New cameras have been installed above 2,000 metres of altitude on Pelister. The official purpose is monitoring the chamois and other wild animals - establishing their numbers, their health, and the potential of the population inside the national park.

„We installed the new cameras in a high region, above 2,000 metres of altitude. Our goal is the preservation and monitoring of the animals' habitats, to improve their conditions for living and surviving in nature,” said Petar Moshtanovski, who works at the institution.

But the second purpose is more interesting than the first. The director of the Pelister National Park public institution in Bitola, Ivancho Toshevski, said openly that some of the cameras also serve to prevent unwanted incidents on the mountain. And that it is already producing results: „With active monitoring, the lack of hygiene has decreased, visitors are leaving less and less rubbish on the mountain.”

So the cameras are not only watching chamois. They are watching people. And since they started watching people, there is less rubbish on Pelister.

That is a fact that says more about us than we would like. Years of appeals, signs, campaigns and calls for „a culture of behaviour in the mountains” delivered less than the knowledge that somebody is recording. Toshevski even thanked the media for carrying the appeals - but the appeals did not clean up Pelister. The camera did.

The institution is announcing other environmental projects too. The question that remains: will Macedonia treat its national parks properly only where there is a lens, or occasionally also where there is not?