Resilient Dolomites

The Dolomites are photographed more than almost any landscape in Europe, and understood less. Behind the postcard there is a working territory: pastures that need snow, orchards that need cold nights, glaciers that hold the water for everyone downstream, and communities who read the season in their own way and are adjusting to a climate that no longer follows the calendar.

I have followed them across the range. A livestock farmer on the Alpe di Siusi. An apple grower in upper Trentino working on land where the fruit belt is climbing higher every decade. Beekeepers at altitude whose hives, wired with new sensors, have become sentinels of what is happening to the air around them. Growers installing photovoltaic panels above their apple rows, farming light and fruit on the same ground. The people of the Valbelluna, and the valleys of Vanoi and Val Badia, where depopulation and the climate pull in the same direction. And the two forces that arrive from outside: the Olympic Games in Cortina, and an overtourism that reaches every pass and every peak.

My work on the Marmolada glacier was selected for the annual meeting of the FAO Mountain Partnership in Rome.

Resilience here is not a slogan. It is a beekeeper reading a sensor, a farmer planting an orchard he will not see in full production, a valley deciding whether it still has a future. Mountains are not scenery. They are where the change gets seen first.