Year 3, Month 1, Day 17: You Used To Look Happy To Greet Me

More on the Edelweiss, this time from the UK Mail:

Alpine plants such as the edelwiss could become extinct if summers continue to get warmer, scientist have warned.

The cold-loving flowers are being forced higher up mountainsides by plants that thrive in higher temperatures, according to the first pan-European study of changing mountain vegetation published in the Journal Nature Climate Change.

Sent January 12:

The drama of climate change-triggered extinctions is unfolding before our eyes. Rapidly rising temperatures and changing weather patterns are now affecting the ecosystems of the European alps, threatening the survival of countless species of plants and animals, and turning the “small and bright, clean and white” Edelweiss into a historical footnote.

Should that tiny Alpine flower vanish from the wild, one of the most-loved songs in the English-speaking world will become a museum piece, devoid of its connection to an actual place, an actual family, an actual story, or the achingly evocative voice of Christopher Plummer. Another victim.

All over the planet, human cultures are likewise endangered; while people in the developed world may not find much sympathy for remote tribes whose habitats will be destroyed in the next fifty years, those societies have songs that mean as much to them as Rogers and Hammerstein’s beautiful “Edelweiss” does to us.

Warren Senders