Abstract
Tourism moves global flows of capital, people and knowledge and thereby fundamentally transforms materiality, social relations, communities and life-worlds. This paper examines the environmental history of an alpine community (Damüls/Austria) under the influence of tourism in the 20th century. Environ-mental History seeks to understand historical society-nature relations and people’s perceptions of nature in the past. Such an endeavor poses a twofold challenge to environmental historians, who conceptualize ‘nature’ as an independent parameter of history without reducing it to a social construct but at the same time address the social construction of ‘beautiful landscapes’ as an integral part of the tourism industry. These two viewpoints can only be bridged dialectically. In this article, the concept of socio-natural sites (SNSs) is used to bridge that gap and to analyze the long-term impact of ski lifts on materiality and the cultural representation of winter sport landscapes. SNSs are constituted by the nexus of social practices and material arrangements. Damüls is a telling example of the restless transformation of an Alpine sport arena built for skiers.
This essay was written within the framework of the FWF-funded project ‘How skiers’ sensations shaped Alpine valleys during the 20th century’ (P24278-G18).
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Notes
- 1.
Colonization is very often carried out to provide a specific social metabolism. Industrialization alters the relationship between social metabolism and colonization. One might almost say that it reverses the relationship.
- 2.
‘Alp’ is a regional term for seasonally used mountain pasture land (a German equivalent term here is Alm), not to be confused with ‘the Alps’ as a term for the central European mountain range.
- 3.
According to Benedikt Bilgeri, from the mid-19th century, potatoes were the main crop in the rainy north Alpine regions of Vorarlberg. The situation was different in the municipalities of southern Vorarlberg, which were characterized by the drier climate of the central Alps. Here, the cultivation of rye and barley survived the introduction of potato crops.
- 4.
Robert McC. Netting calculated 150–180 kg potatoes per 100 acres for Törbel (see Netting 1981, p. 39).
- 5.
Robert McC. Netting traces this back to the fact that children’s food could be easily produced from potatoes and dairy products. Little effort was thus required for children to receive better quality nutrition, and they survived longer as a result (see Netting 1981, p. 159). From a contemporary perspective, the introduction of the potato has been seen as an important factor in the population growth that began with industrialization (see Sandgruber 1982, p. 49).
- 6.
Saumwege constituted a transport system in agrarian society that used horses to transport goods across Alpine passes. These packhorse trails provided an important source of additional income for the farming communities in the mountain regions.
- 7.
The ‘1000-Reichsmark Ban’ was established by Adolf Hitler between 1933 and 1936. It obliged each citizen of the German Reich wishing to cross the German border into Austria to pay a total of 1000 Reichsmarks (equal to approximately €4000 in 2012).
- 8.
The name ‘1800’ referred to the altitude above sea level to which it brought access. The ski lift operators in Damüls used the topographical characteristics of the terrain to represent the arrangements in the discourse of tourism. This form of representation was and is still very commonly employed in Alpine tourism arrangements, such as when guesthouses are named after Alpine flowers such as the alpine rose (Rhododendron hirsutum).
- 9.
Within the framework of the European Recovery Programme (ERP) , ca. 305 million Austrian Schilling was made available for the development of the tourist industry in Austria. These funds were provided by the USA between 1948 and 1955 and given to businesses in the form of low-interest, long-term loans. New loans are being provided from the repayments of the original loans even today. The ERP represented the most important national assistance instrument for the development of tourism arrangements until the late 1980s.
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Groß, R. (2016). How Tourism Transformed an Alpine Valley. In: Haberl, H., Fischer-Kowalski, M., Krausmann, F., Winiwarter, V. (eds) Social Ecology. Human-Environment Interactions, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33326-7_23
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