walking along
High Elevation Research
I read the news today. It is Valentine’s day, and folk who celebrate such things are celebrating love.
Britain is flooded. Not all of Britain, but Britain is a fairly “full up” place so when nature mixes in months of relentless rain it seems like the whole island is one great big disastrous puddle. For months houses have been half submerged, the storms still roll in. A huge chunk of North America is under snow, and sleet, and ice, and relentless cold. I’m not wearing my coat while I write this, sitting by a Canadian coffee shop window. It’s only -3C, and during a winter like this -3C feels so cozy. I don’t need a hat today. I read on. There’s the aftermath of the Chemical spill in West Virginia, in Pennsylvania the turnpike is blocked by multiple pile ups on the icy roads, violence in Venezuela, massacre in the Central African Republic.
I turn to Utata. A woman is looking comically despondent in Mickey Mouse ears, there’s a man with cold ears, flowers, a baby, graffiti, a theatre, a skyline, there’s plenty of snow. In California, where George took this picture, there’s a drought. I’m no ecologist but I’d guess that the White Mountains of California are always dry. I look at the sinewy curves of the trees in his picture, and the truly perfect blue sky, the mosaic-like surface of the slopes. The oldest known living tree is on these mountains. Earth might seem screwed, but right now it is still a tremendously beautiful planet. Not just the California mountains, but the flooded levels of Somerset, and the iced over swathes of Maryland too.
So this is my Valentine to you, if you are sick of rain and snow. I offer you dry ground, blue skies, and most importantly a group of ecology research assistants; a bunch of people who study what makes the ecosystems of this world keep ticking over, in the hope that we can all learn how to keep most of it beautiful.
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, Rachel Irving and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
