Small Mountain Community Research Articles

Farm diversity and fine scales matter in the assessment of ecosystem services and land use scenarios

CONTEXTThe ecosystem services (ES) concept has brought together research on ecosystems, biodiversity and human well-being, but critical challenges remain to make ES operational. ES assessments are relevant tools in multi-purpose landscapes, such as agricultural landscapes situated within natural protected areas where the challenge is to meet both local livelihoods and conservations goals. La Sepultura Biosphere Reserve in south-eastern Mexico has evidenced tensions among social actors due to territorial disputes; local farmers and conservation institutions contest the landscape’s land use and ES benefits. OBJECTIVEWe conducted an empirical study in the territory of a small mountain community within this biosphere reserve. We assessed ES in alternative land use scenarios with the aim to generate knowledge in support of local land use and management decisions. METHODSWe first characterised local land use using mixed methods research and quantified six locally relevant ES: Livelihood ES valued by farmers including forage production, firewood stocks, and resin production, and ES valued by conservation institutions including tree cover, riparian corridor, and tree diversity. Next, four alternative land use scenarios were built based on expert knowledge and stakeholder participation, with a different balance and integration of production and conservation objectives. We then estimated these ES in the four scenarios and assessed ES trade-offs at the farm and landscape level. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONSWe found that farm diversity mattered. Though farms presented similar trade-offs in each of the scenarios, the magnitude of these trade-offs varied considerably among small vs. large farms. At the landscape level, the intensive cattle ranching and forest restoration scenarios presented hard trade-offs, compared to the more moderate integrated agroforestry practices scenario. Moreover, the land use zoning scenario, a management strategy promoted by conservation institutions, did not differ from the current landscape nor offer an improvement in conservation indicators. Livestock played a key role in the land system, and trade-offs between forage production and other ES were recurrent across scenarios and spatial scales. Still, management practices that harness biodiversity and ES can improve sustainability of cattle ranching, and thus reconcile production and conservation goals. SIGNIFICANCERelevant ES assessments in agricultural landscapes support local land management decisions, integrate the social–ecological context, and scale up land use scenarios from the farm (fine scale) to the landscape level.

Tourism Development in Inner Mountain Areas—The Local Stakeholders’ Point of View through a Mixed Method Approach

Tourism in inner areas, especially in the mountains, is a complex phenomenon due to the different tourist’s needs and to the specific local features that vary considerably from one destination to another. Consequently, a unique tourism development strategy cannot be defined and adopted anywhere. When considering tourism-based territorial development in mountain areas, it is crucial to take the vision of local stakeholders into consideration. To drive different and/or unexpressed opinions towards shared tools, this study analyses the local stakeholder’s point of view using a mixed method consisting of a Delphi method followed by a Group Nominal Technique. The research was performed in Soana Valley, a small mountain community in the Northwestern Italian Alps. It involved 17 local stakeholders divided into three main groups—local administrators (n = 3), hospitality operators (9) and retailers (5). Results show how operators converge on three common aspects—local food product offering, territorial promotion and collaboration among operators, on which the community should focus to build a territorial integrated tourism offering.

Environmental and Community Stability of a Mountain Destination: An Analysis of Residents’ Perception

This study aims to explore the use of the social-ecological system (SES) in tourism of a mountain area. Authors examined residents’ perceptions of tourism impacts on four SES aspects: ecosystems, local knowledge, people and technology and property rights institutions. The aim is to find area that will be a “common ground” for community and area that can be a source of conflict and will require additional work to solve the differences. Second objective was to examine residents’ perception towards future local development tourism policies (winter tourism, seasonality and environment and culture) and how those policies can affect natural, socio-economic and cultural aspects of mountain area. Residents’ perceptions of sustainable tourism development potential, perceived tourism impacts, analysis of community attachment and employment sector of stakeholder were involved in this study. The authors applied the Q-methodology, as one SES-allied approach, in a small mountain community of Kopaonik, the Republic of Serbia. The results revealed that residents’ agreement/disagreement is connected with two aspects: ecosystem and property rights and that ecosystem can be significantly influenced by all three development policies. Findings suggest that development of future natural conservation plans and new cultural attractions can have positive effects on all parts of social-ecological system. Some practical implications of those findings for tourism planning and development are also discussed.

