Introduction

The Mountain-Portal is a non-profit operation devoted to raising public awareness of the need to make the development of mountain peoples and their environments sustainable in a threatened future.

This web page is a beta site (www.mountain-portal.co.uk) developed with money taken out of pocket from earnings and pensions of environmentalists who pioneered the Agenda 21 chapter on mountains at the Rio Earth Summit.

It is a prototype and a demonstration intended to explore operational problems, seek comments and show the nature and utility of the concept.

In this form it is to demonstrate to potential donors how a "one stop web shop" can provide the infrastructure for realistic and effective mountain advocacy world wide to raise public awareness. It will only be read by those invited by the originators. Therefore the sequence of pages is not what it would be in a final topical version designed to lure readers by being changed every month as a conventional "on-paper" periodical would be. It begins with a record of origins to show how the idea evolved. It will end with a sketch of where it will go in the future. In between it presents a partial demonstration of its potential.

It has cost nothing but effort from its originators and has not benefited from the services of a professional designer. It therefore carries few graphics or other decorative features which would be posted in a properly financed definitive version.

The originators are members of Mountain Agenda an informal group of environmentalists, diplomats, communication specialists and academics who launched Chapter 13. It is one of several NGO follow-up initiatives seeking funds. This site also contains information specific to the project itself for potential donors and subscribers.

The objective of this web site is to provide, in one user-friendly place, everything you could want to know about the state of the world's mountains, present, future and past.

It is to help you to participate in raising public awareness of the environmental threats to the world's mountain heritage, the millions of people who live in the mountains and the billion or more who live on the plains beneath them. It stems from the conviction that only broad public awareness and support can secure the political will to ensure the sustainable development of the mountain resource.

It is designed to make it easy for media, speech writers and script writers, journalists, policy advisers, politicians and diplomats; teachers, business men and women, publishers and charitable institutions, civil servants in local and national governments and international institutions in their several ways to raise the profile of mountain environments in public perception whenever opportunity presents itself.

Contents

There are five departments in this beta version of Mountain-Portal

Origins describes the way in which the private initiatives flowed into the preparatory process of building the Rio Conference in 1990-2, and how Chapter 13 made it to Agenda 21. It sketches briefly the Lima Global Consultation and the early ideas for creating a global constituency for mountain environments and their peoples.

Section A contains current news and associated background to events that affect the mountains. For exemplary demonstration it deals with material that might have been presented the week the body of the English climber George Leigh Mallory was discovered. He died near the summit of Everest on the 1924 Expedition.

Section B comprises facts and figures for reference, the basic resources of classic and modern literature (including complete book texts), scientific and social research, legal and political texts. It will also extract material from the Mountain Forum e-conferences and items from the bulletin-board which might interest journalists or commentators.

Section C gathers material to provoke reflection, anecdotes to lighten speeches or texts, lighter items and byways including personality portraits, natural history, early traveler's material, useful quotations, an anthology of poetry. There will be a sub-section on Mountain Music with an introduction and sample scores. There will be links to tourism/mountain travel information, and field studies and educational courses in art and science.

Section D will contain speeches by politicians and other notables that bear on the sustainable development of upland and mountain environments. Speech making involves seeking inspiration from existing sources. In the definitive version these would be gathered and contributed on a routine basis by members of the Mountain Forum and associated NGOs. In this beta version some accessible speeches are posted just to give the idea.

Deployment

This demonstration prototype was prepared to help in the process of fund-raising for the full system. It only became possible with the fall in price of the necessary powerful computers, scanners, communication technology and software.

Building this resource is a large and continuing task which will need paid staff, a budget for communications, website maintenance and some copyright clearance but above all the participation of the members of The Mountain Forum. This latter body is the principal non-governmental group following up on the United Nation's mandate for action agreed at Rio. It is a decentralized worldwide confederation of networks of NGOs and individuals concerned with mountain environments and their peoples. It was founded at the NGO Global Consultation in Lima, February 1995 and is open to all interested. It was to provide:

"mutual support and the exchange of ideas, experiences and peoples to raise mountain issues on local, national, regional and international agendas and to work towards promoting policies and actions for sustainable and equitable mountain development."

