Abstract ID: 3.15680 | Accepted as Talk | Talk | TBA | TBA

Since 2022-2023, the French Alps coniferous forests suffer significant dieback caused by a bark beetle outbreak, favoured by droughts and heatwaves of unprecedented intensity, caused by climate change (Kotlarski et al., 2023). This crisis is hitting a forestry and wood industry that is already trying to operate a transition in response to global changes. In the specific socio-ecological context of mountain forests (Lachello et al., 2025), this transition manifests itself distinctively in a number of areas : low productivity, financing difficulties, environmental conservation policies, cohabitation with recreational practices. Cumulated with the institutionalisation of policies to fight climate change, biodiversity erosion (Parès, 2020) and the increase in socio-environmental criticism of French forest management (Deuffic and Banos, 2020), bark beetle outbreaks have a particularly pronounced impact on the day-to-day work of those managing public forests. This paper proposes to study how bark beetle outbreaks influence three categories of “nature workers” (Granjou et al., 2010) in the Alpine context: managers, forestry technicians and forestry workers at the Office National des Forêts (ONF), the French government agency responsible for managing public forests. This paper is based on a survey combining sociology, ethnology and history, conducted within two territorial units of the ONF Savoie Mont Blanc agency, between October 2023 and December 2025. It combines data consisting of participant observations (Peneff, 2009) carried out during working days with ONF agents, semi-structured interviews and the study of historical archives. This paper analyses how mountain ONF staffs are adapting or not, their professional practices according to bark beetle disturbances, in an already demanding transition context. In this specific mountain context, they face three « a priori » contradictory injunctions: injunction to manage the bark beetle outbreak consequences, injunction to profitability and injunction to ecologisation. We show that, for the most highly qualified functions, the actions relating to profitability vary according to the socio-ecological context of each territory. Meanwhile those relating to the greening of society are influenced by indirect impacts of climate change, like pests, and the employees personal commitments to preserve biodiversity. Conversely, the least qualified staff are subject to these injunctions in an indiscriminate manner.