Speeches to plagiarize.

1)  Suitable for mountaineers, ramblers, country lovers. Theme ideas are in red

MOUNTAINS UNDER PRESSURE

Peter B. Stone, Mountain Agenda

I remember a Polish climber at an international meet calling the mountains I knew so well - the mountains of our youth. I was only thirty at the time and so was he and so it all seemed a bit premature then to talk like that.

But the mountains of our youth are different now, and so they are for all but the youngest among you. They are different not just because we're older but they're different because of human impacts. Impacts which happen at an accelerating tempo.

Over the years many valleys have been drowned in hydro development or in leisure concrete - a direct human impact. And the forests are thinner and sick due to general pollution of the air. The glaciers are thinner and receding fast, in the Alps for example, due the gradual warming of the planet - and that is an indirect human impact. Either way the degradation of the mountain environment is due to human actions. Mountain agriculture is in transformation and even the rain and the mist are different from what they were in our youth, to be precise their ph is now markedly more acid.

But if we declare that whatever human actions have done to the mountains can equally well be undone - we have a problem. It is a problem of human perception. Humans can only save the heritage that comes down to them from previous generations if very many of them want to do so. In order to want to do so they have first to know, then to understand, and then to feel and to feel strongly that the degradation of mountain ecosystems has to stop.

Here the mountains are at a double disadvantage. Take their first disadvantage.

In the language of our days we say that they have public relations problems. The images we all have are that mountains are colossal masses of inert rock, distant, durable, snowcapped and eternal.

- We may have got used to more evanescent things disappearing under human impact. Marshes are drained, hedgerows are cleared, coastal mudflats are reclaimed, rivers are polluted to the point of losing all their wildlife. We have even got used to the idea of whole forests getting sick or, in the case of tropical rainforest, disappearing altogether. These have been among the concerns of environmentalists over the last 20 years. But not the mountains. Moving mountains has always been a metaphor for the impossible. The mountains are remote, immovable and ageless. And it is hard to believe that man is wrecking the mountain ecosystems too.

These images have done the remote mountains and their people a great disservice. They have made political 1eaders and decision makers who live in the plains, where the big cities and national capitals have grown up, to a large extent, blind to the degradation of the mountains and the increasing impoverishment of their inhabitants.

So we all have difficulty believing there is: a problem. Secondly mountains are marginal.

For a start they are usually on national frontiers and are usually the reason frontiers are where they are. The hard-of-access watershed is a convenient line. Good fences, good neighbours. In former times people often came to live in the mountains because they were driven back there by stronger groups who took the more fertile plains. They were marginalized in the beginning.

Today the same holds true. If, for example, an energy company wants to build a hydro electric dam and push out the inhabitants of the valley living behind it, money from banks in the cities of the plains will easily buy up the land holdings. The farming is marginal and land is cheap. That is true for Tasmania, Chile, the US, and in Europe for Norway, Austria, Italy, the Pyrenees, Switzerland and the French Alps. It is true-for Wales, Scotland and Ireland. It is even more strikingly the case in the mountains of the developing world, the- Himalaya, the Western Ghats, the Andes and the mountains of Africa.

The proposed economic exploitation may be forestry, or tourist development or mining or even the government's desire for cash crop development as in Africa. Whatever the case existing mountain economies are vulnerable because they are marginal. The inhabitants were called, before language had to be politically correct, hillbillies. The mountains are now progressively colonized by the plains and the local inhabitants induced into letting it all happen because they think they have little choice, being, for the most part, poor and unsophisticated.

In the Himalaya better access by road to and from the plains has had the effect of integrating upland agriculture into the market down the hill. Tempted to sell to the market down below to get away from subsistence, farmers have to attempt to compete. As is usual in other parts of the world they are tempted to over use their resources and degrade the soil. Soil erosion is bad enough on the flat but in the mountains the other, vertical, dimension that climbers and walkers know so well, makes all things go faster downhill - metaphorically and physically.

