Salvate le Alpi

Year: 2001 Pages: 92 The presence of snow is the only important thing for skiers and snowboarders: they want nothing more than to go down any slope and have fun. Climbers rely on nails driven into the rock, mountaineers on weather forecasts, ice lovers on only a few tools; Then, in case of emergency, everyone takes their mobile phone out of their backpack, with which they can promptly call the rescue helicopter from any wall, cliff or crest in the Alps. “Long live the mountains!” Reduced to the backdrop of a cult of the body and performance which constitutes one of the few escape routes of the city's imagination, the Alps are becoming a single immense playground of paid risk, or more simply the indifferent place of distracted and devastating tourism . As a function of this tourism, car parks, cable cars, marked slopes, barriers against avalanches, etc. appear everywhere. And together with the number of those who the author calls "entertainment addicts", accidents also increase. For years committed to promoting a more balanced and compatible relationship with the mountains, Messner denounces here what is plain for all to see and, far from any environmentalist fundamentalism, proposes his recipes for saving the Alps (and mountaineering ).