 I thank you from my heart for the wonderful surprise of this Award. It specially pleases me that it is a recognition which clearly means far more than other sporting awards or media success. When one's life is devoted to mountaineering, when the passion takes over one's whole life, then there comes another challenge. For me, mountaineering is not only climbing to the top, but excelling also in science and human relations. In order to use my head in climbing, I studied geology. It was only later that I became aware of the need for human and social responsibilities. We climbers are usually criticized as egoists. Most of us are certainly more or less egocentric.
Too often we forget that we are also tied to life in the valleys, that we carry responsibility and obligations to those who dwell there, whether we like it or not. What are we able to contribute in return? Our joy in individual outdoor adventure - often an extreme effort to us - is mostly misunderstood. Over the years I have grown more conscious of the existence of values and interests in the Mountain World beyond the confined limits of sport alone. These values are freedom and solidarity towards others, which begin to assume special significance at the beginning of the new millennium. The great urgent social challenge of our age is to link personal freedom with solidarity, to combine them. Would that be impossible? I do not think so. What seems utopian to today's politicians has always existed in the free world of mountaineering in spite of the sharply competitive race to the peaks and all too many human weaknesses. I believe that today we must, as climbers, preserve these values, not just for our own sake but also for humanity at large. We should pass this awareness on as a modest contribution to those who follow and as a means of curbing modern trends of excessive commercialization and exploitation of Nature and the Mountain World.
By doing so we could make mountaineering appear to the general public much less of a useless activity than we have been accused of so far.
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