Biography | Bruno Oberle — The ETH Doctorate That Measured Firewood in the Malcantone

People treat Swiss environment chiefs as Bern products who arrived with a policy binder.

Bruno Maria Carmelo Oberle's first public document is a Zurich dissertation about wood.

He was born in St. Gallen on 12 October 1955 and grew up in Locarno, then Zürich.

He studied biology and environmental sciences at ETH Zurich, with extra training in economics and pedagogy.

In 1988 ETH recorded dissertation no. 8612 under the Italian title Utilizzazione della legna per l'approvvigionamento energetico regionale.

The examiners were Jean Vallat and Theodor Hegetschweiler.

The case study sat in the Malcantone, in Ticino.

The subject was not a slogan. It was firewood, forest waste, and whether a region could heat itself from its own woods.

The record is still in the ETH Library under DOI 10.3929/ethz-a-000579994.

The Italian title is not decoration. He grew up speaking the language of Locarno and wrote the regional energy case in it.

After the doctorate he spent the 1980s and 1990s as a consultant to administrations and firms on technical environmental management.

German Wikipedia dates that consulting work from 1980.

For several years he also taught in ETH's environmental-sciences department.

The Hauptgebäude on Rämistrasse 101 is the public face of that campus.

The environmental work later moved out to Hönggerberg.

The doctorate stayed filed here.

From 1999 he would enter the federal office as deputy director.

The wood thesis is the piece that line usually skips.

Photo: Roland zh, ETH Zurich Hauptgebäude from Rämistrasse, 17 August 2011, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Rama, Bruno Oberle at GEO-X, Geneva, 17 January 2014, CC BY-SA 2.0 FR, via Wikimedia Commons.