People in the Mountains - Mountain Geography: Physical and Human Dimensions - page 483

tions and Aboriginal groups in the North American Cordillera. As national minorities,
these distinct cultural groups have often suffered in their relationships with the major-
ity through epidemic disease, discrimination and persecution, forced relocation and as-
similation, genocide, and in-migration.
FIGURE 10.2 A typical Himalayan village in which intensive terraced cultivation of grains (inset
shows rice cultivation) has been a primary source of livelihood for generations in the Yamuna
River Valley, Uttarkashi Himalaya, Uttarakhand, India. (Photo by J. S. Gardner.)
People living in and adjacent to the mountains amount to about 25 percent of the
global population, or 1.7 billion people (Meybeck et al. 2001), who are wholly or par-
tially dependent on mountain resources such as water, timber, minerals, and agricul-
tural products. For example, the approximately 700 million people in the Indo-Gangetic
Plain region of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh rely on water from the Himalayan and
trans-Himalayan ranges. Similarly high levels of reliance on mountain water are found
in Europe, the Americas, East Africa, and China.
The population density of a place is a relatively sensitive measure of human popu-
lation. Generally, the population density of mountain areas is relatively low. However,
people are not distributed evenly, and specific regions are densely populated—for ex-
ample, the East African highlands, Mesoamerican highlands, and parts of the central
Andes. Grötzbach and Stadel (1997) draw a distinction between “physiological density,”
which is based on the area of agricultural land, and “arithmetic density,” which is based
on the total land area. In some areas, as in fertile and well-watered locations in the