Volunteers Instead of Guns: The Bergwald Project Calls for Help

These forests protect settlements and infrastructure from avalanches, rockfall and flooding, accomplishing far more than serving as a backdrop for hunting tourism and wildlife feeding.

Climate change, rising temperatures and extreme events place additional stress on mountain forests, while the burden from recreational hunting, tourist use, infrastructure and forestry interventions simultaneously increases.

To increase the mountain forest's resilience, the Bergwald Project focuses on targeted measures to promote biological diversity, site-appropriate rejuvenation and continuous care rather than short-term raw material maximisation.

In this way, the project stands in stark contrast to hunting-driven "solutions" where wildlife serve as scapegoats for alleged browsing damage, while structural problems in forest management remain hidden.

Hands-on field work: What volunteers do concretely

During project weeks, volunteers work under expert guidance in steep terrain: they plant site-appropriate young trees, maintain protective forests, remove non-native species, build erosion protection and help make forest structures more resilient to storms and drought.

Such deployments combine physical work with environmental education. Volunteers learn about ecological relationships and experience how forest ecosystems can be stabilised without hunting romanticism, but with plenty of hands-on work.

Public outreach instead of hunting propaganda

The Bergwald Project explicitly asks media outlets and platforms to highlight the importance of mountain forests and support in the search for volunteers.

Editorial offices have access to detailed press texts and media images. Additionally, the project invites journalists to participate on-site and speak directly with volunteers and project leaders.

For hunting-critical publications like wildbeimwild.com, this is an opportunity to shift the focus away from recreational hunting and trophies towards genuine protection and maintenance work in forests, thereby presenting a different image of commitment to mountain regions.

A Counter-Model to Recreational Hunting

While hunting associations continue attempting to stage their role as alleged guardians of forests, the Bergwald Project demonstrates a civil society counter-model: protective forest management as a public good task, carried by volunteers and experts, without kill quotas and trophy logic.

Those who want to get involved will find information on project locations and dates on the Bergwald Project website and can accomplish more for the mountain forest through their own work than a whole season of recreational hunting ever could.