Dwarf apple trees have a long history, as they were first documented and collected by Alexander the Great in 300 BCE, but their use as rootstock for passing on that dwarfing tendency became widespread only in the latter half of the twentieth century.16 Precisely how the dwarfing tendency is passed on from the rootstock to the scion wood—the wood taken from a tree of the desired fruit variety—remains a bit of a mystery. Nonetheless, the rootstock seems to influence the growth pattern for the rest of the tree through chemical signals in the form of plant hormones.
The Dutch orchardists grafted their penchants for agricultural innovation and economic efficiency to come up with the slender spindle trellis system—a means of training a dwarf apple tree to grow with the support of horizontal trellis wires and a thin upright pole of bamboo or metal. There are various methods of pruning and training dwarf apple trees to achieve different heights, outputs, and management intensity, but the common factor is the dwarf rootstock. For decades researchers have been developing different fruit tree rootstocks for cold hardiness, disease and pest resistance, and size. While the reliance upon smaller trees seems counterintuitive for maximizing fruit production, the key elements of enhanced production and payoff reside in the intensity of planting and the efficiency of management. If a farmer can maximize the number of trees per acre while reducing the labor and costs necessary for pruning, spraying, mowing, and harvest, then adopting a trellis system can make a lot of sense.
Within two decades the South Tirol went from an experimental plot of approximately 75 acres (30 ha) in 1969 to more than 39,500 acres (16,000 ha) of slender spindle plantings by 1990.17 Today there are more than 45,467 acres (18,400 ha) in production.18
With an average of thirty pesticide sprayings per year in those orchards, it’s not just the apples that are spreading. It’s hard to picture what it looks like. Until you photograph it, that is.
In 2012 Urban decided that it was time to start documenting the spraying that he was observing not only from his own farm but also in the local area. He began making videos of farmers applying pesticides, in all seasons and during all sorts of different weather conditions. While pesticide drift is extremely difficult and expensive to document after the fact, it is not especially difficult to capture the spraying methods or timing of pesticide applications. It wasn’t a strategy that he embraced immediately, but sometimes push comes to shove, even among neighbors.
The Gluderers are bounded on three sides by apples: One neighbor is an organic apple farmer, and another is a conventional farmer who is always respectful of the Gluderers’ need for established buffers. Both farmers are careful not to spray when weather conditions pose significant risk for drifting of the chemicals they use, since the Gluderers don’t even use copper or sulfur, substances allowed in organic fruit and vegetable production.
However, one adjoining neighbor consistently showed blatant disregard for their requests that he be more careful about the distance and timing of his sprayings. He continued to push the limits of the law, up to the point that the Gluderers finally decided to file a complaint with the local police in 2015. It turned out to be the first time in the South Tirol that a complaint against a neighbor for breaching required buffer distance resulted in a fine. The farmer had to pay a modest 500 euros (just over $500), but he was allowed to continue spraying.
Urban continued to make videos of farmers spraying pesticides in order to demonstrate how far pesticides were drifting and the intensity with which they were being applied. He documented some farmers applying them in windy conditions and others blasting their aerosols into the air—with spray reaching 30, 60, and even 90 feet (9, 18, and 27 m) high even though the trees themselves seldom exceed 13 feet (4 m) in height. In some cases, he captured a farmer parking his tractor in one spot for an extended period of time in an effort to push the pesticides into areas not accessible by the tractor, meanwhile allowing the wind carry the excessive applications high into the air and down the valley.
The videos didn’t show anything locals didn’t already see on an everyday basis in apple country, but they did document the carelessness of some farmers—and what some would begin to call an abuse of the public trust.
Urban and Annemarie couldn’t help but worry about the health of their family. It wasn’t uncommon for farmers to spray their orchards twenty or more times in a season. Surrounded by so many different pesticides, in cocktails known only to the farmers spraying them, the Gluderers couldn’t possibly assess what might be the biggest threats to their health—or if the combination of certain chemicals warranted even greater concern. While their high tunnels protected their crops, their family couldn’t spend their entire existence under the protection of their translucent bubbles, nor could they control the impacts of pesticide drift outside the high tunnels.
