The Hole in the Swiss Trees Reclamation Plan : The Swiss Plan to Spend $10 Billion to Save Their Alpine Trees From Air Pollution--Even If They Don’t Need To

To hear the Swiss tell it, their postcard-perfect country is in the throes of one of the world’s major environmental disasters: A mysterious ailment threatens to kill a far higher percentage of Alpine trees than the Amazon rain forest is losing to arson.

The drama began to unfold 10 years ago, when environmentalists made their first serious surveys of the Swiss forests and found thousands of sickly trees. Over the next few years, they warned that 50% or more of the nation’s woodlands were damaged or dying, victims, they assumed, of air pollution, mainly from the 4 million cargo trucks that annually crisscross Switzerland on their way to neighboring countries.

Such numbers were alarming, and not just because the Swiss love nature and depend on it for a lucrative tourist trade. The forests, known as bannwalder , protect mountain communities against snow, mud and rockslides. If the tree barriers were lost, slides might conceivably bury centuries-old villages and drive the dwindling Alpine population to the cities.

As panic spread, the Swiss government committed itself to saving the forests by restoring air purity to 1950 levels within the next decade. The cornerstone of this strategy is a $10-billion plan--an amount equal to about one-third the country’s annual federal budget, though doled out over a dozen years--for building a railway network that will ferry foreign trucks, with their ignitions turned off, across Switzerland. The rail scheme has aroused protests in the European Community because of the costs and delays it will mean for truckers. But in Switzerland--which is not an EC member--almost two-thirds of the Swiss electorate supported the plan last year. Even before that referendum, the government increased funding for reforestation efforts and gave scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Forestry Research a mandate and a hefty budget to prove the destructive effects of motor-vehicle emissions on Alpine trees.

And so, with a thoroughness and sense of purpose the world has come to expect from them, the Swiss seemed well on their way to resolving their environmental conundrum.

Trouble is, after years of research, Swiss scientists have been unable to uncover evidence that hydrocarbons and other combustion-engine pollutants are destroying significant numbers of trees. Worse yet, their most recent monitoring of the bannwalder indicates that Swiss forests show no signs of dying off and indeed are more extensive now than at any time in the past century. “I doubt there’s a problem--so why should I be looking for its causes?” asks Jurg Bucher, who has spent much of the past decade at the forestry research institute studying the effects of air pollutants on trees.

The skepticism spreads to scientists with other expertise. Paul Fohn, director of the Swiss Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research, based in the ski resort Davos, insists that there has been no increase in the frequency of avalanches over the past 10 years. “If forest sickness was growing, you would expect more avalanches, wouldn’t you?” he says.

Because of these disappointing research results, environmentalists have reacted to scientists with much the same feelings the ancient Greeks reserved for bad-news messengers. There are dark accusations of professional incompetence, treason to the cause of ecology, even financial machinations. “Maybe the scientists are prolonging their research so they can get more money for their projects,” grumbles Andreas Gotz, director of Bergwaldprojekt, a volunteer reforestation program based in the eastern town of Chur.

No one, though, is suggesting that just because the Alpine forests might be healthy the country should reconsider its multibillion-dollar offensive against foreign truck traffic. Nor has confidence been shaken in the premise that Switzerland, by its own efforts, can turn back the clock to an era of purer air despite being surrounded by countries that account for most of the pollution drifting across the Swiss mountains and valleys.

Perhaps the stubborn, exorbitant campaign to save the Alps can best be understood within the context of other quixotic Swiss crusades to defend themselves against a hostile outside world. The end of the Cold War may have eliminated the remotest danger of invasion, but Switzerland, with one-eighth the population of Italy, still maintains an army larger than its southern neighbor’s. And while the specter of nuclear war has receded in the rest of Europe, the Swiss continue to press ahead with a mandatory program to install an underground shelter in every home by 2000.

“We Swiss have always tried to wall ourselves off from Europe and build a secure world of our own,” says Niklaus Meienberg, a social critic and writer whose iconoclastic views make him a loose cannon among his 6.7 million compatriots. “And we’ve always needed a big outside threat. With no more communism to worry about, pollution looks like it could be it.”

