Posted on 01/26/2002 2:54:55 PM PST by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
- It used to be that people who went up into the mountains could count on getting away from it all.
That's becoming less true every day, according to an analysis of the health of mountain ecosystems for the United Nations University. War, pollution, tourism, the effects of climate change, population growth, overdevelopment, deforestation and soil erosion are degrading mountain ranges around the world, the recent report said.
In North America and Europe, the chief problem is too much tourism, bringing more people and automobiles into mountain valleys than their fragile ecosystems can withstand. The ill effects are most extreme in the Rocky Mountains, the Great Smoky Mountains and the European Alps, the report said.
For mountains in developing regions of the world, the problems are more complex. The report cites the Himalaya-Karakorum-Hindu Kush range as the most ecologically threatened range in the world. The range extends from the borders of Myanmar and China across northern India, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan and Afghanistan, with the most severe problems occurring in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
"Military and repressive government actions together overwhelm the already serious problems of poverty, drought, deforestation, out-migration and unfair treatment of mountain minority peoples,'' said Jack Ives, author of the report and a professor of geography and environmental science at Carleton University in Ottawa.
Mountain ecosystems are home to 600 million people and the primary source of freshwater for half the world's population.
One of the problems common to most or all of the mountain ranges is climate change. The glaciers in Glacier National Park in northern Montana, part of the Rocky Mountains, are melting and are expected to completely disappear in the next 30 years. Similarly, the famous snows of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania have retreated 82 percent from the total area of mountaintop they covered a century ago and are expected to be gone entirely in a decade or two.
In the Snowy Mountains of Australia, more than 250 species of plants are threatened by warmer winters and less snowfall. Studies have found sub-alpine trees growing at altitudes over 131 feet higher than 25 years ago. In the Canadian Rockies, a series of warm winters has exacerbated a pine-beetle infestation that now threatens 1,931 square miles of forest.
The Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee and North Carolina suffers from air pollution from encroaching urban areas, electric power plants and intense automobile traffic. During 1998, the park's worst recorded year for ground-level ozone, studies found damage to 30 plant species in the area. Upper elevations are saturated with acid rain deposition. The Western Carpathian and Tatra Mountains in Eastern Europe are also afflicted with acid rain from neighboring industrial centers that has heavily damaged trees.
In the European Alps, growing summer and winter tourism has accelerated a shift in mountain communities from farming economies to tourism economies, increasing air pollution and soil erosion.
The number of visitors to Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado has grown 50 percent in the last two decades. At peak season, 20,000 cars drive through Banff, Alberta, every day. The World Trade Organization rates tourism as the globe's No. 1 industry, accounting for about 10 percent of the world's gross domestic product.
"For a long time, tourism was seen as a benign economic stimulus for these (mountain) communities, unlike mining and grazing that have demonstrable impacts on the environment,'' said Mark Peterson, state of the parks director for the National Parks and Conservation Association. "We're now seeing that tourism comes with its own baggage in terms of the environment.''
On the Net:
United Nations University - www.unu.edu/mountains2002/
Furthermore, I've never heard of "United Nations University".
(Their football team must suck!)
I'll bet they look just spiffy in their powder blue uniforms.
I hear the UNU's hacky sack team kicks butt, though.
Man, if that ain't some fine example of "the Gaea effect". I wasn't aware a mountain--an inanimate object that is actually not even a single object but a large aggregate with very indefinite borders--could have "health" one way or the other!
It is now simply ACCEPTED that "Gaea"--the personification of the Earth as an animate creature--is reality, and so they don't stop to even think how silly this headline would have been even a quarter-century ago.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.