Energy has always been a central part of the 1600 commoners’ organizations in Switzerland. The access to timber but also forests for multiple reasons had been a central part of rights and duties of Swiss Commoners systems since the 13th century before the energy turn to fossil energy sources. Commoners’ organizations own 1/3 of all forests in Switzerland in common property and are the main force to maintain biodiverse cultural landscape ecosystems. But since the devaluation of timber as an energy source after the energy turn to fossil sources, the economic value of forests has been massively reduced. Therefore, the use value has been transformed to a burden, as the maintenance costs financially are rising and cannot be covered by subsidies. But as many commoner’s organizations hold the value of identity and relation to the collective forests high, they still manage them outside the capitalist value system. They maintain them via internal cross subsidies by income from real estate land, housing and gastronomy and some of them also using income from water rights for hydropower. But since the green energy turn, increasingly also timber as a regrowing natural source of energy becomes important. The paper shows two cases from commoner’s organization in the German speaking (Sarnen, Canton Obwalden) and the French speaking part (Val D’Annivier, Canton Valais) illustrating how innovative initiatives of commoners’ organizations led to decentralized heating systems for otherwise undervalued timber not being used for construction work. This is an important decentralized contribution to the energy transition, while at the same time maintaining the ecosystem services of the protection forests so important to mitigate climate change. However, in the ongoing debate on the green energy turn, this additional source of diversifying green energy adding to wind, water and solar tends to ignore this important option.
