Wasted World by Rob Hengeveld

Author:Rob Hengeveld
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2011-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

Whenever I look at photo books or television programs on mountain life in the European Alps, the Rockies, the Andes, or the Himalayas I’m always impressed by the rich flora: meadows full of flowers forming a brightly colored blanket spread out over the mountainside. And each of those thousands of flowers seems different. Even if they are of the same red or yellow, they still have different intensities of red, different shades of yellow. Some flowers show off with their large size, whereas others stand humble and shy in-between the foliage with their tiny, greenish-yellow flowers. If you’re lucky enough to get to such mountains yourself, carefully wading through this bountiful life, you’ll also smell the flowers; the scent is never the same in any two flowers or any two meadows. And each flower is visited by insects flying around in huge numbers: flies, bees, wasps, and shiny beetles. They all add their bit to the low buzz surrounding you, and the crickets lower in the vegetation add their sharp chirping.

Those crickets stagger clumsily around in the turf, eating from grass stems and blades, whereas the bees sample nectar from all the flowers, flying busily between the meadow and their hive. If they are wild, their hives can be found hanging high up in a nearby tree, or, depending on the species, in-between the stones heaped up in a corner of the meadow. You might find the nests of predatory wasps dug into the ground and closed off by little pebbles and the sonorously buzzing bumblebees and beetles creeping in a tussock of grass or in their burrows in the soil. Spiders rush off hastily as you walk through the meadow; look at the butterflies fluttering silently between the flowers, sucking nectar, rolling out their tongues to reach it.

If you move slowly or sit down silently, after some time you might see some other animal life: young marmots chasing each other, mountain goats clashing heads, or deer, seemingly on tiptoe, alertly treading into the field. Little birds twitter in the air, and far away in the distance are one or two eagles approaching, circling higher and higher along the mountain slope into the sky until they disappear from sight, still looking down from their great height in search of prey.

Yet, sitting there, you know that this amazingly rich abundance of life will last only a short time; soon, it will be too cold for most of those insects to fly or for lizards or the occasional snake to rustle amid the vegetation. Plants, in their turn, will die off and rot away in the following fall rains or wither in the winds of the winter cold. Each year in spring, however, when the sun warms up the slopes, life bursts out again, and there they are back again—the flowers, insects, marmots and lizards, the clashing mountain goats, and the eagles circling in the air!

But then, after having watched life in that mountain meadow, after letting its beauty and smells sink

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