Narratives beyond the visual: Bridging climate and biodiversity protection

With the dawn of the "new era", even sleepy Switzerland saw the expansion of new renewables gain momentum at the political level. The “Solar Express” initiative aimed to close the winter gap within a few years and thus reduce fossil fuel-driven electricity production by promoting solar installations on high-altitude alpine open spaces. It is interesting to note that this climate protection initiative was met with resistance, particularly from environmental groups. They argued that the “industrialization” of the landscape directly threatened biodiversity, and they underscored this finding with visual imagery. The need to preserve the “intact landscape” was the killing argument for many projects that would have made an important contribution to climate protection. 

The Solar Express initiative will only achieve a small fraction of what would have been necessary to have a noticeable effect. As a result, this federal initiative has once again slowed down, and Switzerland is falling behind with its climate targets. In the meantime, however, we have learned that it makes more economic sense not to place the panels too high up in the Alps. The real lesson was that climate and biodiversity protection can only be reconciled through systemic considerations. This requires a logical connection and, above all, a storyline that begins with planetary boundaries and ends with water protection thanks to solar energy. Complexity cannot be solved visually, but narratively. Just because a landscape looks “intact” doesn't mean its biodiversity is “intact.”

Different approaches are needed to narratively disentangle this myth in the narrow focus on landscape conservation and nature conservation. These include a geological awareness of deep time, a trained sense of scale and scale effects, a multisensory approach to landscape, but also a way of thinking that no longer understands biodiversity solely in spatial terms, but rather based on the lifelines represented by watercourses. Pure observation has had its day; what is needed is polyphonic, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary storytelling today.