Making room for mountains.

• Author: Denniston, Derek
• Position: Environmental protection for earth's mountain ranges - Editorial

Ask a hundred people at random what the most urgent environmental problems are, worldwide, and the responses are predictable--but not necessarily in accord with what a careful global view would tell us.

In all probability, one fundamental system would be entirely overlooked by our hypothetical 100 respondents. The earth's great mountain ranges--the Himalaya, Andes, Rockies, Alps--still occupy only a peripheral place in our awareness. We think of them as colossal realms of immutable rock and ice, with little role in the biological processes of the planet--and little vulnerability. But in fact, mountains play a critical and unique role in the life of the planet--as this issue's story on the Himalaya shows.

Their steep slopes make them geologically unstable, with huge climatic variability and ecological diversity over very short distances. As a result, mountain ecosystems are more prone not only to natural hazards--landslides, avalanches, earthquakes--than most other ecosystems, but also to human damage. While the political leaders and decision makers who live in the plains typically ignore these distinctions, they do so at their own peril--and at the peril of their downstream populations.

About 10 percent of the world's people live in mountainous regions, and another 40 percent depend on mountain environments for their water, power, timber, minerals or topsoil--and hence much of their food. The great rivers of Asia, which nurture and irrigate the continent's vast rice crops, bring their water and nutrients from the Himalaya. The Amazon and Madeira, similarly, are fed by the Andes. The environmental degradation of the mountains and the increasiug impoverishment of their inhabitants affects the earth--and its human population-profoundly.

So far, these threats...