A mountain in agenda: the secret life of a U.N. document.

• Author: Denniston, Derek

It's a common observation: most people know about United Nations resolutions, but few actually read them. Partly, that's because of excessive abstraction: documents that may have profound implications for the world are written with a dispassionate prose that tends to obscure the disturbing, often tragic events that led to their writing. And partly it's negligence: while the voluminous negotiation that generates such declarations gives them an impressive aura of official international policy, securing agreement also means writing this policy with a conceptual blandness that makes the issues seem almost academic. The on-the-ground reality is often shockingly different.

A prime illustration can be seen in the world's newly evolving official policies for mountains. People often assume that mountains - remote, rocky, windswept - are ecologically marginal or barren, and sparsely populated. On both counts, that assumption is wrong. In fact, mountains harbor extraordinarily high concentrations of the planet's biological and cultural diversity. And, as a recent World Watch column noted, the Himalaya range alone contains as many people as the 10 largest cities in the world combined. Yet, because mountain populations are poor, and because lowland industries have heavy investments in the exploitation of mountain resources, the threats to these environments are almost universally downplayed or ignored.

Last spring, I visited one of the world's great ranges - the Andes of South America. I traveled to two of Peru's national parks - Manu, on the eastern edge of the Andes about 700 kilometers due east of Lima, and Huascaran, about half that distance north of Lima in the Cordillera Blanca, the world's highest tropical range. The visit gave me a sharpened sense of the real lives - and daunting challenges - that lie behind the few U.N. statements that have been issued on these neglected regions.

I made this trip mainly to participate in the first global conference of mountain non-governmental organizations (NGOs), in Lima. One purpose of the conference was to produce NGO inputs to yet another U.N. document - a review, by the U. N. Commission on Sustainable Development, of the mountain chapter (chapter 13) of Agenda 21, the global blueprint for sustainable development approved at the Earth Summit three years ago. The resulting document condenses the essence of decades of research and observation - and thousands of stories about the struggles of embattled peoples and ecosystems - to two pages of text. An annotated version of this text follows, along with some of my observations about the on-the-ground or behind-the-scenes realities it represents.

United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development April 1995, Third Annual Session's report on Agenda 21, Chapter 13 Sustainable mountain development (Advanced, unedited text)

1. The Commission recognizes that mountain ecosystems and environments are of crucial importance as rich and unique centres of biological and cultural diversity, water stores, and sources of minerals. Mountains cover at least one fifth of the Earth's landscape and are home to at least 10 percent of the world's population, predominantly economically poor people. Mountain ecosystems are complex, fragile, unique in geomorphology, and they react sensitively to climate change. There is a corresponding need for a comprehensive inter-disciplinary approach to sustainable mountain development as well as the effective participation and empowerment of mountain people in the use and conservation of mountain resources.

   Contrary to popular impressions that mountains are largely barren, these variegated environments contain some of the planet's greatest biological riches. Seven of...