Swiss National Park: Creating Untouched Nature
A quintessential Swiss train outside the national park
After our brief foray into city life, we head west from Geneva to Zernez, a sleepy town of ~1,500 outside Swiss National Park. The train ride across the country features many landscapes that make you want to burst into applause, and Jeremy recollects on the foreign yet familiar landscape. The town his dad is from, Ouray, Colorado, is taglined “The Switzerland of America,” and we both see why: though continents apart, they share the same rugged, amphitheater-like peaks that encircle quaint mountain towns.
We arrive in Zernez to a familiar face: our first guest star! During this leg of the trip, we are joined by friend Meredith. Amongst many other wonderful qualities, Meredith is the queen of organization (a fact I am grateful after a month of travel logistics and decision fatigue) and maximizing experiences. She has AllTrails maps downloaded and the opening hours of the town’s grocery stores committed to memory before Jeremy and I even step into Zernez. Also, since our tent only has room for two, we upgrade our campsite stays to a cozy cabin. We bask in the luxury of days on a real mattress, a dinner table, Wi-Fi we are not mooching from a café, and showers every night.
We spend the next few days exploring the park on foot, the main way to do so. Courtesy of Meredith’s hike selection, we hike upwards of 50 km through the Alps, see many marmots (one of my favorite animals <3), and thoroughly burn our legs with ever-increasing elevation gains.
At Swiss National Park’s educational center, in its maps and promotional brochures, and on its website, phrases like “wilderness” and nature as “untouched,” “pristine,” and “pure” dot descriptions of hikes, vistas, and the park’s overall character. The landscape certainty lives up these descriptions, and the park rules reflect this mentality: there are few roads, only a handful of trails, and bringing dogs, walking off marked paths, and camping are all prohibited within its borders.
The quintessence of untouched nature we see today was core to the park’s founding. In 1904, a member of the Swiss parliament proposed the idea of a large reserve in the country, following the fortress model of conservation the U.S. had established with the creation of Yellowstone. A search committee surveyed potential landscapes across the country, with a primary qualifier being spaces devoid of human settlement. In a way, they put the cart before the horse with Swiss National Park: instead of deeming a specific landscape worthy of protection, the Swiss government set out to find one, and create a park full of said untouched wilderness.
Zernez, a town of about 1,500 in eastern Switzerland
The area now called Swiss National Park outside the community of Zernez fit the parliament’s bill, and they leased the valley from the municipality of Zernez for a period of 25 years. The park was officially established in 1914, with the stated goal of ensuring that a piece of Switzerland’s mountain landscape be left to develop naturally, without human influence. Any changes would be the subject of scientific observation and research.
While there were no permanent settlements in the park’s area, the designation of the park created decades of tension between community members and park management. Further economic downturn in the local community led to reluctant land concessions from the community to the government to expand the park’s area further and further.
Under the park’s strict protection policies, local community members could no longer use any conceded land for agriculture and forestry. Throughout the park’s 100+ year history, tensions between community members and park advocates existed on and off, often tied to land concessions and, at times, top-down conservation decisions. As recently as 2000, community members in Zernez voted against a small expansion of the park, despite generous concessions they would have been given. This vote, and the park’s broader story, speak to a disconnect that can occur between top-down conservation and local communities, even after decades of shared history and economic development have occurred.
One of the many scenic vistas of Swiss National Park
As we hike (mostly uphill) throughout Swiss National Park, I think about these ideas of “pristine nature,” community-driven conservation, and the Other Nature Project’s larger purpose. While many don’t often think about this when planning a national park visit, these sites are often sites of historical or current conflict between local communities, park management, and conservation advocates.
Almost anywhere in the world, a national park’s creation profoundly affected someone, and often, their land. Often those effects create a mixed bag of costs and benefits. Costs are often profound and unquantifiable: restriction of access to traditional lands, destruction of livelihoods, and lack of decision-making power. But, parks also create the possibility for economic development, transitions away from extractive economies, scientific research, and explicit legal protection for endangered ecosystems.
In many ways, Swiss National Park represents tradeoffs local communities face when a large attraction such as a national park is created. Zernez today hosts many of the 120,000 annual visitors to Switzerland’s only national park, playing a vital role in supporting the missions and success of the park. It is easy to get behind the 100+ years of scientific research and measure the monetary benefits the park has enabled – but how can we evaluate the multidimensional, at times bumpy, century-long relationship between the local community and this protected area?
Given our short time in Swiss National Park, we leave the park with more questions than answers – about community voices, creating wilderness, and our own love of wild places – and much to continue exploring around the world.