Soil erosion in the Andes has now gone so far that the population, having farmed as high as it can get, is obliged to descend to the Amazon rain forest in search of land to live by.

Where the soil remains the mountain peasant agricultural economy as celebrated in "Heidi" and admired from Rousseau onwards and which has formed the backdrop to European mountaineering cannot, even when modernized, survive competition from the plains without protection. Even now when it looks as if it still does work you will find that most of the farmers are near retirement age or farm only on a part time basis and have another job in the valley or a small inn.

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You may ask how fast are these allegedly rapid changes happening? Where has the emergency come from so quickly?

There are several answers which may depend on where you are. Talk a little about the Alps partly because you all know the Alps better than other mountains, but also because the pressures on that mountain ecosystem have been at work for longer than elsewhere.

The big common factors in most threatened mountain ecosystems are improving technology and either rising populations or rising incomes.

Look at improving technology first because its effects eventually spread worldwide and change what is and is not, economic.

Sometimes technology makes things possible that were not possible before, sometimes it just makes them cheaper.

The helicopter is the most spectacular. Over the last 30 years its performance and reliability has improved enormously. When the famous drama of Vincedon and Henri occurred on Mt Blanc in 1956 - they were two young Frenchmen who ill advisedly followed Bonatti on a Christmas excursion up Mt Blanc by the Old Brenva Route - The attempted rescue by helicopter failed because the machine was at the very limit of performance and it crashed near the Grand Plateau. Twenty years later at a similar height on the shoulder of the Matterhorn in a blizzard two helicopters attempted to rescue a 70 year old Geneva professor who had just climbed the north wall but bivouaced exhausted on the descent. His guides raised the alarm. This time it was very different. One chopper hovered off the rocks with a searchlight to illuminate the area whilst the other went in and picked up the inert form in his sleeping bag. All in the middle of the night in a snowstorm.

Helicopters can now provision Everest base camp and even put supplies into the Western Cwm. If you want to put a restaurant and bar on the top of the Zinal Rothorn the main questions today are to do with profitability and marketing and whether you can beat off the ecologists and conservation lobbies. They are not to do with whether it is technically feasible. Helicopters regularly take up new alpine huts in pieces and bring the old back down to the valley. Last year an Alpine Club meet in Chamonix watched two helicopters relaying ready-mix concrete up the valley to a hydro site in the Aiguilles Rouges all day at ten minute intervals.

The helicopter is the glamorous end of technology but the lowly bulldozer has improved and differentiated too. Above where I live in the Jura one local put a jeep road up to the crest of the mountains from the end of the forest road a thousand feet below, in the space of two days. Without planning permission. He was rumbled by a passing walker and the authorities made him rough it up again.

A trench digger, which usually looks like a yel1ow spider with two wheels and two iack legs, can be taken up by helicopter miles beyond any track and will dig anything from a snow cannon installation to a septic tank just as fast as it would in the valley below.

The Karakoram highway is the most spectacular testimony to the modern bulldozer but the technology of tunnelling is just as important in the mountains and has revolutionized all weather access to high valleys. Avalanches now pass harmlessly overhead.

In the Alps modern road building technology has made a ski development a simple question of terrain choice. I have an old map (it was new when I bought it) of the area around Cluses with an enticing empty valley above it served by neither road nor track. There's a little dot - a cow shed - in the bottom where it seems to be flat and where it says in Michelin's smallest type face (which I think is seven point italic) Flaine. Then one bright day a developer with a line of credit in Paris arrived and made a small town after building a road over the pass and installing a lot of lifts. Now the Michelin map writes the name in 14 pt. bold and it is sign posted all the way from Geneva.

At first it was just for skiing, but then there was the question of all that capital tied up in winter apartments doing nothing during the summer. And served by an expensive road. So tennis courts appeared. And the skier's restaurants up the hill? Were they to stay closed for the summer'? Surely not. So development began a new chapter. Flaine became a resort for all seasons to repay, all the year round, the investors who had put up the money. They were not the locals, by the way, but then there weren't any locals.