Natural Hazards, Diverse Economy and Livelihoods in the Sierra de las Minas, Guatemala

Los residentes de la pequeña comunidad montañosa de Santa Rosalía en la Sierra de Las Minas, Guatemala, viven con la amenaza de riesgos naturales. A pesar de experimentar lluvias estacionales poco predecibles y los retos que estas conllevan, los residentes de Santa Rosalía continúan viviendo bajo circunstancias de aislamiento y vulnerabilidad. En nuestra investigación hacemos uso de análisis cartográficos, una evaluación histórica y datos de entrevistas para entender la manera en que personas sujetas a riesgos naturales continúan desarrollando sus vidas en sitios con estas características. En este trabajo integramos las teorías de diversidad de medios de vida, diversidad de economías, y sistemas humanos y naturales acoplados bajo un solo marco conceptual a través del cual evaluamos la diversidad de actividades y potencial de construcción de resiliencia para la gente y sitio.

The Sweet Hereafter by Atom Egoyan: Extreme loss and psychic survival

In a small mountain community of British Columbia a school bus swerves off the road, causing the death of 14 children. Mitchell Stephens, a New York lawyer, immediately enters the fray with the idea of instigating a large‐scale lawsuit to obtain compensation for the victims, making contact with each of the parents who had lost children in the accident. Many are persuaded to join his cause. The lawyer, bombarded by phone calls from his daughter, a drug addict, even turns to Dolores Driscoll, the bus driver, who survived the accident. The latter, however, with the support of her paraplegic husband, refuses to become involved in the lawsuit. Another character who is vigorously opposed to the collective cause is Billy Ansel, a garage owner who had already lost his beloved wife and witnesses the death of his two children from the pick‐up truck in which he is following the school bus. Among the survivors there is, finally, the 14-year‐old Nicole Burnell, who had dreamt of becoming a folk singer and now finds herself paralysed from the waist down. Nicole is initially persuaded by the lawyer and by her parents – in particular by her father Sam, with whom she has had an incestuous relationship – to testify in favour the party seeking compensation, but when she steps into the witness box, realizing that such legal action was misguided, she offers a ‘false’ account of the accident, invalidating the case. Two years after the tragedy of the school bus, Mitchell Stephens bumps into Allison, a friend of his daughter’s, on an airplane and ends up revealing to her some of his painful experiences.

Residents’ Perceptions of Tourism Impacts and Attitudes Towards Tourism Policies in a Small Mountain Community

The purpose of this paper is to explore residents’ perceptions of tourism impacts and how they affect attitudes towards local tourism policies. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of community attachment and employment sector of residents. This study presents the results of a quantitative survey among residing families of a small mountain community located in the Northeast of Italy. The findings reveal that residents’ perceptions on economic, environmental and socio-cultural impacts affect their support to local tourism policies. Residents who perceive positively tourism impacts are more willing to support future tourism development policies. The analysis has also demonstrated that native-born residents generally perceive negatively tourism impacts and are less willing to support any increase in the overall number of tourists, supporting the well know social exchange theory. Some implications for the tourism planning and management of the destination are also discussed.

