By Phil Williams
phil@franklin.uga.edu
For a man born in the flatlands of Oklahoma, Robert Rhoades has spent a surprising amount of time looking at the world from mountaintops. From the Alps to the Himalayas, from the Andes to t he Blue Ridge, Rhoades has worked and studied among the world’s mountains for more than three decades.
Now his work will take him into a new realm: getting mountain ecosystems more firmly on the international agenda. Rhoades, a professor of anthropology at UGA, has been elected North American board member for the Mountain Forum, an international group that will help celebrate 2002 as “The International Year of the Mountains.”
In addition, Fausto Sarmiento, an assistant professor of geography and co-director of UGA’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, is currently president of the Andean Mountains Association. Sarmiento is also deeply involved in preparations for the Year of the Mountains as a member of the Interagency Group, led by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, based in Rome.
“Much of the world is vertical,” says Rhoades. “I learned this while walking through the Himalayas carrying goats and chickens.”
While sharp peaks and massive ranges have always elicited human awe and interest, mountains have perhaps received less attention in recent years than rainforests and coral reefs. At the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, mountains finally gained a small foothold when a group of mountain enthusiasts helped set out a study agenda for the coming years.
The document from Rio, called “Agenda 21, Chapter 13,” was, says Rhoades, a great step forward in helping educate the public about the importance of mountains. More than half the world’s fresh water originates, for example, in mountains and highlands, and biodiversity is being threatened in mountains around the world.
By 1998, the U.N. General Assembly had voted to declare 2002 as the International Year of the Mountains. A non-governmental group called the Mountain Forum was formed by scientists and policy makers, and Rhoades, with his history of research among the world’s mountains, was elected in November 2000 to represent North America.
The Mountain Forum is a global network based on the idea that each region should organize and promote awareness about mountains. The first full meeting of the group was held this past November in Geneva.
Since the meeting in Rio, knowledge and information about mountains have improved in such areas as water, biodiversity, tourism, agriculture, minerals, timber and energy. Researchers also are beginning to focus on the aesthetic, spiritual and recreational significance of mountains.
“Traditionally, the study of mountains and their economic development has been on the back burner in many countries,” says Sarmiento, who is a native of Quito, Ecuador. “We need to be breaking mountain paradigms.”
While mountains are considered the water towers of the world and have a tremendous biodiversity, they are very unstable geologically. They have also often been the location for guerrilla warfare, because such terrain makes large military actions difficult.
But now interest in mountains is rising, says Sarmiento. Nearly 90 conferences on mountains have been scheduled around the globe for the next two years.
Rhoades came to love mountains as a member of the first Peace Corps group that signed up when President Kennedy created the organization in 1961. He went to Nepal, where he and a fellow volunteer had the vivid experience of chasing off a leopard that was trying to capture and kill a child in their village (the boy was injured but lived).
Since then, Rhoades has visited mountain regions in South America, North America, Europe, Asia and Africa, spending time with highland peoples and recording their views and the changes they are undergoing. He is currently involved in a major research project in the Andes with a focus around the Cotacachi Cayapas Ecological Reserve (part of the Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource Management program funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development) and is a senior fellow at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development in Kathmandu, Nepal.
He also has a joint project on mapping the Hindu-Kush-Himalaya region. Closer to home, he has been deeply involved with the Foxfire Project, which has for more than 30 years been preserving the history and folkways of the Southern Appalachians. UGA’s Institute of Ecology has long studied the science of the Appalachians as well.
Sarmiento’s research in the Andes goes back almost 25 years, to when he began studying a bird called the Andean lapwing. He subsequently studied fragmentation patterns in Ecuadorean cloud forests and tropical Andean forest regeneration.
Currently, he is engaged in research on the human “drivers of change” in tropical mountains and in comparative geographies of the Andes and the Appalachians. The Andean-Appalachian initiative, funded by the University System of Georgia, will allow collaborative work with Georgia Southern University and Andean universities, says Sarmiento.
He and Rhoades attended a meeting in Rome in 1999 sponsored by the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, the lead agency for the Year of the Mountains. “My country, Ecuador, was able to offer a venue for the second World Mountain Forum, which will be held in Quito in 2002,” says Sarmiento.
While research and study on global mountain biodiversity and development have a long way to go, the international effort, with a little help from UGA, is looking up. |
|