As they monitored the crops in the show gardens that surrounded their high tunnels, pesticide residue levels exceeded the rate at which those herbs and flowers could be sold even as conventional products. Furthermore, the water that was shed by the high tunnels was so contaminated with residues that it couldn’t be captured and reused and instead was piped away.
The economic threat to their business was real. Everything that Urban had worked so hard to build was at risk—and not just at home. Some of the fields that his job training center had used for growing herbs were now off-limits to organic production due to pesticide drift from an orchard located 0.5 mile (800 m) away. After enduring several years of the herbs consistently testing positive for pesticides—resulting in the disposal of the entire crop each time—the center decided that only vegetable root crops could be planted in the fields: crops that wouldn’t be immediately exposed to drifting pesticides. The absurdity seemed as widespread as the drift, and it was headed for Mals. Urban minced no words in his assessment of the threat crawling up the valley: “In Mals, they have no chance if our problems become their problems.”
With the growth of Big Apple, so much was at stake. And it wasn’t just the future.
CHAPTER 4
Frozen in Time
He was dead within two minutes. The subclavian artery just under his left shoulder blade was severed by a weapon that would go undetected for the first ten years of the forensic investigations, despite the fact that experts from all over the globe had probed every orifice and noted each scar, tattoo, and deformation that covered his perfectly preserved skin.
Virtually no cadaver had ever raised so much international interest among forensic experts, scientists, medical technicians, and anthropologists. Yet not only did they miss seeing the arrowhead buried deep in his shoulder during the first decade of initial research, but they also hadn’t been able to find their way to his stomach with their endoscopic probe. It would be eighteen years before they finally discovered that the small, misshapen organ had mysteriously migrated up just underneath his lungs, hidden from researchers and their tech-heavy peering and prodding.1 That freeze-dried pouch turned out to hold not only the secrets to his last hours but also much more. It was the Ice Man’s stomach, and it contained an undigested meal that would make anthropologists around the world salivate in anticipation of the forthcoming analyses. They all wanted to know what the Ice Man ate and what secrets his shriveled stomach held about the southern flank of the Alps thousands of years ago. Few people, if any, knew at the time just how relevant those findings would be in thinking about the fate of agriculture in the twenty-first century.
As it turns out, the stories of ur-ganic and organic aren’t that far apart in the South Tirol, at least not in distance. The Ice Man, dubbed Ötzi (ERT-zee) by the locals, in honor of his resting spot 10,532 feet (3,210 m) high in the Ötztal Alps, was discovered only 17 miles (28 km) from Günther Wallnöfer’s organic dairy in Mals and a mere 10 miles (16 km) from the Gluderers’ organic herb farm in Goldrain.
The evolving discoveries of what Ötzi ate would bring to mind not just the carbonized remains of Copper Age offerings but al
so the twenty-first-century sacrifices made to the idols of agricultural “progress.”
Like Günther, Ötzi came from a culture reliant upon domesticated dairy animals. Like the Gluderers, he and his contemporaries were familiar with the nutritional and healing powers of gathered and cultivated plants and fungi. The food and health traditions that had sustained this long lineage of mountain dwellers since Ötzi was first encased in ice were under siege in the beginning of the twenty-first century. The agricultural biodiversity, livestock traditions, and healthy soils that had been fundamental to human survival surrounding Ötzi’s old stomping grounds risked being wiped out within a generation. All for the almighty apple.
The stories of the discovery of the Ice Man and the movement of Big Apple up the Vinschgau Valley intersect at a variety of points, but the most obvious nexus is geographic proximity. Ötzi’s final days were spent in the Schnals Valley, a staggeringly steep-sided valley that drops in a southerly direction from Similaun—an 11,798-foot (3,596 m) peak—to where it connects with the eastward dip of the broad Vinschgau at an elevation of 1,837 feet (560 m), only about 5 miles (7.7 km) northeast of the Gluderers’ organic herb farm.
