Erstellt am: 9. 6. 2011 - 12:40 Uhr

Finding the Value of Nature

Eco-tourism or snow machines. Lake Bohinj in Slovenia tussles with its future direction.

“We have to decide what kind of tourism we want to develop in the future here,” says Klemen Langus, the tourism chief of the Lake Bohinj as he gazes northwards from the top of the ultramodern Vogel cable car back over the blue elongated lake towards the snow-capped peaks of Triglav, the highest mountain in the Julian Alps and the national symbol of Slovenia.

chris cummins

Following his gaze is a treat. Two-thirds of Slovenia is forested and the dense woods on the slopes below the cable car flow down like a bumpy blanket right down to the shore of the lake, the foliage hiding the one road still open to motorized traffic that runs on the south side of the water connecting the village of Ukanc and Ribcev Laz on either side of the lake and bringing cars to the cable car. Klemen wishes the locals would leave their cars at home more and use the quiet electric tourist ferry, which is the only motorized boat allowed on the lake, as a form of public transport. But that`s one green idea too far for the villages.

But when we turn around and look at the landscape above the cable car, it is a different story. The Vogel ski area, built under the communist government in 1960s, looks hideously ugly in summer. Patches of brown, unhealthy-looking grass are surrounded by with fields of loose scree and gravel. This is the view you are rewarded if you climb Triglav.

chris cummins

The landscape is further scarred by roads for the four wheel drive cars that, on this hot summer`s day, are busy carrying out maintenance on the shaped landscape of the winter ski slopes. Skeletons of the ski-lifts that poke out in all directions. Far from being an Alpine idyll, it`s more like a day out a quarry.

“This is not a natural environment”, says Klemen, “it`s a man-made artificial landscape created in summer in preparation for winter.”

Despite its aesthetic and ecological drawbacks, the ski industry has long sustained the economic life of the mountains. But that might be about to change.

Klemen says that the statistics show that summer tourism is now proving more lucrative than winter tourism, bringing in ever more tourists and at much lower costs.

Lake Bohinj is apparently a magnet for dark clouds and so is relatively blessed by snow storms, but it isn`t immune the concerns of climate change and inevitable rising snow lines. Plans for artificial snow makers have been approved on a political level, although permission has been denied for plans to build a reservoir to feed the snowmakers with water. The Director of Triglav National Park Martin Solar, who admits he is often at loggerheads with the Vogel lift company, says that this might mean that the landscape will be spared the snow machines. The expensive of pumping water up to service the snow-machines would mean too much investment in what is only a partially effective palliative to rising temperatures.

Understandably many locals are wary of any plans to restrict the sort of development that has allowed their communities to survive and prosper for decades.

But Klemen Langus, who grew up in the area, hopes he can convince the local population that they should support the sort of soft tourism that maintains rather than scars the countryside. “We might change our minds and say now we want unspoiled nature because we earn with unspoiled nature.”

Klemen would like to see an end to the ski industry in the Triglav national park – he would keep the cable car but then leave the mountain slopes to sport ski tours and free riders. He`d like to see pylons of the chairlifts removed and the alms returned to cattle grazing. But he`ll face stiff opposition from those earning from the winter ski industry.

Yet Klemen says it doesn`t have to be a battle between environmentalists and the local population since the two groups should be natural allies. “We have to remember that people have lived in this area for two thousand years or more. The culture of mountain people has usually, out of necessity, been in symbiosis with nature. “They don`t need someone from a university to tell them about the importance of nature – it`s in their blood.“

He says people from the shores of Lake Bohinj have a deep respect for their environment despite the pressure for economic success. "They have a feeling for how far development should go,” he says.

The rutted slopes of Vogel suggest that that hasn`t always been the case, but once again, just like in the American elections, it`s the economy (stupid) that is going to drive this decision. If it is seen as profitable to make their community an icon of green tourism that attracts, they will “If we can calculate the true value of nature, then things will move forward.”

There are already moving forward. The 27 year old junior manager of the Eko Parkhotel Bonhinj, Anže Čokl shows me around the luxurious looking hotel, built mostly out of natural materials, just behind the lake. It is run 100% of renewable energy and has won a Green Globe award for energy efficiency. The hotel tries to use products sourced within 100km of Bohinj to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions related to transport. These ideas are progressive and the design looks futuristic in a region where time often seems to have stood still, but the concept is rooted in the community. Eight of ten of the employees are local and the hotel is booked out. It is green-model but also a successful economic model for the local area. And that is the sort of practical symbiosis that helps ideas spread.

chris cummins

The value of nature in this part of Slovenia is hard to put into hard figures but is easy to grasp with your eyes. I take the bus away from the lake along to route of the turquoise river Sava. Fly-fishermen are standing in long rubber boots straddled among boulders which are startlingly white in the sun. The water is so clear that, even from the road, I'm convinced I can see each pebble in the river bed. On the otherside of the road, a hawk is circling on a thermal above the sun-drenched meadows where an old man in a white hat is hoeing. All around is the thick multi-hued forest. It doesn`t just seem like the mountains, the 'playground of Europe' as Reinhold Messner calls them, it seems like real countryside.

If eco-tourism can become a successful industry anywhere in Europe, then diminutive Slovenia must be in pole-position. This is the region where the legendary Zlatorog was said to roam - a chamois with golden horns and magical life giving powers. As a symbol of the worth of the wilderness around Lake Bohinj, it seems more relevant that ever.