REINHARD LASSIG, A SCIENTIST AT THE FORESTRY RESEARCH INSTITUTE on the outskirts of Zurich, is en route to the Alpine communities in the canton of Glarus, about an hour’s drive east. A narrow, winding mountain road offers a visual feast of snowy peaks above, evergreen forests and buttercup meadows below and, at the valley’s bottom, a village of steeply gabled houses and a primly spired church. “I work in places where most people choose to vacation,” concedes Lassig, who is carrying out field studies of storm damage on Alpine woods.

For all its beauty, the landscape of Glarus has been reshaped by its inhabitants. Ancient tree stands like those in parts of North America have almost disappeared from Switzerland. Forests here are “managed”--with renewable tracts set aside for the timber and pulp industry or well-maintained areas reserved for recreation.

Stopping at a curve, Lassig points to our destination: a scruffy mountainside that looks like it’s suffering from an advanced case of mange. A storm called Vivian swept through Glarus in late 1990, cutting large, unsightly swathes through the spruce and beeches. Normally, the dense forest canopy affords protection against raging storms. But if a few bunched trees lose enough foliage, weaken and collapse, then winds will sweep through the gap with enough force to knock down even healthy specimens.

The mystery is why those clusters of trees sickened and died, making the rest of the forest vulnerable. Many environmentalists argue that air pollution was at fault. “Weather probably had a greater influence,” says Lassig, a tall, lanky man who speaks in a flat monotone. He suspects that a succession of hot, dry summers brought on an infestation of bark beetles, which destroy trees by disrupting their water and nutrient circulation. Many of the trunks knocked down by Vivian are missing their bark, a telltale sign that the beetles were present in huge numbers.

Stopping along the trail, Lassig picks up a rectangular metal container and removes its cover. The bottom swarms with tens of thousands of tiny bark beetles attracted by pheromones--hormones used by the insects to advertise food and sex--that were sprayed on the container by researchers. Startled by the sheer mass of beetles, Lassig predicts another season of considerable havoc to trees in this area. But the beetle invasion doesn’t settle the argument for environmentalists, who point out that the insects tend to attack unhealthy trees and that those trees may have been sickened by vehicle emissions wafting up from the Alpine highways.

Lassig is by no means disdainful of the concerns raised by environmentalists. Born in Germany, he himself was drawn into forestry science by alarm over the fate of the Black Forest in the late 1970s. Many of the trees in those fabled southern German woods showed heavy leaf and needle loss, which environmentalists attributed to acid rain and motor-vehicle pollution. “I believed warnings that within a decade there would hardly be any Black Forest left,” says Lassig, who was a university student at the time. “But a few years later, the forest regained its health, even though air pollution had certainly gotten worse.”

According to Lassig, there is evidence of a similar cyclical pattern in the Swiss Alpine forests, which cover 29% of the country. For some time, defoliation seemed to be worsening, but leaf density increased a few years later, before dipping again in the last year or two. “Nobody knows how healthy any forest was a decade ago--which is when forests began to be monitored closely,” says Lassig. And even today, there is no agreement on how much a tree must be defoliated before it can be considered at risk. The EC has recently decided that any tree that has lost more than 25% of its needles or leaves is sick. By that benchmark, about 16% of the Swiss Alpine forests are unhealthy. But many Swiss environmentalists still use the old standard of 10% needle or leaf loss as their measuring stick and thus arrive at figures of forest damage above 50%.

“The evidence of forest decline is clear,” says Konrad Meyer, a spokesman for the World Wildlife Fund in Zurich, who, like other environmentalists, accepts 10% defoliation as a symptom of disease. “There is no way scientists can deny that a serious problem exists.” Complicating matters further, defoliation isn’t a sure sign of impending mortality. A tree can lose all its leaves--from a caterpillar attack, for example--and fully recover to the point where it looks absolutely normal in two years. The forestry research institute has been monitoring 7,800 trees around the country for eight years and has discovered that specimens that apparently suffered irrevocable foliage damage have recovered while some seemingly healthy trees have died.

