The Alps, Europe’s longest mountain range, stretching in a 1200-kilometre arc from eastern Austria via Switzerland and France to north-eastern Italy, have in recent decades increasingly become a focal point for the media, whether as a holiday destination to escape the city heat, as a training area for fit and not-so-fit mountain climbers, or as a recreational area for all those who seek inspiration from the beauty of nature and the fresh mountain air. But the newspapers are also filled with negative headlines, such as the melting of the last glaciers, frequent natural disasters such as landslides and mudflows, or the sheer volume of traffic and the ruthless exploitation of every last corner of this natural paradise with the giant hotel enterprises that are springing up everywhere. The abandoning of many unprofitable farms is a further media topic, especially in those areas where the European Union has arrived too late with its support for farmers as “guardians of the landscape”. The residents of rural Alpine areas lives are directly linked to this rapid change, with people whose world was just a few years ago frequently secluded and self-sufficient: people who would not keep pace with these radical changes and contemporary trends, who have so to speak retained their inner core and are thus in a sense part of a “dying” generation.