Mountain cultures: celebrating diversity and strengthening identity

बिआरटीनेपाल २०७३ मंसिर २५ गते ७:१८ मा प्रकाशित

For many, mountains evoke powerful emotions with their breath taking landscapes that inspire wonder. Mountains cover nearly 27% of the worlds land surface and directly support 22% of the world s people. They serve as water towers to the world, providing for the freshwater needs of more than half of humanity. In addition to their impressive majesty, mountain systems also encompass a wide variety of ecosystems, a great diversity of species, and distinctive human communities.

The Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) is one of most diverse mountains systems in the world, spanning 4.3 million sq. km. of land across eight countries, from Afghanistan to Myanmar. Over millennia, communities in these landscapes have maintained a close relationship with the natural resources and surroundings that provide their livelihoods.

For years, mountain were not studied as cohesive systems, but in recent decades, research is providing a more holistic understanding of mountain environments, and how they contribute to overall human well-being in the context of social, economic, and environmental changes.

The HKH presents some of the most austere geo-climatic conditions in the world, encompassing the barren wilds of the Tibetan Plateau, the cold semi-arid zones of northern Pakistan and Afghanistan, and the sweltering rain forests of northeastern India and Myanmar. These climates, however, have not deterred vast migrations, interactions, and evolutions of human communities in the HKH over the course of history.

Several hundred languages are spoken throughout the HKH, dialects that sprang from the Iranian, Tibeto-Bu

rman, Indo-European, Burushaski, Mon-Khmer, Munda, and Mongolic language families. The associated cultural groups in the HKH testify to a dynamic assemblage of peoples shaped by several millennia of migration, trade, pilgrimage, conquest, and various religious, artistic, and political movements. These communities have come to possess distinct linguistic and artistic expressions, and world views to which the natural rhythms of mountain life are central. At the same time, through generations of intimate interactions with their natural environments, these communities have developed vast treasures of traditional knowledge on indigenous pharmacology, agro-pastoral practices, and architectural and spatial use practices. For these communities, land, water, and forests are not simply natural resources to be exploited for profit on distant markets. As their ancestors before them, these communities understand that their well-being, their sense of identity and their children’s futures depend on the careful stewardship of the environment.

Until recently, traditional knowledge and practices provided the basis for the well-being and livelihoods of indigenous mountain communities. Consequently, mountain communities enjoyed an intangible, even spiritual connection to the elements of nature. However, in the recent decades, global media connectivity and the inclusion of once far-distant regions into national planning has ushered in the forces of globalization, consumerism, and often top-down governance regimes. This has accelerated the pace of change in the HKH, often at the cost of losing the particularities of mountain of socio-ecological balance.