Over in Verbier there was a new twist to the old story. Verbier too was an empty bowl with a few cows when two young-brothers from Martigny below who were good mountaineers, wandered to the edge of the green cirque one summer afternoon. One of them was eventually to develop the Verbrers as they were first correctly known to the pre-war English skiers and, on the back of his success as a developer, he became a Swiss federal counsellor. His brother became a professor of biochemistry and a mountaineer well known to English climbers of my generation.

The new twist? An answer to the problem of how to run profitably a big ski lift in the summer. Summer walkers are very few since the ski areas without the snow look just like quarries and are a disgrace. There are no cows or shepherds and the alpine meadows and the flowers have gone. But of course the alpine golf course is the answer. When I first saw the work in progress I asked how could they get people to whack a golf ball uphill. A local explained to me pityingly that the golfers went up the hill on the ski lift and whacked the ball down hill. And also, that, because of Swiss planning laws to encourage golf courses as tourist infra structure, the promoter could build lots of apartments in spite of the freeze on construction of any more ski apartments. I suppose a golf course covered with alien grass is at least green - anything is better than the sight of a dynamited ski piste studded with snow cannon glinting in the summer sunshine. ~ .

Skiing has become a mass sport and a massive problem for mountain ecosystems partly because of the advancing technology of the plastic ski boot and to a lesser extent the metal and glass fibre ski. Nowadays almost everyone can ski passably well in a short time but just try skiing out all the lifts in Courcheval or Lech with those leather boots one used to hire from Moss Bros and a pair of hickory skis and you will find your abilities far below what you thought they were. It a sobering experience.

Thanks to technology in various guises it is now the winter tourist revenues which far outclass the soft tourist revenues from summer walkers and which have skewed development accordingly. In Switzerland the ratio is 70 to 30.

There are other technologies that are unexpectedly contributing to the transformation of the Alps. One current menace is the nuclear power station. No one is proposing actually to build them in the Alps. The problem is that they are most economical if they run at the same power output all the time. So what do you do with the excess electricity at night since it cannot be stored? Pumped storage schemes as at Llanberis and Trawsfynnedd are the familiar answer but in the European Alps the scale of thinking is much bigger.

It has become clear that to dam a valley even without enough water to run hydro is nevertheless potentially profitable. The idea is to buy nuclear power cheaply - Off peak - from as far away as Germany and use it to pump water up the hill at night to fill high altitude reservoirs. Then you let it run out through a hydro plant during the day or during the winter so as to sell the electricity dear, actually at four times the off-peak price.

This is not energy production but energy enrichment which produces no new energy. The sheer volume of water envisaged is staggering, it amounts to four limes as much as the volumes already retained by existing hydro-dams. Only valleys with present tourist infrastructure are off limits for economic reasons. As we are aware a depopulated high alpine valley is worth little in strictly monetary terms. It is a new way to make money out of the Alpine resource but there is no room for alm uncles and cows and cheese.

There is considerable momentum to the hydro industry. Water management or river basin management is a new environmental faith as demand for water grows and climate warming makes rainfall irregular. The industry presents itself as working in the public interest and, as with nuclear power, it never seems short of money or political influence.

Lastly under the heading technology we have. to look at the familiar truck or heavy lorry. Nobody in Britain needs telling that, in its competition with the railway, the heavy truck has won hands down. In Switzerland they love their railways rather more than here - they are clean and run on time- and the government has done its best to impede the heavy lorry by limiting weights to 28 tons and banning night and holiday truck traffic. The Austrian government has imposed a 38 ton limit and a 60 kms/hr night speed limit. But the modern truck is an economic wonder and over the last 30 years a whole new road infra-structure has been build to enable it to transit the Alps whilst investment in railways has declined.

The results have been an environmental and political surprise. At the Brenner for example rail and road took equal amounts, 3 million tons a year each in 1970. Today the total is around 22 million tons with virtually the whole growth in road transport.

