[MUSIC] Throughout this course we've discussed how mountains have never been in such demand or regarded with such favor as they are today and for a whole host of reasons. The resulting influx of people to mountains globally has created unprecedented pressures on mountain environments and the diverse ecosystem services that they provide. Previously, isolated mountain communities are increasingly connected to the rest of the world. And mountain valleys and passes are now essential corridors for the transportation of people and goods across continents. Of course, mountains have always been used by people. Let's look more closely at the livelihoods of mountain peoples, how mountains have sustained particular ways of human life. [MUSIC] Today, about 10 to 12% of the global population lives in mountains. That's roughly 880 million people which are largely concentrated in developing in transitional countries. Places like Nepal, Peru, India and China. Half of the world's mountain population is located in Asia, followed by South and Central America. Regions that are presently witnessing some of the highest rates of population growth. In developing regions, a significant number of mountain peoples are the rural poor. Those who rely on scarce or dwindling resources and opportunities relative to demand. These are often resources derived from agriculture, from animal husbandry, forestry, mining, and a variety of formal and informal service jobs. Much of the global mountain population is unemployed or underemployed, and migrate temporarily or permanently to seek employment opportunities at lower altitudes or in cities. The migration of mountain peoples alleviates the population pressure on the scarce resource bases of rural areas. In some cases, it might also generate additional income in the form of cash remittances sent back to families. But the migration also generates social problems around divided families and divided communities, and can place added pressure on those who remain at home, often women, children and the elderly. In the economically developed mountain regions of Europe and North America, many people now enjoy a relatively high standard of living, although this affluence is relatively recent. Prior to the 20th century, rural mountain peoples of the global north generally experienced conditions of socioeconomic underdevelopment. The shift has been attributed in part to the development of roads, railways and air links, which have facilitated new flows of people and capitol into mountains, stimulating new opportunities and diversifying livelihoods. In this lesson, we're going to examine the often conflicting demands of using mountains, and preserving and managing the integrity of mountain environments, cultures and economies. Let's begin by thinking about some of the ways that people have traditionally used mountains. The livelihoods of mountain peoples have always been varied and complex. Early systems often included combinations of gathering, hunting, subsistence agriculture, animal husbandry, using and utilizing the diversity of ecosystems and environments at hand. But its been primarily over the last 400 years, with industrialization, colonialism, commercialism and tourism, that the current diversity of mountain livelihoods developed. Though this varies greatly across mountain regions. The ecological diversity of mountain areas was ideal for early hunting and gathering. Rural mountain forest provided a variety of food types within a relatively short distance. By following migrating wildlife up and down mountains from summer to winter pastures. Hunters could find an abundance of prey, which along with the flora provided food throughout the winter. Other advantages included the availability of firewood, shelter, fish and water from mountain streams. To early hunters and gatherers the resources scattered over a variety of closely connected and diverse ecosystems with seasonal variability, provided a rich environment to utilize. To take advantage of such environments, many hunting and gathering peoples were also highly mobile. But also very highly systematic and territorial, utilizing both seasonal and permanent settlements. Although subsistence hunting and gathering has largely declined as a widespread practice, pockets still exist in some mountain areas. In most cases, subsistence use of renewable resources supplements other livelihood practices. For example, throughout the mountain world the collection of mushrooms and berries, and medicinal, and decorative plants for domestic use or sale remain widespread. Hunting of wild game and birds as well as fishing is common throughout the North American cordillera for example, as a means of supplementing livelihoods. In contrast, the mountain people of Kalimantan, Borneo, remain a more traditional hunting and gathering mountain society. However, groups like this continue to feel the pressure from the outside world in its influences. They face considerable difficulties in protecting their way of life and their environment. And in many instances have even sought out alliances with international conservation agencies. In most cases, though, while hunting and gathering continuous wildly in mountain areas, it's much more commonly supplemental to new ways of life. Mining has been and remains a common livelihood in many mountain areas around the world. Mountain offer ores, coal, stone, gravel, and