1 - Risk Perception, Climate Change and Disasters of the Alpine Environments: The Mont de La Saxe Landslide

Summary

Introduction

The mountains and the Alps are becoming a key observation point, able to give voice to new interlocutors (Dall’Ò, 2022) and for understanding the cultural and social impacts of climate change and current short and long-term environmental disasters: from ‘extreme events’ to the loss of ecosystems, from the gradual disappearance of glaciers to the health, social and economic consequences on the communities that have to cope with them. In this scenario, the Mont de La Saxe landslide, in addition to being a ‘natural’ phenomenon, emerges as a social and cultural issue of absolute importance for anthropology. The landslide interests a large section of the southern side of the Mont de La Saxe. Containment works – a wall, a bypass of the Dora torrent from Val Ferret and a rockfall tunnel – have been built to protect Entrèves (400 inhabitants) and La Palud (100 inhabitants), two small but densely populated and heavily visited villages in Courmayeur (a well-known tourism area on the Italian side of Mont Blanc), located at an altitude of over 1,300 metres. These are two small mountain communities that over the last years I have had the opportunity to visit for research purposes in relation to risk perception and climate change. This research is part of a broader investigative framework on the Anthropocene and perception of climate change in the Mont Blanc, area to which I have dedicated myself since my PhD in 2014 and during post-doctoral research from 2018 to 2021.

From a methodological point of view, an ethnographic approach guided my field research. I spent a long time in the local communities and conducted interviews, recordings, discussions and debates with field informants and with the political and administrative authorities in charge of emergency management. I also participated in risk-prevention activities such as evacuation simulations. I also collected and analysed academic literature and media coverage on the subject. This Alpine context offered me a clear vision of how the perception of a potential disaster or of a climate crisis is influenced by social and cultural factors rather than just by scientific ones.

The Mont de La Saxe area has been in the news in recent decades due to a major landslide affecting both the eastern and western sides of the mountain. This has caused a series of barely manageable and sometimes dramatic consequences.