Agricultural Settlement and Land Use in Mountains - Mountain Geography: Physical and Human Dimensions - page 586

FIGURE 11.26 Kalash women gather berries shaken loose by their grandfather in the treetop (top cen-
ter), Rumboor Valley, Hindu Kush, North-West Frontier Province, Pakistan. (Photo by S. F. Cunha.)
The deforestation issue of the last quarter century placed mountain agroecosystems
at the epicenter of international controversy. In 1992, the United Nations Earth Summit
officially recognized the crucial link between highland and lowland environments (Ives
1997; Sène and McGuire 1997; see Chapter 12). Several subsequent initiatives have ad-
dressed this inevitability. The first emphasizes community-based participation, or more
simply, involving local people in the planning, decision making, and implementation of
development projects. This strategy reduced the rate of Himalayan forest loss that in
the 1960s and 1970s followed a top-down agenda that failed miserably. Some of the
community-based cooperative plans adopted in the 1980s met with more success and
are partially responsible for the ongoing afforestation. This apparently intuitive idea
is not new. The Swiss Alps were heavily deforested by the 1870s, at which point the