“The rate of mortality has remained constant,” says John Innes, a Scotsman who joined the forestry institute as a researcher several years ago. “Forest growth is actually higher now than it’s ever been before.” And he suggests that future research efforts might be better directed at trying to answer why this is so rather than attempting to prove the opposite.

This is not to say that the forestry institute has halted investigations on the effects of combustion-engine emissions on trees. Using climate-control chambers that look like glass shower stalls, researchers over the past eight years have exposed saplings to ozone, nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide at levels that match those found at various Alpine sites in an effort to discover what these gases do to the trees’ biomass, root growth and the rate of photosynthesis in their leaves. The effects, thus far, have proved negligible.

Moreover, institute scientists point out that even if future experiments determine that rising amounts of these gases are damaging trees, there is little that Switzerland on its own could do to protect its flora. “Sulfur dioxide, some nitrogen oxides and ozone are trans-boundary pollutants, and there’s not much more that could be done within this country to reduce their levels,” says Innes.

Compared with Southern California’s brown veil, the air over most of Switzerland is still pure enough to make anybody’s lungs feel healthy. Smog alerts are unknown here, and over the past decade, there have been no dramatic jumps in air-pollutant levels.

But Innes and his colleagues are well aware that their findings have appalled much of the Swiss population. And sometimes they embrace some rather unscientific hypotheses to explain the ire they have provoked. “Behind all this forest decline business, there is a mass psychological aspect at work,” says Jurg Bucher. “A decade ago, nobody in Switzerland looking at the forests thought there was a problem. When I was giving courses to forest rangers in 1983, they would tell me that the trees were healthy. But then came these alarming reports by environmentalists, and suddenly all the forest rangers began to see problems.”

Environmentalists retort that emotion is also blinding their scientific critics. “Perhaps we overemphasized the threat of air pollution on the forests back in the 1980s,” says Meyer. “The forests haven’t disappeared, and now many scientists are reacting to what turned out to be overly catastrophic forecasts.”

THOMAS RAGETH, THE CHIEF FOREST RANGER IN GLARUS, WHO JOINS LASsig during his field survey, is visibly annoyed by the skepticism of the Swiss scientific community. “There’s no doubt in my mind that over the last 10 years the forest has been thinning out,” says Rageth, a fit man with a ruddy complexion and black hair graying on the edges. “But what’s causing it--that’s what he has to discover,” adds Rageth, jerking his thumb in Lassig’s direction.

When Rageth wanders out of earshot, Lassig tries to give his own spin to the ranger’s comments. “Forest rangers are in a difficult situation,” he says. “They have been telling forest owners and woodcutters for years that the trees were dying. And now they’re worried about losing credibility.”

Rageth has been spending much of his time supervising efforts to replant the avalanche-stopping bannwalder on the slopes overlooking several villages in the canton. Following Rageth’s directions, Lassig drives up a steep gravel road until it narrows into a footpath. We climb the last few hundred yards, past brown cows with enormous bells around their necks and farm wives clad in polka-dot bikinis gathering up hay. From the summit, the snowmelt of Alpine peaks can be seen merging into dozens of cascades that feed into a river rushing past the hamlets in the valley far below. It’s the kind of view that makes you want to yodel.

Half a dozen of Rageth’s forest rangers are hard at work erecting wood tripods over tender saplings. The tripods protect the young trees from heavy snow until they grow sturdy enough to act as barriers themselves. The technique is as old as the Swiss nation. The first written record on bannwalder-- a parchment admonishing farmers not to cut the wood on mountainsides because of avalanche danger--dates back to 1349, only 58 years after the defense pact that gave birth to Switzerland.

Nowadays, the materials necessary to rebuild the bannwalder are transported by helicopter. The enormous costs, about $350 per square yard, are footed by the taxpayers. And according to Rageth, those costs would be even higher if it weren’t for a profusion of volunteer workers. Local schools encourage their students to put in one week of free labor a year planting trees on the mountains. Lions, Rotary and Kiwanis clubs organize work outings for members. “And it all started because of concern that the forests were dying,” says Rageth.