Walker Percy's The Gramercy Winner: A Memoir of the American Tuberculosis Experience

Dr. Walker Percy (1916-90), physician and writer from the American south, is best known for his philosophically grounded writings, both nonfiction and fiction. Among many honors, Percy won the National Book Award for his novel, The Moviegoer, in 1962. Less known is how Percy's experience as a 1940s patient in the American north defined his creative mind-set and how Percy himself documented that turning point in an earlier unpublished novel, The Gramercy Winner. When considered in the pathographic tradition, Percy's early attempt at story telling typifies the way patients reconstruct illness through a blending of nonfictional and fictional narrative. Set in northern New York in the same small Adirondack mountain community where he was treated for TB, his narrative reveals what Maria Montello calls Percy's transition, a journey or pilgrimage from one kind of diagnostic and therapeutic activity to another (qtd. in Elliott 48). In The Gramercy Winner Percy both explores his individual transformation from physician to writer and exposes the culture of an illness that transformed the collective American mindset before the advent of wonder drugs in the early 1950s that promised a chemotherapeutic cure. As David Morris observes in Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age, tuberculosis was, in short, a lifestyle, a parable, a theater of illness complete with tacit rules, recurrent images, and complex social meanings that came to dominate the imagination of an entire century (Morris 55-56). TB likewise came to dominate the imagination of Walker Percy. The life-altering impact of Percy's bout with during the 1940s comes up repeatedly in interviews with Percy and in critical commentary written about him. Percy's remarks to interviewer John Griffin Jones in 1983 typify the way Percy characterized the experience: contracted working as an intern at Bellevue Hospital doing autopsies on TB deaths. For two years I was, quote 'taking the cure,' as we said, at Saranac Lake in New York, and also working as a doctor up there, which was the best thing that ever happened to me because it gave me a chance to quit medicine. I had a respectable excuse (Lawson, Conversations 262-63). Percy graduated with an MD from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1941 and began interning at Bellevue in 1942 when the onset of TB forced him to leave Bellevue and follow the accepted treatment of the time. Before the advent of successful drug therapy in the early 1950s, many twentieth-century TB sufferers typically cured at institutionalized sanatoria where patients followed a strict regime based on rest, fresh air, diet and, sometimes, surgery. Patients often preferred sanatoria located in the mountains because of the presumed curative properties of mountain air.1 Saranac Lake, New York, isolated high in the Adirondack Mountains 300 miles north of New York City, was a premier facility especially popular among medical personnel. Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau, also a Columbia CPS graduate, Bellevue intern, and TB sufferer of an earlier generation, had founded the first successful North American sanatorium in Saranac Lake in 1884, using his knowledge of similar initiatives in the European Alps. Trudeau also founded there the first research facility in North America devoted specifically to tuberculosis. The Trudeau Sanatorium and its research wing, the Saranac Laboratory,2 gave rise to an entire community devoted to curing, and set the standard for clinical practice and research in North America. Doctors especially were drawn to Saranac Lake by its reputation and by the opportunity for continued practice and research because ambulatory patients with medical qualifications were often pressed into service. It was natural for Dr. Percy to follow the Columbia-Bellevue-Trudeau axis (Figure I).3 Saranac Lake was a thriving therapeutic community when Dr. Walker Percy arrived in September 1942 as a young patient in his midtwenties. …

Residents’ Attitudes and Perceptions of Tourism Impacts and Their Policy Implications

This paper presents the results of a quantitative survey among residing families of a small mountain community on their attitudes and perceptions towards tourism impacts and policies. In total 295 questionnaires accounting for approximately 20% of the population were collected. A factor analysis was performed on residents’ agreement with different policies to obtain four different components. These components were used as dependent variables for a regression analysis showing that residents’ perceptions of economic, environmental and socio-cultural impacts of tourism affect their attitudes towards different tourism policies.

Residents' perception and attitudes towards tourism impacts

PurposeThe aim of this paper is to analyse how the impacts of tourism are perceived by a local population and which factors affect the relationship between impacts and perceptions' formation, with specific consideration of the framework in a mountain resort. For this purpose, the paper explores the existing literature on issues related to host perceptions and attitudes and involves a primary data collection in the mountain community of Folgaria in Northern Italy.Design/methodology/approachThe number and quality of the questionnaires collected allowed a quantitative analysis of the hosts' perceptions and attitudes to be performed, and a cluster analysis has demonstrated the existence of different groups within which members have common features and similar perceptions and attitudes.FindingsIn general, this research work has revealed a recognition by the residents of the positive economic impacts of tourism. Also, the social and cultural impacts are recognized to be positive, but at a lower degree. In terms of the future tourism polices, the different groups identified in the cluster analysis exert different positions.Originality/valueThe paper presents the first study of residents' perceptions and attitudes applied to a small mountain community.