Freeway generated dust has contaminated soil nearby with lead to such an extent that agriculture is no longer permitted. The lead content of human breast milk is up to seven times higher than in normal areas away from the road. The noise is 55 db half a mile away from the road. Sulphur dioxide from trucks alone is 220 tons a year with about the same again in nitrogen oxides. Salt used in winter against icing has now contaminated the groundwater as well as the soils and the vegetation.

New industries and commercial developments have been attracted by the greater access to such an extent that both the Brenner and the Gotthard passes are now the site of a geographer's marvel - nascent linear cities draped right up and over the top of the Alpine chain. One need hardly add that tree damage is pronounced all the way up the valleys. The Alps are becoming urbanized along all the major transit routes.

On the political side citizen anger is mounting. People have become aware that there is no end in sight to this flood of traffic channelled through the narrow defiles of mountain passes. Huge volumes flowing today do not yet reflect the lowering of customs barriers in the European Community which is expected to boost road freight traffic even more.

The citizen action group in Austria near the Brenner calls itself The Committee for the Safeguard of Living Space in the Tyrol. In Switzerland political pressure has gone beyond Austrian demands for palliative measures like limiting the size of trucks, insisting on catalytic converters and soot traps, freezing the current volume and so on. The Swiss want all the transit trucks carried on the railways and in tunnels. A new Gotthard Tunnel and new base tunnels on the Lotschberg- Simplon axis are planned. Present price tag is IJS$12 billion. The costs make the Channel Tunnel look modest. They call it the Construction Site of the Century and even now costs are expected to be 20% up on the Chunnel.

Enough of technology. The other factors is that of more people and more prosperity - that is prosperity on the plains.

The most direct effect of prosperity in lowland populations has been to power the tourist industry. Between 1950 and 1985 in Germany the length of the working week went down by 23% and by 17% even in workaholic Switzerland. During the same period real earnings have risen by around 100%. They spent a lot of the money on motor cars. In 1950 there were32 cars per 1000 in Switzerland and only 10 in Germany. Now the figure is over 400 per thousand inhabitants. They also spend a lot of the money on holidays and on secondary homes. By 1980 Switzerland had 75 million overnight stays and Austria 118 million. There are now more than 40,000 ski runs in the Alps. In Switzerland alone the number of ski lifts and cable cars has quadrupled over the last 30 years and at the same time the increased tourist attractions provoked the construction of 250, 000 secondary residences. A necessary consequence is more car parks, roads, sewage plants, shops, electricity generation and so on.

Make no apologies for dwelling on the Alps to illustrate the pressures on the mountain ecosystem at their most advanced. There is a temptation to regard them as special and unrepresentative, but close study soon shows that they are a showcase for what human impacts can do to the supposedly remote, durable and eternal mountains wherever they are in the world. :

In Europe's other mountains many of the Alpine symptoms of unhealth are plain, particularly in the Tatra and the Pyrenees - widespread forest sickness, over development of some ski areas, migration of population from others, collapse of agriculture and loss of associated cultures. Again colonization from the plains, and marginalization of the upland populations ate there for all to see.

Nevertheless one must go to Japan to find the utmost in mountain development. The "world number one" as they say in tennis is surely Mt Tateyama. Other mountains in Japan may have more visitors but Tateyama at 3 003 m. high is only 5 sq kms in area. It gets 400,000 visitors in August alone and 1.5 million over the year. To get there you take a train from Tateyama city at sea level to Murodo at 2 450 m. Then inside the mountain you take a cable car or trolley bus to a vast assembly area where you line up in numerical order for an hour or two before going up to higher altitude. It is said to be akin to the experience of Tokyo commuter trains in the rush hour. At the top too many feet eroded the mountain side so the paths were paved and drained. Less than 1% go to the top to worship the mountain god, the rest go mountaineering and trekking. The mountain has been famous as a religious shrine since the eighth century. One sight will be familiar to any of you who wish to go to the top, the ptarmigans are protected and quite tame.