The Bergwaldprojekt is typical of the new volunteer reforestation groups that were born in the mid-1980s, when environmentalists began to sound alarms about the Alps. “It’s enough to know that air pollution might have a role in making forests unhealthy--even if we don’t know for sure,” says Gotz, the Bergwaldprojekt’s director.

Less than 10% of Swiss live in the Alps today, compared with more than 25% a century ago. Gotz concedes that a bucolic nostalgia plays a strong role in recruiting volunteers. Ranging in age from 18 to 74, they are almost entirely German-speaking, a reflection of the greater environmental activism of Swiss Germans compared with their French or Italian-speaking compatriots. “It’s a question of mentality,” says Gotz. “The Swiss French still seem to love cars more than forests.” Other environmentalists suggest that because of linguistic and cultural ties, the Swiss Germans are strongly influenced by the Green movement in Germany, which is far more militant than such groups in France and Italy.

Still, the Bergwaldprojekt sends its volunteers to all parts of the country so they can replant “where forests are in bad shape and the risk of avalanches is greatest,” he says.

The man in charge of monitoring the incidence of avalanches and issuing warnings about imminent, killer snowslides is Paul Fohn, director of the Swiss Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research.

“An avalanche is simply a fast-moving mass of snow,” says Fohn, a rugged blond who looks like an off-duty ski instructor. “The emphasis is on fast--up to 300 kilometers an hour. Usually, you need a fresh layer of snow one-half to three meters deep. And you need slopes of 25 to 55 degrees. It’s difficult to start an avalanche on an incline lower than 25 degrees. Beyond 55 degrees, it’s too steep for enough snow to pile up.”

What makes new snow particularly dangerous, Fohn explains, is that it’s dry, fluffy and loose, so it easily collapses and slides downhill. Contrary to those old Hollywood movies, a sharp noise--say, a shout or a volley of rifle shots--won’t start an avalanche. But a skier slaloming downhill just might create enough shock waves to set one off. And that’s why the mountaintops around Davos and other resorts--where ski runs start far above the tree line--are zippered with concrete and steel anti-avalanche barriers.

Trained as a geophysicist, Fohn says his interest in avalanches dates back to his childhood in a small town near St. Gotthard Pass, where in 1951 a horrendous snowslide claimed the lives of more than 100 people. Every year, about 660,000 trucks en route to Italy or Germany cross St. Gotthard Pass, where motor-vehicle pollution is the worst in Switzerland. Yet according to Fohn and to scientists at the forestry institute, deforestation even around St. Gotthard hasn’t increased, nor has the incidence of avalanches.

So, as a scientist, Fohn remarks, he isn’t impressed by the insistence of environmentalists that truck traffic is destroying trees and heightening the risk of avalanches. “But even if a pollution link doesn’t exist,” he adds, “speaking as a private citizen and father of a small child, I’d rather live with less polluted air, less smells and noise. And I’m sure I’d feel even more strongly if I were still living near St. Gotthard.”

ST. GOTTHARD IS THE EPIcenter of the Swiss government’s grandiose anti-pollution plan to put foreign trucks on tracks. The most expensive and technically complicated part of the scheme calls for boring a 31-mile-long railway tunnel alongside the pass near the Italian border. It’s about the same length as the new Eurotunnel connecting France and Britain. “But of course the Eurotunnel is only under the sea, while St. Gotthard is rather more difficult to build because it goes through solid, granite mountains,” says Christian Kung, an official with the Swiss Department of Transport, Communications and Energy who helps oversee the new rail project.

In recent decades, Switzerland has managed to move 80% of overland cargo within its borders by train. (By comparison, in neighboring France and Austria, only 20% is transported by train, while trucks account for the bulk.) This is no mean feat, considering that the volume of goods from EC countries moving through Switzerland rose from 28 million tons in 1970 to 61 million tons in 1987. And by 2010--when the new rail system is supposed to be completed--those figures are projected to leap to 150 million tons. Viewed from this perspective, says Kung, the concept of placing trucks on trains is simply a continuation of Swiss policy to keep the railways’ share of cargo at 80%. Besides, he adds, truck traffic through the narrow Alpine valleys is already near saturation.