Ecotourism and Sustainability in a Q'eqchi‘ Maya Community, Guatemala

Despite the cornucopia of unique natural resources found in Latin America, the average citizen in most countries remains economically destitute. For example, the World Bank (2004, 2008) estimates that 56% of the population of Guatemala lives in poverty. The key to economic success throughout much of Latin America, and Guatemala in particular, is land. Guatemala's economy relies on agriculture. The most fertile land, however, remains concentrated in the hands of either multinational agricultural companies such as Dole or descendants of colonial settlers. Indigenous people in Guatemala, who make up 50% of the population, are left with small infertile plots of land (Lovell 2000). The environmental consequences of this paradox are pervasive throughout the developing world. Population pressure and the need to increase both food supply and exportable materials have placed in jeopardy the world's most fragile ecosystems. Landless peasants migrate to forested areas in search of land to cultivate. Deforestation is an enormous problem pervasive throughout Latin America. F i n d i n g a m e a n s o f s u s t a i n a b l e development is arguably the most urgent conservation goal in Latin America. Given t h e c o n f l i c t b e t w e e n n e e d f o r environmental conservation and economic need for survival the obvious question is: How can Latin American governments and specifically local people, make money from t h e i r n a t u r a l r e s o u r c e s w i t h o u t unsustainably exploiting them? Many development agencies and the United Nations offer ecotourism as a response. Ecotourism has enormous potential to bridge the gap between economic d e v e l o p m e n t a n d e n v i r o n m e n t a l conservation. The goal of a successful ecotourism project is to create a situation where it is more profitable to conserve resources to show to paying tourists than to unsustainably exploit them for agricultural production (Honey 1999). Can ecotourism live up to its potential as a tool for sustainable development? That very question is addressed in this study. Here, we explore the question of sustainability and ecotourism in the small indigenous mountain community of Chicacnab, Guatemala.

Residents' Attitudes to Tourism in Central British Columbia, Canada

Traditionally dependent on extractive resource industries, communities located in peripheral regions of British Columbia are searching for economic diversification opportunities. Valemount, a small mountain community in central British Columbia, has recently attracted two large-scale resort development proposals. Based on a survey of local residents in Valemount, this paper examines residents' attitudes to tourism-induced socio-economic and recreational opportunities, and the future of tourism development. Linkages are explored between community attachment, community satisfaction, community concerns and tourism-related attitudes. Results indicate that the majority of residents are positive about tourism development. While resident satisfaction with current opportunities is low, and some residents are concerned about the negative impacts of tourism development, residents perceive that the potential benefits of tourism development outweigh its negative impacts. The positive reactions to tourism development should be seen in the context of declining importance of forestry and the lack of other economic opportunities. Research results serve as baseline information for monitoring resident attitudes in the future, and as a basis for initiating local level consultation processes for future tourism projects.

The Social Construction of Race and Monacan Education in Amherst County, Virginia, 1908–1965: Monacan Perspectives

That's all you heard, everywhere we went, or whatever we done, “oh, he's one of those issues.” We couldn't work with white people, we couldn't be in schools with them, we couldn't associate with them, we couldn't eat [with them]. I think they came up with the slang word “free issue.” They had this hatred; they just had this ungodly hatred. They couldn't accept you as a human.At the prodding of Thomas Jefferson, the Virginia General Assembly in 1782 passed legislation that allowed slave owners to manumit their slaves by issuing slaves a copy of their emancipation papers and making them “free issues.” Nevertheless, in Amherst County, Virginia, the meaning of “free issue” evolved to connote something very different than it did at its inception for a small mountain community.

