Nature beauty and much more

Mount Everest, Himalayas, Nepal

In the massif of the Himalayas, which forms the boundary between Nepal and China, stands Mount Everest. Rising to an altitude of 29,028 feet (8,848 m), Everest is the highest point on the planet. In Nepali the mountain is called Sagarmatha, He whose head touches the sky,” and in Tibetan it is called Chomolongma, Mother Goddess of the world.” The name Everest comes from the British colonel George Everest, who in 1852 was assigned the task of drawing up a cartographic outline of India. Since the triumphant expedition by the New Zealander Edmund Hilary and the Nepalese Sherpa Norgay Tensing on May 29, 1953, Everest has inspired more than 300 successful ascents and has claimed some 100 lives. But crowding has caused pollution problems, and the consumption of brushwood for campfires has stripped the slopes and exposed them to erosion. However, in the past ten years, new regulations, clean-up operations, the installation of solar panels, and the introduction of portable fuel for expeditions have helped reverse the degradation of this fragile high-altitude site, declared a national park in 1976, which is vital to the Sherpas.

Whale off of the Valdés peninsula, Argentina

After summering in the Arctic, whales return to the southern seas each winter to reproduce. From July to November, whales mate and bear their young along the coasts of the Valdés Peninsula in Argentina. Until the 1950s, this migratory marine mammal was extensively hunted for its meat and the oil extracted from its fat, which brought it to the edge of extinction. Protective measures were adopted after international attention was focused on the problem in 1937. In 1982 a moratorium was declared on whale hunting for commercial purposes, and in 1994 the austral seas become a whale sanctuary; the Indian Ocean was established as a sanctuary fifteen years earlier. Despite these efforts it was estimated in 2001 that more than 21,000 whales have been killed since the enactment of the moratorium, mainly by Japan and Norway. After decades of protection, 7 of the 13 whale species, of which only a few thousand remain (10 to 60 times fewer than in the early twentieth century), are still endangered.

Birds flying over the lagoon near the mangroves of San Blas, Nayarit state, Mexico

Mexico contains a great diversity of climate and landscape, including deserts, mountains, hardwood forests, and, as here, lagoons alongside mangroves—a subtropical rainforest typical of alluvial coasts. Although Mexico boasts more than 900 species of cactus, 1,000 orchids, and the same number of mammals, it is the country’s variety of birds that is most striking: no fewer than 10,000 species, including the celebrated quetzal, also known as the bird of the Aztecs.” Mangrove swamps are a favorite haunt of migrating birds. Here they find plentiful food: insects, mollusks, shellfish, shrimp, and small fish, which come to breed at the feet of the mangroves, a tree peculiar to this mixed ecosystem that is part sea and part land. Mangroves are essential to marine life. They also protect the shoreline, holding in place the sediments deposited by rivers and curbing the ocean’s erosion by acting as a breakwater.

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Greater flamingos on Lake Nakuru, Kenya

Lake Nakuru has a surface area of 24 square miles (62 km2), which takes up one-third of the national park of the same name that was created in 1968. It shelters nearly 370 bird species, including the lesser flamingo (Phoeniconaias minor) and the greater flamingo (Phoenicopterus ruber), of which 1.4 million have been counted on the site. Like the other alkaline lakes scattered along the Rift Valley, its location on a rocky volcanic substrate, weak flow, intense evaporation, and average depth of 40 inches (1 m) give it a high soda content. These briny waters are favorable to the formation of blue-green algae, microorganisms, and small crustaceans, which provided the basic diet of flamingos. However, chemical products used in river farming and the water runoff from the nearby city of Nakuru have gradually polluted the lake waters. Since 1990 Lake Nakuru has been considered a wetland of international importance.

Drying dates in a palm grove south of Cairo, Nile Valley, Egypt

Date palm trees are grown only in hot, arid areas with water resources, such as oases. Five million tons of dates are produced each year worldwide. Most of the production from the Near East and North Africa is intended for each country’s domestic market and only about 5 percent is exported. Egypt, the world’s second-leading producer, after Iran, harvests more than 800,000 tons of dates each year, which are consumed locally at a rate of 22 pounds (10 kg) per person per year. These dates are habitually preserved in traditional ways. Fresh-picked, yellow or red depending on the variety, the dates slowly turn brown as they dry in the sun, protected from the wind and water by a small wall of earth and branches. They are then kept in baskets woven from palms. Although most of the dates produced go on the table, several derivatives (including syrup, flour, dough, vinegar, sugar, alcohol, and pastries) are made from the fruit manually or industrially.

