ABSTRACT
As the highest features of the landscape, sacred mountains have become associated with the highest values and aspirations of cultures around the world. These associations suggest that sacred mountains have important roles to play in efforts to protect biological and cultural diversity. Mountains function as sacred natural sites in three general ways, ranging from traditional sacred mountains to places of personal inspiration. People around the world experience the sacredness of mountains through their views of them, such as mountain as centre, temple or place of revelation. The relative isolation and multiplicity of microclimates that have made mountains sanctuaries of biological and cultural diversity are now threatened by global changes. Mountains are among the first places to show signs of climate change as species are driven to higher altitude and extinction and snow cover and glaciers that supply water disappear. This chapter presents examples, ranging from Mount Cotocachi in Ecuador to the growth of dangerous glacial lakes in Nepal, of the physical and cultural impacts of glacial retreat on local communities and religious traditions along with their responses. Other kinds of global change, such as modernization and tourism, threaten to overwhelm traditional beliefs and practices that have preserved biological and cultural diversity associated with sacred mountain sites and highlight the need to adapt them to changing conditions. Examples include the re-establishment of a sacred forest in the Indian Himalaya, a foiled attempt to put a casino on top of Mount Sinai and the desecration of the San Francisco Peaks in the American southwest by a ski area development. Local communities have two options in responding to global changes: they can attempt to deal with them directly or they can try to adapt to them and mitigate their impacts. In the case of climate change, the problem is so global that communities mostly have to resort to the second option, although some religious leaders attempt to eliminate the causes of climate change through traditional beliefs and practices. Since the other kinds of changes are more regional, a mix of the two options is possible. For any measures to succeed, stakeholders, both local and non-local, need to be involved as full partners in programmes to preserve biological and cultural diversity in the face of global changes.