Genetic characterization of an isolated alpine population using seroprotein markers: Vallouise (Briançonnais)

The aim of the “Dauphine Project” is to reconstruct, with a wide perspective and multidisciplinary approach, the anthropological history of some mountain populations in both the French and the Italian parts of the Ancient Dauphine. Within the “Dauphine Project”, the present study is an analysis of seroproteins conducted on blood samples of subjects living in Vallouise, small mountain community (Brianconnais); they are male and female adults from families native to the zones for at least two generations. In particular, the third component of complement (C3), the group specific component (Gc) and properdin B factor (Bf) were considered, these being very important markers in human genetics research. The data for these systems are the first results of the biological study of populations of the Western Alps. They add to our otherwise scantly knowledge about the distribution of these polymorphisms in the populations under study. The results were compared with those in the literature on European populations, particularly of the Mediterranean area, in order to identify origins and microevolutionary processes, as well as biotransformations related to environmental adaptation.

Subsequent Educational and Professional Attainment of Black and White Students from Two Segregated Schools

This is a documentary and ethnohistorical study of two segregated one-room schools that existed in the 1930s and 1940s in a mountain community in Virginia. This paper documents the higher educational and professional attainment of the students from the Black school compared to those from the White school. The inferior educational opportunities available to the Black students were offset in some measure by the values of their immediate community. The paper examines the powerful effects of community expectations and values on the life paths of its students. While focusing historically, this study has implications for today's schools in pointing to the critical role of the community in the success of a school. Separated by custom and law, the two races remain bound together by the inextricable web of the social and economic order of which they are a part. In a study of this kind, therefore, it is as impossible to speak only of schools for Negro children, as though they were an isolated phenomenon that could be excised from the social for study at any convenient time, as it would be to trace the natural history of an organ of the human without reference to the larger whole. (Bond, 1934/1966, p. 287) Writing in the same time period in which this article focuses, Bond emphasizes the importance of examining the education of Black students in the larger context of their society, the body social. In an effort to follow Bond's admonition, this study examines the elementary and subsequent life experiences of all the students, Black and White, in one small mountain community in rural Virginia during the 1930s and 1940s. Due to segregation, there were two one-room grade schools for grades 1-8. Both schools served the same general locality, although the children attending Sweet Hollow White School (also referred to in this article as the White school)' were drawn exclusively from homes on nearby mountains and in a narrow mountain valley, referred to as a whereas most of the children attending Tedley Hall Colored School (also referred to in this paper as the Black school) came from the more open and accessible land at the mouth of the hollow. In the 1930s there were no bridges in the hollow except footbridges. Until late in the 1940s, horses, automobiles, and trucks had to ford the river at least three times going up the hollow to the Sweet Hollow White School. The Tedley Hall Colored School sat at the mouth of the hollow, near fields of orchards. Tedley Hall was at the intersection of dirt roads coming from several hollows and of two gravel roads coming from larger towns. The nearest small city was 20 miles away and in another direction six miles away was a railroad town where apples were packed for shipping. Due to their isolation, residents of this rural community comprised most of the web of social and economic influences in the social for their students in the 1930s and 1940s. Because of this isolation, these two schools provide a good setting for a study of the effects of the social-Black and White communities within a segregated society-- on the education of Black and White students. Due to segregation, the Black and White communities existed in the same geographic location but for the most part operated separately from each other, especially in education, a characteristic that is consistent with other studies noted by Siddle Walker (2000). Siddle Walker in her metastudy of segregated education for Black children in the South from 1935-1969, aggregates rural and urban education since their overall experiences were similar. During de jure segregated education, Siddle Walker notes that schools for Blacks in the South were unequal to those for Whites in terms of such factors as funding, facilities, materials, and length of school terms. Segregation produced a closed system where school members and community members interacted in a number of settings and where school and community values reflected the beliefs of the other, the schools . …

