Fortunately, there was a wise old man in the group, a man who had experienced more and accomplished more than all of his fellow debaters combined. Reinhold Messner, the most famous of all mountaineers, the lifelong admonisher, always extremely concerned about his beloved mountains, turned out not to be a fanatic or fanatic on Louis Klamroth's program about the future of alpine winter tourism, but rather the smartest of the guests. He warned with deadly seriousness about shrinking glaciers and disappearing permafrost, which would cause entire mountains to slide and trigger apocalyptic tragedies. He preached renunciation and rethinking, and yet he pointed with equal emphasis to the 16 million inhabitants of the Alps who would have no means of subsistence without tourism and whose needs cannot simply be ignored.
The moderator is speechless
Jakob Strobel and Serra
Responsible editor of the travel magazine, deputy head of the reporting section.
“I'm a practical person,” said Messner and stubbornly refused to demonize tourism and pit it against nature conservation: “The Alps can tolerate even more visitors than before, we just have to distribute them better” – a statement that almost leaves Louis Klamroth speechless, but Messner maintained his conviction that people absolutely had to keep coming to the mountains, for a very good reason: of course, not entirely without vanity, he referred to the five museums which he founded to show people the mountains. . “I can’t want to protect what I don’t know,” Messner said. That's why tourism is so vital to the survival of the Alps, that's why it needs to be promoted, not abolished, and so he rightly demanded more empathy from everyone involved.
The last of the Mohicans? A cable car on the Nebelhorn near Oberstdorf. : Image: Maximilian von Lachner
We would have liked that too, but instead we had to settle for a group that was more willing to compromise than fight and handled the conversation as clumsily as in the worst snow. Katharina Schulze, leader of the B'90/Greens parliamentary group in the Bavarian state parliament, as expected, defended soft winter tourism that needs to be “expanded”, claimed a “proactive” role for politics and had typical political battles with Michaela Kaniber CSU Bavarian Tourism Minister. Unsurprisingly, she spoke of the fact that bans don't help and that it would be better to be open to technology in the land of laptops and lederhosen, and she was on par with her colleague when she stated that “money doesn't grow from the sky.”
Double-packed cassandras
At least Reinhold Messner found a brother in spirit in Florian Stern, managing director of the Oberstdorf ski club and former professional snowboarder, who argued in an equally pragmatic way. He defended the production of artificial snow as the lesser evil, he defended a speed limit on motorways so that people could ski a lot with the emissions saved in this way and he assured all winter sports enthusiasts that they would not have to feel guilty because Skiing alone accounts for ten percent of the environmental footprint of ski holidays.