But the stories of Ötzi and Big Apple share more than just geography. The two narrative threads also share a twisted conspiracy of climate change and wind. Just as the warming of the Vinschgau Valley has allowed apples to creep into ever-higher elevations and the winds of the region have exacerbated the problems of pesticide drift, it was the combination of receding glaciers and the blowing of fine Saharan sands across the Mediterranean and onto the already dwindling snowpack above the valley that hastened the emergence of the Ice Man.
Ötzi’s icy sepulcher was slowly conceding to the precipitous climbing of temperatures in the latter decades of the twentieth century. Then a massive sandstorm in March 1991 blew yellow sand particles from Africa to Europe, amplifying the sun’s intensity and opening the lid to Ötzi’s crystallized tomb.
On September 19 of that year, two German hikers, Helmut and Erika Simon, were traversing the upper elevations of the Ötztal range just above and to the north of the Vinschgau Valley, along the ridge that separates the contemporary borders of Italy and Austria. As they picked their way across the landscape of stone and ice just above 10,000 feet (3,000 m), they stumbled upon an unnerving sight in a slight depression of rock that cradled the last remnants of a dying glacier: Facedown, the head and upper torso of a mummified cadaver was protruding from a dwindling basin of water and ice atop the craggy ridgeline.
At first, it wasn’t clear whether the Simons had found the remains of a missing hiker or even a soldier from one of the world wars. In fact, it wasn’t even obvious who should be contacted—the authorities from Italy or from Austria—since the cadaver was situated so close to the jagged border between the two countries, a borderline that had never been completely delineated because the site was covered with more than 60 feet (20 m) of snow when the border was established by treaty in 1919.2
Austrian officials presumed jurisdiction initially, and they attempted to extricate the corpse the day following the discovery, but they weren’t able to pull it free from the ice. They did, however, find the ax with a copper head and a finely crafted yew handle that would become not only Ötzi’s signature tool but also the tool that would later force anthropologists to reconsider their established starting point for the Copper Age, now categorized as the period between 3500 and 2200 BCE.3
However, Ötzi’s origins and his modern destiny were very much in limbo during the first weeks following his discovery. On September 21, the father of the owner of the nearest mountain hut set out to try to free the corpse from the ice, but with no success. Coincidentally, two world-famous mountain climbers, Reinhold Messner and Hans Kammerlander, happened by the site, and Messner estimated that the body was at least five hundred years old, a guess made without the advantage of seeing the ax, which had been taken down the mountain by a police officer the day before. A day later, an Austrian team finally freed the cadaver from the ice and readied it for transport to Austria, but a sharp drop in temperatures allowed the ice to reclaim its prize for yet one more night, until the forensic specialists were finally able to extricate the Ice Man on September 23. They transported him and a portion of his increasingly interesting tools and clothing by helicopter to Vent, Austria, where he was then transported by hearse to the Institute for Forensic Medicine in Innsbruck.4
What followed was one of the most fascinating and complex forensic investigations ever undertaken. Ötzi had died a hauntingly lonely death, but his reemergence into a world of prehistorically inclined paparazzi and scientists armed with every kind of probe, scalpel, and scanning device imaginable was enough to make even the coolest of characters blush. Not only was Ötzi the best-preserved mummy of his time, but almost all of his clothing and tools were also frozen in time with him. However, it was what he ate in those last hours that would shed so much light on what was at stake more than five millennia later down below in the Vinschgau Valley, the place where scientists would determine that he had spent a good portion of his adulthood.
High above where the Schnals and Vinschgau Valleys meet sits a rocky outcropping known as Juval. Situated just above the entrance of the Schnals Valley, overlooking the east–west expanse of the Vinschgau, Juval’s strategic location and its southern exposure weren’t missed by the people of Ötzi’s time and even earlier. Recent archaeological excavations have revealed the remains of a Stone Age settlement at Juval. At approximately 3,280 feet (1,000 m), the site is actually the highest Neolithic settlement yet discovered in the region. It seems almost certain that Ötzi was well aware of the Juval site; in fact, some researchers use various forms of evidence to suggest that he may have inhabited the site in some fashion.
