The village submerged by the glacier and the other disaster announced that we persist in not seeing
There is a silence that screams more than a thousand words. It is what you breathe today in the mountains of Lötschental, where Blatten , a small village nestled at 1,500 meters above sea level in the Canton of Valais , lies largely buried under a flow of mud, ice, earth and debris . An entire community overwhelmed, as if by a sudden and ferocious blow from the mountain, which gave way with a violence as unexpected as it was announced.
An avalanche of nine million tons broke away at 3:30 p.m., after days of alert, as if to confirm a prophecy that no one really wanted to see written. The entire slope of the Birch glacier collapsed into the valley, taking with it trees, rocks, past and present. The Lonza River was dammed, houses swallowed up. One person is missing. A life. A face. A name that is missing today.
But this is not just the story of a landslide . It is the story of an open, collective wound. It is the voice of a climate crisis that has been knocking for years , then screaming, and now devastating. It is Blatten's story, but also ours. Of a world that continues to delude itself into thinking it can live as if nothing were happening, while the mountains fall, literally, in silence.
Mayor Matthias Bellwald said: “We have lost the village, but not the heart.” And those words, so simple and true, encapsulate the indomitable spirit of the mountain people, but they are not enough. Not anymore. Not after years in which Switzerland – and the world – have seen an increase in “Bergstürze,” mountain collapses, linked to melting glaciers and accelerated soil erosion.
According to data from the Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN), Switzerland has lost an average of 2% of its glacier volume each year over the past decade, with a record loss of 6% in 2022 alone . The Alps are warming twice as fast as the global average. This is no longer a warning sign: the fire is already advancing.
On May 19, nine days before the disaster, the village had been evacuated as a precaution . About 300 people had left their homes. But the mountain waited. And then it all came down at once. A magnitude 3.1 earthquake shook the area at the moment of the collapse, almost like a scream from the Earth.
And now we ask ourselves, once again: how long can we afford to pretend that these disasters are isolated, unfortunate, inevitable? How long will we continue to be moved by the images without changing anything?
Every glacier that melts, every mountain that crumbles, every house that gets lost under the mud, is a call. A cry that asks us to face reality: the climate crisis is not tomorrow, it is today . And every day in which we do not do enough, every missed choice, every compromise with comfort, is a hand that pushes another village towards the abyss. We can no longer limit ourselves to counting the dead after landslides , we must count every additional degree as one less life. Because ignoring the climate crisis does not make us spectators: it makes us accomplices.
Luce
