People in the Mountains - Mountain Geography: Physical and Human Dimensions - page 515

it appears to have been highly systematic, territorialized, and practiced from perman-
ent and seasonal settlements.
Although subsistence hunting and gathering as a widespread strategy has declined,
pockets are still present in mountain areas. In many cases, it is supplemental to other
livelihood activities. The collection of mushrooms, berries, and medicinal and decorative
plants for domestic use or sale occurs throughout the mountain world. Hunting of wild
game and birds and fishing are common in the North American Cordillera and parts of
the Hindu Kush-Karakoram-Himalaya as a livelihood supplement. The mountain tribes
of Kalimantan, Borneo, called the Dayak by outsiders, provide an example of a more tra-
ditional hunting and gathering society. Such groups, however, continue to feel pressure
from the outside world, face considerable difficulties in protecting their way of life and
environments, and, in some cases, have sought alliances with international conservation
agencies and activists. Thus, in a few locations, hunting and gathering remains an old
way of life, and continues widely in some mountain areas as part of the new way of life.
Mining
Mining has been and remains a widespread source of livelihood in many mountain areas
(Fox 1997). Mountains offer ferrous and nonferrous ores, coal, stones, gravel and sand,
gems, precious stones, and rock and evaporate salt.
All aspects of mining, from exploration and prospecting to extraction, processing,
and transport, have occupied mountain residents and many more outsiders since Pa-
leolithic times, when indigenous people and outsiders tapped mountain areas for tool
and building materials, ornaments, pigments, and salt. In the Alps, important sources
of rock salt were located in the provinces of Salzburg and Upper Austria, where it was
mined on an industrial scale. Alkaline lakes north of the Himalaya and in the Atacama
desert of the Andes have long been sources of evaporite salt. Industrial-scale silver and
gold mining, supported by the forced labor or mita system, dates from at least Inca
times (fifteenth century) in the Andes, continued through the Spanish colonial period,
remains active in various places in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia (Cole 1985), and has ex-
panded under multinational corporations for the extraction and processing of industrial
minerals like copper, zinc, and tin (Fig. 10.15). In Canada and the United States, mining
was the principal industrial activity that brought people and settlements to the western
mountains from 1850 to 1930 (Harris 1997). Starting earlier, coal mining in Appalachia
helped shape and support the unique mountain people there. The global economic de-
pression of the 1930s brought mining everywhere to a temporary halt and left behind
many abandoned settlements (ghost towns) and, in many cases, devastated and toxic
environments.
Mining has retained its importance in the mountains as a major employer and source
of environmental impacts, especially in the Americas, with many of the benefits accru-
ing to large transnational mining corporations and their shareholders living far from the
mountains. Growing global demand, high commodity prices, new technologies, and im-
proved transportation have resulted in the expansion of open-cast and subsurface min-
ing in the Andes and North American Cordillera at high altitudes and in arid and cold
conditions. This has provided some employment for local people, but many workers are
also from outside the immediate area. A result is the emergence of large temporary