Who Owns Nature?

Where do we as humans find ourselves on the scale: are we nature’s – our world’s – protectors or its destroyers? In expansive film theater images we will enter the wild animals’ cosmos– not in Africa, but here at home. In one of the most beautiful landscapes in Europe – in the German, Austrian, French and Swiss alps – we will pose this question to humanity on the basis of the condition of the forests, their owners, the wild animals, their hunters and the farmers in the cycle of the seasons.

The question “Who Owns Nature?” immediately leads to the next question: what is nature? Almost all of us live in cities. What most of us understand to be nature is: the plants, the city park or what we see when we travel with a train or car from one city to the next. But is the green meadow nature? Is the forest, which flies by us one tree trunk at a time, natural? So who do the deer, stags, chamois, wild boars, hares, foxes, lynxes, bears or wolves belong to? They have no owners. They belong to themselves; they are a part of nature. However, to be precise, nature no longer exists in Europe. There are “green” surfaces that are used and planted agriculturally. The wild animals share their habitats with us. Who determines how we live with them?

In optically lavish images, the film takes us into the unique world of the wild animals, archaic landscapes, seasons – and the hunters. In the heart of our western civilization, we enter a world that doesn’t seem to fit to our contemporary age. Mountain goats, bellowing stags, a pack of wolves, forest rangers, farmers, wildlife biologists, hunting opponents and hunters: they are all protagonists in a dramatic alpine play.