Some notion of how the new railway project will operate can be gleaned in the city of Chiasso on the Italian border. There, a rail-truck link is already operated by a company called HUPAC. Many of its customers own trucks that are larger than the 28-ton limit imposed by Switzerland, so they have no alternative but to put them on a train. At HUPAC’s terminal, trucks from Milan roll onto flatbed rail cars en route to Frankfurt; others unhook their trailers, which are then hoisted by huge cranes and deposited on train wagons within five minutes.

“This is what the future of transportation through Switzerland will look like,” asserts Francesco Crivelli, the manager at HUPAC’s terminal. “We’ve got everything helping it along: political support, environmental concern and economics.”

It’s the economics of the operation that raises hackles among Switzerland’s EC neighbors. Today, truckers pay only a 15-franc (about $10) toll to drive through Switzerland. When the new railway project is completed, trucks will be charged at least 300 Swiss francs (about $200, at current exchange rates) to be transported by train from one border to the next.

The trucking lobby in the EC “is very angry,” concedes Rita Seethaler, an economist at the transport department. “But there isn’t much they can do about it because we’ve got a lot of backing for the new railway system in this country.” Popular support runs deep in both the business community and labor unions. “The rail and tunnel project will create many construction jobs,” says Seethaler, who notes that the current 4% unemployment rate is high for Switzerland, though it is less than half EC levels. “Of course, contracts will be open to EC bidders. But we do have a lot of experience with construction in the Alps, and it’s likely most of the building will be done by Swiss firms.”

Still, Seethaler insists, the main impulse behind the new rail project is ecological. One of her ministry’s policy papers states, “The protection of the Alps as a recreation area, but also the maintenance of the protective shield of mountain woods against avalanches and landslides, rules out an additional extension of the road network.”

Seethaler predicts that future Swiss legislation will make the 300-franc toll on the new rail system seem like a bargain to truckers. “We’ll soon be imposing heavy taxes to cover the ‘external’ costs of truck traffic--air and noise pollution, for example,” she says. And she estimates those taxes could amount to as much as 600 francs for every heavy vehicle crossing Switzerland. “When that happens, trains will be a lot more competitive than trucks,” she adds.

SURPRISING AS IT MAY SEEM, many environmentalists are not enthusiastic about the new rail plan. And to some extent their objections smack of good old-fashioned Swiss isolationism. “We’re opposed because it will only increase the traffic of goods through Switzerland,” says Gotz, the Bergwaldprojekt director.

The Swiss Society for Environmental Protection was one of the leading ecology groups that supported the rail plan, “but only because other alternatives were worse,” says its spokesman, Rolf Oberhansli, a councilman from Baden, near Zurich. A former drawing teacher, Oberhansli made an extensive self-discovery voyage some years ago through Russia and China--not coincidentally the world’s largest countries--and returned home with an epiphany: Tiny Switzerland should resist submerging itself into a greater Europe.

“The new Europe that’s being built wants to move goods freely from Stockholm to Sicily--and it’s crazy,” he says, because the environmental impact of transporting those goods is too high. “Someday, those environmental costs will be part of the price of goods traded across borders,” he adds. “Only then will we know what their real market price is.” Presumably, the price will be forbiddingly high enough to slash the number of trucks and rail cars lumbering across the Swiss Alps.

Oberhansli envisions a not-too-distant future when environmentalism and economics will even conspire against private cars. His distaste for the combustion engine has already prompted him to surrender his own automobile. He gets around with a “general ticket,” which allows him to use any form of public transportation--bus, rail, boat--to any destination within Swiss borders. The ticket costs about $1,700 a year, half that much for a spouse and progressively less for each child. And Oberhansli points out that additional savings result from not having to pay the onerous auto insurance, gas and garage rates in Switzerland.

But doesn’t he ever miss driving? Just a spin around the lakes, perhaps? “Well, my wife has an old, little car,” Oberhansli confesses somewhat sheepishly. “But we only use it to go on vacations, in the Alps mostly. It’s the only way you can really get around freely.”