As is the case with so many of the Neolithic settlements and cultic sites in the South Tirol, a medieval castle now sits atop Juval. First appearing in written history in 1278, Juval Castle is perched atop a promontory that intimidates today’s casual visitors, much less medieval invaders. The castle is now owned by Reinhold Messner, the mountain climber who happened by the discovery site and hazarded the first guess at Ötzi’s age while the glacier mummy was still ensconced in ice. Messner’s estimations carry a lot of weight in the South Tirol, given his status as the world’s most renowned mountain climber. A native of the region, he was the first climber to scale Everest without oxygen, and the first person to conquer all of the world’s peaks over 8,000 meters (26,000 feet).
Messner spent years restoring Juval Castle, eventually renovating a portion of it to be one of six locations housing different elements of his Messner Mountain Museum. Juval Castle was dedicated to the theme of the Myth of Mountain, focused on the spiritual aspects of mountains in different cultures. In addition to exhibits of cultures with deep spiritual affinities with mountains, Juval also features a farm, vineyard, distillery, and restaurant, all of which maintain a focus on local, traditional, and sustainable practices.
Perhaps, then, it should be no surprise—given their geographic proximity and their philosophical alignment—that Messner sells the Gluderer family’s herbal products from his gift shop and has lent his name to the Gluderers for a line of ecofriendly body-care products. They not only share a vista of a landscape overrun by apples but also a view that there are better ways to farm, methods rooted deep in mountain traditions.
As it turns out, the exchange of resources between Messner and the Gluderers, between the inhabitants of Schnals and Vinschgau Valleys, was indicative of a back-and-forth movement of goods that stretched far back into history. Ötzi would turn out to be a case in point.
The question of where Ötzi belonged had two sides to it: the legal aspect and the scientific question. In the initial weeks surrounding the discovery of “the man in ice,” it was thought that he was found on the Austrian side of the border, but by early October it was clear that the discovery site was within the Italian
domain. Nonetheless, Ötzi would remain in Austria until 1998, at which point he was escorted under tight security and international fanfare to his newest home in Bozen (Bolzano), Italy.
Diplomacy aside, the burning scientific question wasn’t where Ötzi was going to chill long-term but rather where he came from before he was murdered in cold blood atop a high mountain pass. The answer came in rather surprising form: toilet paper. Well, organic wipes, anyway.
As it turned out, one of the types of moss Ötzi was carrying was a dead giveaway as to which side of the mountains he had come from before meeting his violent end. It’s not that the moss (Neckera complanata) he was carrying was special; it was actually quite mundane. This species of moss was a coveted toiletry item not only for Ötzi’s contemporaries but also for the roving shepherds and high-altitude hunters of the twentieth century. Gathered below, somewhere in its habitat range from Juval down into the Vinschgau Valley, it was commonly used for wiping, among other things.5 The moss remnants were among the best early clues as to where Ötzi called home, at least for the latter part of his estimated forty years.
However, investigators wanted more specific answers about Ötzi’s origins. Detectives are renowned for stomaching a lot of things, but it’s not every day that they’re called upon to retrace a cadaver’s digestive tract and determine not only a victim’s final meals but also his last travels—5,300 years ago. Scientists estimate that the progression of food through the entire gastrointestinal tract follows a general time frame of about thirty-three hours. In general, it takes four to five hours for the stomach contents to reach the transverse colon—the middle part of the large intestine that crosses the body from right to left—and another nine to twelve hours for it to reach the end of the small intestine before beginning the fourteen- to fifty-five-hour passage between the beginning of the large intestine and the end of the colon before being excreted through the rectum.6 Using those figures as a benchmark, scientists can deduce the approximate time between meals. But that doesn’t tell them where those meals were eaten.
A Precautionary Tale Page 7