Global Mountains conference report (original) (raw)

Introduction: Mountains of Our Future Earth—Perth 2015

Mountain Research and Development

This editorial introduces the conference and the papers in this special issue, which are based on presentations given during the conference. The present issue of MRD concludes with an evaluation of the conference and consequent recommendations for future research. The Perth mountain conferences ''Mountains of Our Future Earth,'' referred to as Perth III, was the third international conference on mountains and global change held in Perth, following 2 previous international conferences. Perth I, in 2005, was the Open Science conference that concluded the 2-year Global Change and Mountain Regions (GLOCHAMORE) project, primarily funded by the European Commission's Sixth Framework Programme for Research and Development. Through 5 product-oriented workshops and this final conference, the project aimed to achieve further understanding of the causes and impacts of global change in mountain regions. The conference attracted 310 abstracts and was attended by 210 people from 41 countries on 6 continents. The principal products of the conference were a book of 197 accepted abstracts (Price 2006) and the GLOCHAMORE Research Strategy (Bj€ ornsen Gurung 2006), which was used as the basis for UNESCO's Global and Climate Change in Mountain Sites (GLOCHAMOST) initiative (http://www.unesco.org/new/en/natural-sciences/environment/ ecological-sciences/specific-ecosystems/mountains/glochamost/) as well as to inform the development of the MRI. Perth II, co-organized by CMS and MRI in 2010, was titled ''Global Change and the World's Mountains.'' It attracted 610 abstracts and was probably the largest international mountain science conference to date, with 450 participants from 60 countries on 6 continents. It provided an unparalleled opportunity for mountain scientists from a very wide range of natural and social science disciplines to present and discuss their research. The key published outcome was a special issue of Mountain Research and Development (MRD 32[S], March 2012), including plenary papers, a synthesis of all papers presented, and 2 prospective policy papers. The conference also provided opportunities for presentation and further development of activities within various global and regional programs or initiatives focusing specifically on mountain themes or featuring a mountain component: a 3-day pre-meeting brought together 80 scientists from 5 continents for a meeting of the Global Observation Research Initiative in Alpine Environments (GLORIA); other initiatives (eg the South Eastern European Mountain Research Network [SEEMORE] and the Mountain Invasive Research Network [MIREN]) organized lunchtime sessions; and the conference was followed by a 1-day strategy session organized by MRI, which focused on future research activities and on the means to ensure a high profile for mountain issues in the Rioþ20 process and other global assessment and policy processes.

2001 – MOUNTAINS: a product of nature or of history and human societies.pdf

Revue de Géographie Alpine, 2001

https://www.persee.fr/doc/rga\_0035-1121\_2001\_num\_89\_2\_4635 RESUMEN: Instead of seeing nature as being of a metahistorical and universal origin, we can think of it as being a historical construction which forms part of mankind's concepts and cultural practices. That means that if what we consider to be natural really exists, amongst which we would include the mountain, then the meaning or purposes of its existence are not imminent, but are built on society's cultural horizon. Therefore, asking about the mountain or nature (or about the nature of the mountain) is also asking about the meanings which have be attributed to it by economic or scientific practices which are part of civilisation. In order to be brief, only a few of the meanings associated with the mountain in relation to the colonisation of the New World can be illustrated.

Global Change in Mountain Regions The Mountain Research Initiative

2009

Upcoming MRI Events Global Change and the World's Mountains Perth II-Five Years Later 7 September-1 October 010, Perth, UK The conference aims at communicating new results between scientists working in the mountains of both industrialized and developing countries around the world and present scientific advances on the topics defined in the GLOCHAMORE Research Strategy. www.perth.uhi.ac.uk/mountainstudies/010

Modern mountains from the Enlightenment to the Anthropocene

The Historical Journal, 2019

Recent scholarship across a range of historical sub-disciplines shows that uplands are where many forms of modernity are both crafted and overwhelmed. Maintaining multiple tensions – between assimilation and distinction, between projections of power and material and human resistance , and between knowledge and elusiveness – is essential to the modernities crafted in mountain spaces. This review highlights a number of common threads running through recent writings on modern mountains. These include heightened attention to the importance of mountains as arenas for the performance of gendered, racial, national, and class-based subjectivities, and the persistence of earlier attitudes and activities in avowedly disenchanted modern visions of uplands. For all of the successes of recent scholarship, more work remains in order to consider mountains in global contexts and to come to terms with our continued entanglement in modern ways of understanding and acting in high places. Looking ahead, it is vital that historians think with and about mountains in order to contribute positively and persuasively to discussions on the human and environmental impacts of global change.

Globalisation of Mountain Perception: How much of a Western Imposition?

This paper looks at ways in which this general view of mountains has emerged in history from the 16th century onwards. It focusses on persons and actions which connected upland areas across the planet. There are mountains scattered on all continents, and it takes some imagination to bring them together and to see them as one distinct region on a global scale. How and why did this historical construction come about? I will try to give some clues to an answer very selectively by presenting three examples ¬¬from several centuries. The first section focuses on a book by the Swiss humanist pastor Hans Rudolf Rebmann (around 1600); the second one deals with the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (around 1800); and the third one takes up the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, the so-called Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro 1992. The first personality is quite unknown even to experts, whereas Humboldt and the Earth Summit are famous in various contexts. At the end of this succinct survey on the globalisation of mountain perception we ask ourselves: How much of it should be considered a western imposition? And would it be possible to (re)construct a non-western geneaology of the phenomenon? Such questions are at the heart of the ongoing debate on global history. So far they have not been raised for mountain regions which sum up to a fifth or a quarter of the global land surface.