sand, gems, precious stones, and rock, and evaporative salt. All aspects of mining from exploration and prospecting to extraction processing and transport have occupied mountain residents and many more outsiders since paleolithic times, when early people's tapped to mountains for tools and building supplies. Ornaments, pigments, and salts, alkaline lakes, north of the Himalaya, and in the Atacama Desert of the Andes have long been sources of evaporative salt using to preserve and flavor foods since ancient times. Industrial scale, silver and gold mining in the Andes dates back to the 15th century Incans and continued through the Spanish colonial period. And has expanded in the present under multinational corporations for the extraction of industrial minerals like copper, zinc, and tin. In North America, mining was the principle industrial activity that brought settlers to the western mountains in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Starting even earlier, coal mining in Appalachia, helped shape and support the unique mountain cultures there. Mining industries bring benefits and pitfalls to mountains and to mountain peoples. The boom and bust nature of the mining industries throughout the 20th century have left many abandoned settlements, ghost towns, and in some cases, devastated and toxic environments. Indigenous mountain peoples in many mineral rich mountain areas while benefiting from employment opportunities have been grossly exploited and marginalized by corporate interests. The benefits of the industrial mining practices primarily accrue to large transnational corporations and their share holders who usually live far away from the mountains themselves. Mining is now a agent of large-scale environmental change. In some regions, whole mountains are lowered. The summit of Cerro Rico in Bolivia for instance, is thought to have been 100s of meters higher before large-scale silver mining began there in the 16th century. The mountain is actually sinking because of mining activities. Other mountains have been replaced by deep pits, such as the world's largest copper mines, including Bingham Canyon in Utah. Now this pit is over a kilometer deep, and nearly 5 kilometers wide. In other places, like the Appalachians, for example, permits for the mountain top removal mining of coal extend across 1,600 square kilometers. Mountain forests remain key sources of fuel, timber, and paper products globally. The harvesting of trees for these products and others, forestry, has been an important source of livelihoods for millennia. First, when trees were used for fuel and construction, and later when they were harvested for national and global markets seeking wood products and paper. Prior to colonial expansion and independence, many mountain people around the world held customary forced use rights. These were rights that were established over long periods, but were largely swept aside with new colonial and in other cases, national land administrations. This was especially the case in the Himalaya and North American cordillera where vast mountain forest areas became crown or state-owned land. These issues were highlighted on both continents by protest movements in the second half of the 20th century. Chipko in the Garhwal Himalaya, and Clayoquot Sound in the coastal mountains of Vancouver Island. Both movements have become iconic in helping to draw attention to indigenous rights, and the need for co-management of forests and mountains. Plant domestication originated independently in several mountainous regions around the world. For example, the mountains of Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador were important for potatoes, grains like quinoa, and several drugs, including cocaine, quinine and tobacco. In the foothills of the Zagros Mountains of Iran, archaeobotanical evidence suggests the use of a wide array of plant species. Including the progenitors of key crop plants, such as wheat and barley, large seeded legumes nearly 10,000 years ago. Over millennia, mountain farmers have developed specific techniques, institutions, and knowledge that enable them to make a living in mountain environments. However, traditional agriculture in mountain regions, particularly family farming, is undergoing rapid transformation due to population growth, economic globalization, and the spread of urban lifestyles, as well as the migration of people from alpine areas down to urban areas. For centuries, family farming in Bolivia as well as in Peru and Ecuador have relied on grains such as quinoa, kaniwa and amaranth, which can survive in harsh conditions, they have high levels of protein and micronutrients. In recent years, consumers worldwide have paid increased attention to these healthier, nutritional, and traditional food products and they've become an important source of income. In some South American mountain communities, quinoa now accounts for more than 80% of the family farm's agriculture income. Mountains and highlands in East Africa have tremendous potential as farming areas because rainfall is higher and more reliable than in the lowlands, and soils are generally fertile. Mountain farmers in East Africa have traditionally produced for subsistence, but in the late colonial times and especially after Independence in the 1960s, they increasingly began to produce crops, such as barley, wheat, coffee, and tea. Since the early 