Controls on As, Pb, and Mn distribution in community soils of an historical mining district, southwestern Colorado

Rico, Colorado is a small mountain community that was developed before the turn of the century around and near underground lead-zinc-silver mines. Today, US regulatory concerns in such communities focus on the metal content, particularly of lead, in community soils. This study integrates bedrock geology, surficial geology, mineralogy and geochemistry in order to define the controls on metal distribution in Rico community soils. The principal constituents of concern are As, Pb, and Mn. The results show that mining-related sources are discrete and localized whereas natural sources, including bedrock (mean Pb content of 3 500 ppm), colluvium (mean Pb content of 1 410 ppm), and older alluvium (mean Pb content of 744 ppm) are wider spread and are the principal sources of metals in Rico community soils. Historical mining sites like Rico should be expected to have significant surficial expressions of mineralized bedrock. In these communities, it is important to accurately define the role of all metal sources as a foundation for determining environmental liabilities, cleanup guidelines, and health risk assessments. The application of geology and mineralogy in support of geochemical characterization is necessary to accurately define the origin and distribution of both anthropogenic and natural metal sources at such sites.

The secret spirit cult of the Sor in Karamoja

Opening ParagraphOver a period of some fifteen years I carried out ethnographic studies in north-eastern Uganda, firstly of the Kalenjin peoples on and around Mount Elgon, and subsequently of the Sor, a small mountain community of Karamoja.The earlier study formed the basis of a thesis on the Sebei of Mount Elgon and lasted for ten years, during which time I was based near Kampala and made intermittent journeys to spend two to three weeks at a time in different parts of the Mount Elgon and western Kenya region.

Familial endemic persistent atrial standstill in a small mountain community: review of eight cases.

Familial persistent atrial standstill (PAS) has been rarely documented. Five patients, three male and two female (mean age 46 years at first observation), with familial 'complete' PAS, all from a small mountain community (900 residents) have been studied. Diagnostic criteria were: absence of P wave in any lead of the standard electrocardiogram; no electrical activity of the atria with extremely slow junctional escape rhythm on the endocavitary recordings; lack of atrial excitability; absence of atrial wall movement at fluoroscopy; no mitral A wave on the echocardiogram. All patients had marked cardiac enlargement primarily due to atrial enlargement and all had impaired functional class. Some had bradycardia for many years but none had syncope. Permanent cardiac pacing was carried out in all. Two had cerebral embolism. In the same community there were three patients, one male and two female (mean age 34 years at first observation), with 'partial' atrial standstill characterized by absence of P waves in any lead of the standard electrocardiogram and by endocavitary recording of electrical activity limited to a localized region of the atrium. These three patients also had cardiac enlargement primarily due to atrial enlargement but to a lesser degree than the patients with complete PAS. One patient had cerebral embolism. The familial and endemic character of the disease is stressed. Cardiac enlargement due primarily to atrial enlargement seems to be a common feature of both the complete and partial form of the PAS syndrome.

Gens du pays, émigrés, étrangers : conflits autour d'une chasse en montagne

Villagers, émigrés and Strangers : Conflicts Around a Hunting Territory in the Mountains The analysis of a conflict between hunters and the mayor of a small mountain community reveals (beyond the classical discourse of land-use conflicts between farming, hunting and tourism) a two-fold issue : on the one hand, there is the hunter's relation to the community (non-farmers and even non-rurals, the hunters — called «émigrés» — no longer live in the village but have maintained symbolic ties with it) ; and on the other hand, there is the plan for controlled development of agriculture and tourism (and which the mayor defends against the attack of the émigrés, who are hostile to change). What makes this example particularly interesting is the fact that the agricultural lands (which are a minority) and the hunting territory (which is vast and consists mostly of communal land unsuitable for farming) are clearly distinct from each other. The farmers (who do not hunt) are therefore not directly concerned by the conflicts revolving around hunting.