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The Sierra Nevada in the Rocky Mountains is another example of an alpine ecosystem under pressure from technology and human prosperity. It was never a landscape slowly created by farmers to provide a sustainable livelihood, as it was the Alps, and the impacts of mining and lumbering with overgrazing set the degradation in motion long before the second world war. Most of the indigenous wildlife has been hunted to extinction. But since the second world war irreversible things have been done. The major source of mischief has been water demand from lowland farming and the cities resulting in hundreds of dams and-aqueducts. Acid rain is a growing menace. The famous Lake Tahoe exhibits the effects not yet, perhaps, as badly as Lac Leman.

It was famously blue but increased nutrients from atmospheric pollution and erosion in the 60 or more watersheds draining into the lake have increased algal growth. 10 m of transparency have gone in the last 30 years and most of it will be gone in the next 40. Population growth has raised the numbers from 10 000 or less in the 1950's to over 100 000 now with ski developments, casinos, apartment blocks, car parks etc.

In the third world the array of problems is the same but some are more pronounced particularly soil erosion and others like secondary residences much less marked. Technology is much the same (though less available) but the pressure from populations without the prosperity is intense.

In Africa the highlands have been relatively hospitable to humans and the average density of population in the highlands is twice that in the lowlands. In Ethiopia for example 80% of the 50 million population lives above l 500 m. But rapid population growth has stressed the natural resource base. Soil erosion and degradation are now extreme in many mountain systems impacting the water economy leading to floods and reduced stream flow in the lowlands. In the highlands lack of water retention capacity means agriculture is increasingly susceptible to drought. Other mountain problems are land ownership and managing access to commonly held land.

In the Andes the population explosion plus the fact that mountain farmers had already farmed as high as possible and had degraded fragile soils has provoked major population movements plus the cocaine trade. The population of Lima doubled from 1970 to l990 and is now over 8 million mostly from the highlands. Many highland farmers have gone down to the Amazon lowlands in search of fresh land. The Altiplano supported more people in l500 A D than it does today. The Andes have several hydro developments where siltation, due to ignoring watershed erosion, will fill up the reservoirs before they have finished paying back the construction loans.

Russia is not exactly a developing country but it does have some of the most spectacular man-made mountain problems on the planet. Hydro and valley floor irrigation projects have been the world's most grandiose. One consequence is well known - the Aral Sea. In 1960, 56 cubic kms of water from the mountains reached the sea. Today the quantity is essentially zero. The water is led off into irrigation channels ten times longer that the rivers coming down from the Pamir and Tien Shan like the Amu Darya. It is believed that the destruction of the Pamir juniper forests has also contributed to runoff and erosion problems. The volume of the Aral Sea is down from 1064 to 400 cubic k.metres. The climate has changed, population growth among the urbanized Tajiks is among the highest in the world, life expectancy much reduced in some parts like those occupied by the Karakalpaks and the total estimated cost of rehabilitation up around 40 billion roubles in 1989. Most of the output of the area such as cotton and electricity went to other parts of the former Soviet Union - a nice example of the plains colonizing the mountains and in this case leaving mountain villages in sight of the dams without electricity of their own.

Enough then of logging some of the follies of mankind in the mountains.

What can be done and who is likely to feel like doing it?

A lot of brave and devoted people are already at work. Mountain Wilderness for example has had the temerity to suggest dismantling telepheriques in certain places. That idea was received by developers as a kind of blasphemy of inconceivable gravity. If the great religion of tourist promotion had been empowered to issue fatwas, Reinholdt Messner would have got the first. The next recipients would be those who have suggested abolishing the winter Olympic Games. In India the threat of something unpleasant for those who resist so-called progress in forestry is no joke as those involved in the Chipko movement will tell you. But the only person I know who was beaten up so badly that he ended up in hospital and then left town in fear of his life was a WWF man in the Canton of Valais in Switzerland - which is that country's ecological Wild West.