1990s, horticultural products, such as vegetables and flowers, are sold on the European market and have increased revenues, while also diversifying farm production. In Europe, mountain farming including cereal crops, olive trees, and grazing pasture still represents 18% of all agricultural enterprises. However, productivity is usually poor averaging 40% lower than farms in the low lands. In the Alps, slightly more than 4% of the population in the alpine areas still rely on agriculture as their chief livelihood. But in the last 25 years the agricultural population has decreased by over 40%. Trade and artisanship have long been sources of livelihoods in mountain regions. Valleys and passes through which people and goods have always flowed have often placed mountain peoples as intermediaries between economies in and beyond mountain regions. High passes in the Alps, for example, have been trade routes for millennia, connecting the large commercial centers of Northern Italy, places like Venice, Florence, and Milan, with those of central Europe. Then there are the famous trans Himalayan trade routes, which link lowland India and China with Central Asia, and the high Tibetan Plateau. The geography of mountains, along with the diversity of its resources, has favorably positioned mountain peoples as producers, transporters, and merchants of trade and sale items. Trade items often included artisan goods, especially items crafted from wood, metal, and wool. The global trade in pashmina and other wool shawls grew and of the Northwest Himalaya, of Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, and Uttarakhand. Beautiful woven textiles have brought international renown to the Kichwa and Amara communities in Peru and Bolivia. Another example is the traditional watch and clock industry of the Jura Mountains in Switzerland and France. Developed over the years from a small cottage industry, that industry is now global. Over the 20th century, but especially since the Second World War, tourism has become a major force of change in mountains. We've discussed tourism quite a bit in this course already. You'll recall that mountains provided the sites of some of the earliest forms of tourism. In the 18th century, the Alps became an essential stop for English aristocrats. When it became fashionable to make the Grand Tour, the canons of landscape aesthetics in the west as well as in China and Japan, conferred a special value on mountain vistas. Not only has this attraction to mountains persisted but it's now become global. There's no region in the world today where the appealing qualities of mountain landscapes aren't acknowledged. Associated qualities have now become assets, valuable for the development of mountain tourism. Snow, with the invention of and spread of Alpine skiing. The diversity of local peoples and traditional cultural practices. The abundance of mineral and hot springs. The scared dimension, attributed to many mountain sites and summits. Biological and geological diversity reflected in the unique geological formations and plant communities, as well as the emblematic animal species such as goats and mountain lions, snow leopards, marmots or grizzly bears. All of these resources will likely take on increasing importance in the coming decades as urbanization exerts a growing impact in our world and lifestyles, and the appeal of travel and tourism continues to expand. Tourism is today regarded by many governments and communities around the world as vital for economic development and survival, and it's distribution is very uneven within any given mountain region. And its benefits tend to be spread very unevenly at every scale, from the national to the local. Tourism is not a one size fits all solution as there are various factors and conditions that need to be considered if tourism development is to be a lasting success. These range from favorable weather to reliable transportation infrastructure, from diverse and high quality services to social and political stability. Tourism also carries the risks of harming ecological goods and services, compromising cultural identities and increasing a social inequities. Associated with tourism is the phenomenon of amenity migration, people who choose to move to mountain communities or the surrounding areas for the environmental and social benefits. Like tourists, amenity migrants are often escaping urban environments, but for longer timescales. This trend has produced a new form of semi-permanent residents. Legions of second homeowners in mountains around the world, especially in Europe and North America, and increasingly emerging economies like China and India. Proponents of this trend argue that it brings affluence, enhanced infrastructure and services, and modernization to mountains. Opponents, on the other hand, warn of a spectacular real estate market with exorbitantly rising housing prices, a potentially unstable economic growth, cultural alienation, and of increased environmental stress. These tendencies began to manifest themselves in US mountain towns in the 1908s, like Telluride, Park City, Moab, places where past resources economies built up around mining had dried up, but they're also visible in Canadian mountain communities of Squamish, Whistler and Canmore. In Switzerland, after a national referendum in 2012 a law imposed a 20% ceiling on the number of second homes in any community.
