by PATRICK LEJTENYI

Everyone likes a good mountain. Mountains are big, impressive, imposing and sufficiently remote that unless we really want to go there, we don’t. But for those who live on them, or make their living from them, mountains are a world unto themselves. Be it farming, logging or mining, mountains are a rich source of resources for the surrounding humans. Trouble is, wherever humans tend to live, they usually make a mess of things.

Enter Larry Hamilton, vice-chair for Mountains of the UN World Commission on Protected Areas. The affable, Canadian-born author, professor, environmental consultant and conservationist will be lecturing on mountains this Tuesday, Sept. 30 at McGill. His talk, “Mountains, Powerful and Fragile: Our Responsibility for their Care,” will address the threats to both mountain environment and mountain cultures, and how to protect both. Speaking to the Mirror over the phone from his home in rural Vermont, Hamilton says that world bodies that swore up and down to do their gosh-darndest to protect mountains are still coming up short.

“Governments need to be pressured” to set up nature-friendly land management schemes, he says. “Don’t forget, last year [2002, the International Year of the Mountain} was a big celebration, there were all kinds of meetings and a mountain summit in Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan and commitment, but where’s the product? Are we going to forget it now?”

Canada the good

Of course, Hamilton acknowledges, some countries are better than others at protecting their natural treasures. Canada, for instance, gets a thumbs-up.

“I think Canada has done a fantastic job with new policies on integrity in the national parks system, new creations of parks and reserves, even recently, in an increasingly crowded and resource-demanding world,” he says. But top marks go to a small mountain kingdom nestled high in the Himalayas between India, Nepal and China.

“In the kingdom of Bhutan, the king has said, ‘Hey, we’re going to maintain 72 per cent of the country in forest,’ and that’s of course mountain forest,” Hamilton says. “They’ve tried to control tourism, they’ve tried to maintain their culture and their respect for the mountains. The sacred mountains there do get protection—it is a religious theocracy, so it’s a little simpler there.”

Europeans, he says, are good at protecting landscapes, but the U.S., with its patchwork jurisdictions of state and federal laws and private properties, makes conservation somewhat tougher. “But I don’t think I want to rate them,” he warns.

But if the industrialized world has improved its conservation efforts, it’s also responsible for most of the threats to mountain ecology.

“In the developing world, the problem is of encroachment, as we push other kinds of land use higher into the mountains,” he says—clearing land for agricultural uses are especially threatening. “But in the industrialized world we have the greatest threat, because of the persistent organic pesticides that are in the atmosphere and accumulate in cold climates, which means high altitudes and high elevations. We’re finding there are real problems with aquatic organisms, and they’re accumulating in the terrestrial part of these ecosystems, and they’re accumulating in people. And that’s so hard to do something about because you’ve got to have changes in lifestyle in the industrialized world and have to have international organizations doing something because of long-distance, transborder transportation of these things.”

Climate change also has a bad effect of mountain ecology, and Hamilton again blames the industrialized world.

Parks as counter-insurgency

Because of their remoteness, mountains are gathering places for people who, for whatever reason, want to be far from the public spotlight. For every J. D. Salinger, there are hundreds of drug-runners and guerillas roaming the ridges and valleys in no-go areas around the world. Mountains, Hamilton says, are battlegrounds, from Bosnia to Afghanistan to Chechnya to Colombia to Korea.

“The list goes on and on,” he says. “The lawlessness and drug-growing is mostly in mountains. There’s a special quality about mountains that needs attention to reduce conflict and promote cooperation. And I think what’s needed there are networks of protected areas—parks, reserves, monuments, whatever—that straddle borders. Peace parks, like the first one, Glacier Waterton across the Canadian-U.S. border. And we’re promoting those as devices, for instance in the Korean demilitarized zone. They might start the process of healing between conflicting countries.”

Larry Hamilton will speak at McGill’s Stewart Biology Building, Rm S1/4 on Sept. 30, 7pm, $8