This Global Consultation in Lima led to a successful proposal to the Swiss Government for the funding of a follow-up mechanism to Rio in 1995/6. The original design of the WMIN comprised:
1) a participatory Conference/bulletin board with regional nodes
2) an e-Mag to reach out to the media together with a so-called Active Archive to provide the resources for advocacy.
It was to provide the connectivity or "nervous system" for a worldwide network of NGOs and individuals interested in environmental threats to mountains.

The original design was truncated due to an unavoidable budget cut in the Swiss Government's support which meant that only the core operations essential to start up activity could be financed.

The priority decisions established an international server node - a computer work station based in the Mountain Institute, West Virginia. This carries membership data and hosts a bulletin board facility for the members of the Mountain Forum. A series of successful, cheap and effective electronic conferences among members resulted in published policy documents. These were prepared in a fifth of the time of conventional conferences. Currently a data base of various documents is also carried and can be accessed through the Internet directly or through this web site. Other regional nodes serve Latin America and Asia. Nodes for Africa, and North America are in the pipeline.

Using this portal

The following notes are for those in the future who use the resource. Copyright observance will be most important. Copyright constraints will vary from item to item.

For example:-

* Material is free of copyright constraints except where signalled. Many of the books are either out of copyright or in the public domain like "The State of the World's Mountains - a Global Report" which was publicly financed for the Rio Conference. Some magazine articles which merit wider circulation are reproduced by permission but common courtesy and a sensitivity to the commercial realities facing the publishers and authors demand that prominent attribution is given even when using short quotes. Abuse of this facility will mean that the supply will dry up and advocacy of the mountain agenda will suffer.

* Please email Mountain-Portal (mountinf @dircon.co.uk) with copies of material profiting from this resource. Give us also your suggestions as to how this service can be improved. Those who write original material or find particular approaches have been successful are requested to contribute their ideas to stimulate others. This will be particularly useful in the educational area. "Material" should be inclusive and might comprise anecdotes, press cuttings, (Eng, Ger, Fr, Sp) teaching strategies, photographs, cartoons. etc..

* Note that photographs are free for reproduction (with attribution) but quality material has to cost money. Mountain-Portal's photograph's are gathered from amateur sources. A list of professional mountain photographers is included and they should be contacted directly when high quality presentations are required.

Origins

As early as 1974 a Conference organized by IUCN on "The Future of the Alps" in Trento, Italy, sounded the alarm. Another was at Mohonk , USA. (1986) and called for research priorities in the wake of books by Erik Ekholm (Losing Ground, 1976) and Clare Sterling which predicted Himalayan eco-disaster arising from watershed deforestation. It was agreed there were not enough facts.

These muddied waters were clarified somewhat in "The Himalayan Dilemma" 1989 by Messerli and Ives. There was yet another conference at Trento under the aegis of the Council of Europe in 1988. All these mostly academic meetings lacked follow-up mechanisms and linkages to influential institutions or politicians. They produced too many resolutions which had nowhere to go (89 or thereabouts for the first one) and lacked publicity strategies to secure media follow-up. However they did colonise the geographic/academic community with an awareness that all was not well.

The Rio Conference of the United Nations was to be an inter-governmental one held on the twentieth anniversary of the epochal UN Stockholm Environment Conference of 1972. The same Canadian statesman Maurice F. Strong was invited to be Secretary-General and was well known to the two originators and was known to have been a mountaineer. Since no government or UN agency had mountains as a specific environmental concern it was essential that some route be found onto the Rio agenda. Maurice Strong proved vital in this regard.

Here follow some snapshots of how this route was found.

Advance warnings

"Environmental Conservation" was a respected quarterly journal edited by the veteran ecologist Prof Nicholas Polunin. He commissioned the attached article which echoed the view that topics not on the Rio Agenda would find it harder than ever to command attention.

The article marked the end of the beginning. The process had begun earlier and an account of early casting about for the best way forward is instructive.

See (Berne Meeting)

The mountain proposal was late on the scene and had not come either from governments directly or through a United Nations specialized agency. In spite of informal contacts with the Secretary General of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) the first official step was to knock on the door with a note.

(Desai Draft)

In summary:

An historical note summarized the activities of the Mountain Agenda group and is made available here for the record and to show that, encouragingly, sometimes direct citizen action can accelerate international negotiation.

Finally the text that Rio passed by consensus - Chapter 13 of Agenda 21

Leighton Hall

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