Prelude: Mountains in an Uncertain World* - Impact of Global Changes on Mountains: Responses and Adaptation - page 4

No surprise then, that it is hard to delimit mountains with a simple
definition. Ask the people of northern England and Wales—perhaps
shepherds at high pasture in the Lake District, or farmers at work in the
shadow of Snowdonia's imposing crags—and they would all affi rm that
they live among mountains, yet altitudes there barely exceed a thousand
metres. Peasants of southern Peru or Tibetan nomads likewise would be
classed as mountain people; their local surroundings exceed 4,000 metres
and yet may be as fl at as the prairies of central Canada. The well known
German mountain geographer of the 20th century, Carl Troll, described
the highest parts of equatorial Indonesia as “high mountains without a
high-mountain landscape”—unlike the remote, challenging, conventionally
'mountainous' Hochgebirge of popular imagination. It's clear that the
diversity of the mountain world defi es easy categorization.
Academics today, perforce, take a pragmatic approach to the problems
of defi nition. It is broadly accepted that mountains occupy more than a
fi fth of the world's land surface, and that they provide the direct support-
base for more than a 10th of humanity. When natural resources, including
water, minerals, forests, grazing land and hydro-power are considered,
more than half of humankind depends to some degree on the largesse of
the mountains. To this must be added their pivotal role as repositories of
cultural and biological diversity, their value as amenity and tourism assets,
yet also their lamentable implication in a panoply of natural and human
catastrophes.
We no longer have the luxury of viewing mountains simply as
spectacular scenery or as goals to be attained by strenuous physical effort.
They are certainly special regions, but they are places where communities
live and have lived for centuries, and where environmental sustainability is
a matter of survival not just to those who live there but to the many millions
more for whom they are just a hazy blue line on the horizon.
In the far distant past when the earliest human societies were evolving,
mountains were the object of veneration, inspiration and even fear; they
had a profound infl uence on the emergence of many religions, including
those that survive today. This spiritual approach to mountains fortunately
persists and has been examined by Edwin Bernbaum in his outstanding
work 'Sacred Mountains of the World,' where he argues for its essential
relevance in any effort to achieve environmental stability (Bernbaum 1990).
With the dawn of the 18th-century European Enlightenment, fear
began to ebb and the quest for inspiration led to the 'golden age' of
alpinism, landscape art, poetry and the privileged tourism of the era.
The identifi cation of end points, or turning points, in the development of
alpinism is highly subjective, but must include Alfred Wills's ascent of the
Wetterhorn (1854) and Edward Whymper's ascent of the Matterhorn (1865),
which encompass the golden age; the Aiguille du Grépon, fi rst climbed in