bank machine, and a place to buy tobacco, but little else and the houses/apartments are all shuttered. Instead, folks who depend on Grenoble, commute from the newer single-family developments, scattered here and there, and shop elsewhere. One has to ask about the viability of that strategy if we want to move away from hydrocarbons. Here you have an existing building stock, abandoned, where if restored and reinhabited, might support local services, schools (utilizing the shuttered school buildings) and a public transportation system. It would be a huge commitment and investment, yet when one does a materials flows accounting, it might be less impactful.
Hydrologists, who directed us to the big dam for our picnic, by passing sweet little parks on the river (!), debated the water resource future of the area, and the energy reliability of these big infrastructures. Little conclusive emerged. There is so much uncertainty.
We walked back down the village below the dam for a drink under threatening skies. The local hotel was nearly 100% Dutch. The Dutch love this region, come in droves and in camping cars, race bicycles, and ‘invade’ villages. They are not super appreciated by the locals as they tend to be somewhat arrogant, demanding and insular. You can really tell who is Dutch too, they are much taller and many tend to be very sun tanned!!
And so, what is the future of the Alps. This small valley, crowned by a renowned glacier is struggling to define it for itself, and the mayors are worried, informed and seeking to find different alternatives. The issue of water supply locally + hydro versus supplying the cities downstream is top of mind and the state intervenes with no compunction. Mayors may go and protest, as with the locals, but state interests often prevail, leaving these rural areas holding the bag.
