Mountain Geography in 2002: The International Year of Mountains

Abstract

Operating with the kind of extended lead time usually reserved for Olympic site announcements or the runup for an international congress, in 1998 the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed 2002 the International Year of Mountains. Such fanfare traditionally aims to bring to the fore a subject matter that has been too long ignored--in this case, peoples and environments. The seven articles in this special issue of the Geographical Review offer an added North American contribution to an already auspicious, if necessarily somewhat introspective, occasion. One may ask, why mountains, or geography, and why an International Year? Simply put, mountains deserve this attention because, at the top of the world, they are places where environmental degradation readily occurs. The results flow downhill and are visited upon the rest of the planet. Consideration is also merited because we all love and revere mountains for their beauty and natural attributes and because there is a need to raise the awareness of this planet's many citizens who do not live in highland environments about the unique nature of places and peoples (Price 1981). Ask a child what makes rain forests special or different, and you will be told something germane; ask a similar question about mountains, and you will probably meet with a blank stare. Yet even the basic statistics are astonishing: Mountains cover about 25 percent of the earth's surface (Figure 1); they are home to 26 percent of the world's populace; and they generate 32 percent of global surface runoff (Meybeck, Green, a nd Vorosmarty 2001). Somewhat more than half of our planet's human population depends directly on environments for water, food, power, wood, and minerals (Ives 1992; FAO 2000). And because mountains contain high biological diversity, they are important factors in the diversity and stability of crops (Mountain Agenda-UNCED 1992; UNCED 1993; FAO 1999; Smethurst 2000). Because elevation, relief, and aspect change markedly over short distances, mountains are excellent places in which to study human and physical processes. Moreover, mountains are distributed globally, from the Tropics to the poles and from maritime to continental environments. Hence academic interest in peoples and environments is widespread. Several current works document geography: Roderick Peattie's 1936 study is still in print (1969); John Gerrard takes on the purely physical environment (1990); Bruno Messerli and Jack Ives chronicle contemporary issues quite well (1997); and Larry Price's classic, Mountains and Man (1981), is being rewritten as Mountains and People (Friend, Byers, and Price forthcoming). The journals Mountain Research and Development and Himalayan Research Bulletin are devoted exclusively to matters montane, and others, including Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research, are at least partially devoted to them. More than 26,000 citations result from an electronic search in Geographical Abstracts for mountain or mountains--just in the title or keyword field! The recent formation of the Mountain Geography Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers indicates an increasing interest in the subject on this continent and in the discipline in general (Friend 1999); and the American Geographical Society has a long history of researchers working on glaciers, health issues, exploration, or myriad other high-elevation topics. In addition to the International Year of Mountains, highland regions are regularly in the news: the War on Terrorism in Afghanistan, the ongoing conflict in Kashmir, ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and in Rwanda and Burundi, forest fires in the western United States, increasing numbers of climbers (and fatalities) on Mount Everest, shrinking glaciers around the world, the list goes on ... reflecting broad interest in mountains. …