We have read carefully Reinhold Messner's recent interview On the "three problems of the mountains": influencers, trafficking, and wolves, and as an Association that has been committed for years to promoting coexistence between humans and wolves—and as mountain residents and workers—we would like to express our opinion.
We share your concern for the fragility of Alpine and Apennine ecosystems and the need to protect the mountains from superficial tourism and a development model that risks stripping them of their identity. More and more often, we see people visiting the mountains without the basic preparation needed to understand their values and address their challenges: visitors who arrive with the idea of "consuming an experience" rather than living it, guided by captivating images but lacking the necessary skills to move safely and respectfully. This lack of preparation isn't just a problem for those who put themselves in danger or hamper rescue efforts, but it also weakens a genuine connection with nature and the communities that inhabit it. This is a tourism model that many Alpine regions continue to push, favoring the wealth of a few and the impoverishment of all natural environments. However, we are convinced that, as newspaper headlines have suggested, identifying wolves as one of the main threats to the mountains is completely wrong and misleading.
Livestock farmers who live and work at high altitude face far greater challenges, and the wolf is just one small piece of a much larger system that currently faces many challenges: the depopulation of rural areas, especially in the Apennines, the lack of services, competition from a global market that devalues local production, and bureaucracy that hinders those who wish to continue managing pastures. The wolf certainly presents a challenge: it requires adaptation and commitment, but it is not "the mountain's problem." On the contrary, it can be an indicator of environmental health and a cultural resource, if supported by adequate prevention tools and serious public policies.
Even in this case, as with tourism, much depends on the cultural preparation with which one relates to nature: It's not enough to ask for simplistic solutions or eliminate what bothers us, but we must grow as a community in the ability to coexist with the complexity and limits that nature imposes on us, just like in mountaineering.
South Tyrol and its mountains need to be positively influenced, especially by highly authoritative figures like Reinhold Messner. With his words and his visibility, Messner today plays a role not unlike that of the influencers he criticizes: he too influences public opinion.
For this reason his statements on the wolf cannot be superficial or full of hostility, but should stimulate society and institutions to focus on coexistence, prevention and culture, rather than on culling, especially in a context such as that of South Tyrol, still behind in prevention systems, lacking in information and communication about wolves, in a region that would have all the economic resources to professionalize the figure of the shepherd and propose a model of coexistence that elsewhere, and with many fewer resources, It has been rooted for many decades: that of coexistence with predators.
As an Association, we are available for constructive discussion, ready to share experiences, data, and best practices developed in the field over a decade of activity, so that the voices of those who love and live in the mountains can truly contribute to building lasting and respectful solutions for all. The mountains truly need protection, and with them the people who live and work there.
To do this, we need to combine nature conservation and support for farmers, avoiding confrontation and barricades in a historical moment when we need to relearn how to communicate with one another. We need culture, intelligent policies, and positive examples: learning to coexist, with nature, with each other, and even with wolves.