Mushrooms can’t run away. But they don’t wait either. That’s why Timo Hans puts his foot down when he drives up the narrow streets of the Hunsrück. The tall Rhinelander crouches behind the wheel of his off-road vehicle like a ten-year-old in a bobby car. He shouts against the noise of the diesel engine. “It’s fifty meters deep,” he shouts, nodding down the steep slope to his left that’s so close you could spit on it. He grins and speeds up again.
Timo Hans is the district forester of Damscheid, a municipality in Rhineland-Palatinate on the Middle Rhine. Some days he can see the Loreley Rock in the morning sun. Today fog hangs over the valley. “I started here 15 years ago,” calls Hans into the wind. “And since my first day it’s been about defending the forest against outside attacks.”
The all-terrain vehicle rushes through a tunnel of hanging branches. There is a layer of orange-brown-red leaves stuck to the wet asphalt. “What some people do here…” He rumbles grimly through a particularly deep pothole. “…this is criminal.”
Source: Stern