Worker resting on bales of cotton, Thonakaha, Korhogo, Côte d’Ivoire

In the nineteenth century West Africa received its first cotton seeds of the Gossypium hirsutum variety, which originated in the British Antilles and remains the most widely cultivated kind of cotton in the world. At the beginning of the twentieth century this raw material represented 80 percent of the world textile market (47 percent today), and the European colonial powers encouraged cotton production in order to break the export monopoly of the United States and Egypt. Harvested manually at a rate of 33 to 80 pounds (15 to 40 kg) per worker per day in tropical Africa, the cotton crop is then put through gins in order to separate fiber, seeds, and waste. One ton of cotton yields 880 pounds (400 kg) of fibers and 1,200 pounds (560 kg) of seeds, which are processed for human consumption (as oil) or for animals (cattle cakes). In northern Côte d’Ivoire, especially in the Korhogo region, cotton plantations, the main cash crop, take up 590,000 acres (240,000 hectares). The country’s cotton output, nearly 300,000 tons, produced by more than 150,000 planters, is only a small fraction of world production; but nationally it counterbalances the agricultural domination in the south of the country, where the great plantations (cacao, palm oil, rubber, pineapple) are concentrated.

Patchwork of carpets in Marrakech, Morocco

In addition to the countries of central Asia and certain countries in South America, major centers of carpet production are found in northern Africa (Algeria, Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco). Morocco has succeeded in maintaining a tradition of manufacture within family units and cooperative craft workshops, although most productions is now automated. Carpets are traditionally woven of linen, a symbol of protection and happiness, with silk, cotton, and sometimes camel or goat hair. The colors and designs are characteristic of the production regions, and the High Atlas mountains, where Marrakech is located, offers the warmest hues, mainly red, orange, and yellow. Ninety percent of the High Atlas carpets are created in the cities of Tazenakht and Amerzgane, primarily by women workers. The Moroccan carpet, once reserved entirely for domestic local use, has gained a worldwide reputation and today enjoys a flourishing export trade.

Nature beauty

Heart in Voh, New Caledonia, France

A mangrove swamp is an amphibious tree formation common to muddy tropical coastlines with fluctuating tides. It consists of various halophytes (plants that can develop in a saline environment) and a predominance of mangroves. These swamps are found on four continents, covering a total area of 65,000 square miles (170,000 km2), or nearly 25 percent of the world’s coastal areas. This represents only half of the original range, because these fragile swamps have been continually reduced by the overexploitation of resources, agricultural and urban expansion, and pollution. The mangrove remains, however, as indispensable to sea fauna and to the equilibrium of the shoreline as it is to the local economy. New Caledonia, a group of Pacific islands covering 7,000 square miles (18,575 km2), has 80 square miles (200 km2) of a fairly low (25 to 33 feet, or 8 to 10 m) but very dense mangrove swamp, primarily on the west coast of the largest island, Grande Terre. At certain spots in the interior that are not reached by seawater except at high tides, vegetation gives way to bare, oversalted stretches called tannes,” such as this one near the city of Voh, where nature has carved this clearing in the form of a heart.

The eye of the Maldives, atoll of North Mali, Maldives

The eye of the maldives is a faro, a coral formation on a rocky base that has sunk, hiding all but a ring-shaped reef that encircles a shallow lagoon. Coral can only form in water of a relatively high temperature, and thus atolls develop principally in intertropical regions. The lowest country in the world, with a high point not exceeding 8.25 feet (2,5 m), the maldive archipelago contains 26 large atolls, including 1,190 islands, nearly 300 of which are inhabited either permanently or seasonally by tourists. The archipelago was severely hit by the tsunami of december 26, 2004, which killed 83 and injured more than 2,000. The coastlines were altered, and some of the islands sank beneath the sea. The coral reefs were also partially destroyed by the gigantic wave and the debris it carried. As well as affecting the tourist trade, the maldives’ main economic resource, the damage to the coral food chain has harmed fishing and the livelihoods of the local people. Aware of the archipelago’s fragility, the authorities and the international community had already set up containing measures to limit the rise of the water level, but the barriers around the capital, male, did not stop the water from getting through.

Fields of tulips near Lisse, near Amsterdam, Netherlands
In April and May of every year, Holland briefly dons a multicolored garb. Since the first flowering in 1594 of bulbs brought back from the Ottoman Empire by the Austrian ambassador, four centuries of selection have led to the development of more than 800 varieties of tulip. On more than 50,000 acres (20,000 hectares), half devoted to tulips and one-quarter to lilies, the Netherlands produce 65 percent of the world production of flowering bulbs (or some 10 billion bulbs) and 59 percent of the exports of cut flowers. Dutch agriculture, which employs 5 percent of the active population, is one of the world’s most intensive and places the country third among world exporters of agricultural produce (after the United States and France). But chemical products have caused a deterioration in the water; Holland is thus beginning to use natural predators to protect its crops from illness and harmful insects, especially in the horticultural sector.