The journalist Luigi Torreggiani writes that he managed “to get hold of the forest management plan of the Municipality of Cortina. Not the latest version, which is currently hard to find, but the previous one. The differences are not very large in quantitative terms, since trees of this age grow very slowly; the data are therefore still very reliable.”
What did Torreggiani discover? That the figures in the management plan do not match at all what emerges from cross-checking the data of the ‘light’ project by SIMICO (Società Infrastrutture Milano Cortina 2020 – 2026 S.p.A., which handles the works for the Cortina Olympics) with the award decision for the company carrying out the felling.
Let us remember that the current one is a second version of the track project, announced as ‘light’, that is, scaled down. “Not building some of the car parks initially planned ‘makes it possible to reduce the interference with the wooded area estimated in the detailed design phase, bringing it from 24,291 square metres to 19,980 square metres, saving 4,311 square metres of wooded area’, writes Torreggiani, quoting the documents.
According to these statements in black and white, the journalist notes that the part of the larch wood that will be felled to make room for the track will be 19,980 square metres: in practice, a little less than 2 hectares.
“Reading the data of the forest management plan for those areas”, the article continues, “it emerges that, on average, the ‘stock’, that is, the volume of wood present in that area, varies between 300 and 350 cubic metres per hectare. The number of trees, on the other hand, stands at around 280-300 per hectare. In practice, each tree in that specific wood ‘cubes’ on average a little over 1 cubic metre.
“Well, from the award decision for the winning company we read that the company’s estimate, at the time of the bid, was as much as 2,200 cubic metres. This is, consequently, three times the 700-800 cubic metres that presumably grow in the roughly 2 hectares the project plans to cut.
In short, it seems that the larches to be cut are far more than the 500-600 cited by the various committees and press outlets, but in fact almost 2,000”.
Clear, isn’t it? If you put two and two together… “This number”, Torreggiani notes, “is inconsistent with the areas cited in the SIMICO project: 2,200 cubic metres cannot fit on 2 hectares”.
“This consideration, derived from the figures in the management plan, is already clear in reality too. Last Friday, regional councillor Cristina Guarda in fact submitted a complaint reporting the felling of larches even in places where, according to the SIMICO project, the “existing trees were to be kept” (for example in the area of the amphitheatre and the ‘Curva Cristallo’).
Something does not add up, then. Europa Verde councillor Cristina Guarda confirms that the felling will go well beyond the ‘reduced’ amount presented in the SIMICO project.
“But the forest management plan gives us other very interesting data on the larch wood”, adds Torreggiani. “It tells us, for example, that the main trees are about 150 years old, that this is a wood that has always been there (as period photographs also show), that it was once used as sparse wooded pasture and then, in the 1960s, was reforested with spruce and broadleaves to fill the gaps between one tree and another. So it is a wood that has always been shaped by humans, even more so after the construction of roads, ski slopes, ski lifts and the old bobsleigh track.”
And so, if it is a wood shaped by humans, and in any case reforested since the 1960s, what is its real environmental distinctiveness?
“In short, it is not a rare wood, so peculiar from a purely environmental point of view”, the journalist therefore notes, “but a forest area of very strong cultural, landscape and social value. A precious place precisely because of its location and its history, suited to the slow tourism that can develop near a town like Cortina, but also very important for its own inhabitants. A place that, cut through by the Olympic serpent of steel and concrete, will lose its ancient identity. That is the point”.
In short, the idea is clear. It is not the felling of a wood in itself that is an indiscriminately anti-environmental practice (“it has been carried out sustainably for centuries”, the journalist recalls, and in this larch wood too it is provided for, cautiously, by the Management Plan) but its actual implementation at a specific time and place and above all for a specific purpose, which may or may not be legitimate from the point of view of environmental balance. In this case, “the felling of those larches, of that wood, to build that track”.
One cannot but join the call for transparency that is being made loudly from many quarters and that the scoop by ‘L’altra montagna’ strongly relaunches. “How many larches will really be cut down, and where? Will the original project be followed or not? Are any changes justified? If so, on what grounds?”
Read the Alta Montagna article