One might say that until recently mountain conservation people have had a fringe image. That was one reason why Mountain Agenda felt the need to make the sustainable development of mountain ecosystems academically well founded, - if you like, academically respectable. The Rio Conference in 1992 looked like an opportunity too good to miss. Mountain Agenda gathered up material for a report on the "State of the World's Mountains" which was published before and distributed at the Rio Conference. It is designed to be a resource book, a box of ammunition for use in the fight against ignorance and apathy. With it went a glossy, thematically organized and illustrated short booklet designed for those who just glance at things which perforce means politicians and diplomats. One of the group wrote a background paper for the inter-governmental so-called PrepCom and also the. first draft of a text which finally became an item in the Agenda 21 approved by the Conference. Therefore mountain ecosystems now rank with tropical rainforests, wetlands, biodiversity, climate change and other avowed concerns of the world's governments in the coming years.

In sketching in the threats to the mountain heritage it is easy to sound totally negative and against all progress. This is why sustainable development is such an important political concept and why the Rio Conference was called the UN Conference on Environment and Development otherwise UNCED. In that conference's decision is a five page text to sustain mountain ecosystems -it is our mandate for action.

Over development in one place is just as unsustainable and reprehensible as underdevelopment and mountain poverty in another. For example in an ideal world those who denounce the intensification of ski development in the Alps should be equally as concerned to see it promoted in the Caucasus and the Carpathians - but promoted in a way which helps the existing mountain inhabitants. If you like, favouring the Austrian style of building on existing villages and their people rather than the French style of bulldozing a pile of concrete into a virgin cirque and installing a piece of instant Paris with snow and lifts. But mountain development is a huge subject ranging from mountaineers' litter, through biodiversity, watershed protection, forestry, soil degradation and erosion, mountain transport systems, mountain tourism, pollution, hydro electricity development, cultural diversity, spiritual heritage, natural hazards and many other topics. One outstanding fact is that we do not know nearly enough at the scientific level. There is "uncertainty on a Himalayan scale" even with regard to hydrology. Simple questions like "how much of the distress of Bangladesh from flooding is due to deforestation in Nepal?" have no accepted answer.
 
 

You are a particularly important audience with regard to the "State of the World's Mountains". The mountains need you. They are the water towers of the world, a refuge for biodiversity as the climate warms up, a spiritual and material resource and a priceless heritage for us all. You are an international audience but let me say a word to my own countrymen. British mountaineers played a capital role in the last century in the development of mountain consciousness. Turner' Ruskin, Compton, in art: Tyndall and Darwin in science, Thomas Cook in tourism, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Tennyson, Keats in poetry and in the inspiring literature of early mountaineering and exploration, Leslie Stephen, Whymper, Wills, John Muir, Tuckett, Mummery, Matthews' The Alpine Club set the fashion. I hope British mountaineers will now rise to a new challenge. Not so much that of raising their bodies to summits but that of raising awareness of the degradation going on.

Mountaineers from all Europe taught people all over the world, mountain awareness, and they continue to do so today. I know they didn't see themselves as doing anything so pretentious and nor do you but the effect has been just that.

Humans can only save their heritage from destruction if they want to do so. So they have first to know, then to understand, and then to feel and to feel strongly that the degradation of mountain ecosystems has to stop. You are the resourceful, knowing, smart infantry that can win that battle. That is what you all are uniquely qualified to do, and we haven't got long.
 

Mallory´s body found, Knoydart rescued, Himalayan glaciers-alarm grows, Everest Forests-a Sherpa's view,
The epic of Mt. Everest, The state of the world mountains, My first summer in Sierra
Poems and Belles letters, The Yellow brick Road - Polemic, Paradise fishing at Autannes, Traditional Solar Science,Dogs on high, Obituary, Esme Percy, Web-sites for browsing
Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan on sustainable mountain tourism
P.B. Stone on mountains under pressure (general overeview of so-called Mountain problematique

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