1. Introduction
⌅We are experiencing a stage of great acceleration and integration of transdisciplinary knowledge in the vertigo of global environmental change and crisis. Nowhere is this more explicit and imperative than in mountain ecosystems, where the three geospatial dimensions X-Y-Z (width, length and depth) interact by the forcing of verticality (V) of slope and aspect orientation, with another important dimension, time (T) manifested as historicity (H). Unlike the n-dimensional space to create the niche for resource partitioning in ecology (Hutchinson, 1957Hutchinson, G.E., 1957. The multivariate niche. Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology, 22: 415-421. https://doi.org/10.1101/SQB.1957.022.01.039 ), the inclusion of temporality in the sequences of events and changes brought by ecological legacies from the past, makes historicity (H) imperative in political and historical ecology (Hartog, 2015Hartog, F., 2015. Regimes of Historicity. Columbia University Press. https://doi.org/10.7312/hart16376 ; Ellen & Fukui, 2021Ellen, R. & Fukui, K., eds. 2021. Redefining nature: ecology, culture and domestication. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003135746 ), particularly when dealing with multidimensional science paradigms (Setiawan & Syamsuddin, 2022Setiawan, A. & Syamsuddin, D., 2022. Multidimensional Science Paradigm in the Philosophy Integration of Ontology, Epistemology, and Axiology. Multidisciplinary International Journal of Research and Development, 1(3): 1-10.).
The importance of the fourth dimension (hence 4D) relies on the flux of scientific narratives leading to landscape transformation in an era of global climate crisis (Balée & Erikson, 2006Balée, W. & Erikson C.L., 2006. Time and complexity in historical ecology: Studies in the neotropical lowlands. Columbia University Press, New York. https://doi.org/10.7312/bale13562 ), the ecological “great acceleration” of the Anthropocene (Eriksen, 2016Eriksen, T.H., 2016. Overheating: An Anthropology of Accelerated Change. PlutoPress, London.; Chakraborty, 2021Chakraborty, A. 2021. Mountains as vulnerable places: a global synthesis of changing mountain systems in the Anthropocene. GeoJournal, 86: 585-604. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-019-10079-1 ), and with the temporality of “presses” enduring gradual changes and “pulses” of catastrophic, abrupt, and ephemeral human and environmental impacts. Altogether, all these factors confront the new with the old, the global with the local, and the real with the imaginary in most mountain socioecological systems (MtSES) (Klein et al., 2019Klein, J.A., Tucker C.M., Nolin A. W., Hopkin K.A., Reid R.S., Steger, C. et al., 2019. Catalyzing transformations to sustainability in the world’s mountains. Earth’s Future, 7: 547-557. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018EF001024 ). Geographic Information Systems (GIS) enable the visualization of space/time compressions parameterizing how digital “mountains” change on the screen (Bogucka & Jahnke, 2017Bogucka, E.P. & Jahnke, M., 2017. Space-Time Cube: A visualization tool for landscape changes. Journal of Cartography and Geographic Information, 67: 183-191. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03544601 ). This can be done by the repeated acquisition and comparison of raster (e.g., from satellite imagery) or vector (e.g., from LIDAR point clouds) data of the same area of interest-which per se offer only 3D. Challenging reconstructions from palaeoecological data help provide modeling for hindcasting the deep past, even in the Pleistocene/Holocene boundaries where humans initiate their impact on mountains (Sarmiento & Kooperman, 2019Sarmiento, F.O. & Kooperman, G., 2019. A Socio-Hydrological Perspective on Recent and Future Precipitation Changes Over Tropical Montane Cloud Forests in the Andes. Frontiers in Earth Sciences, 7, Article 324. https://doi.org/10.3389/feart.2019.00324 ). Going beyond monitoring the recent past and present, modelling approaches can help understanding possible changes of mountainscape in the earlier past-or prepare for probable future scenarios of change due to the interactions of social, cultural, economic, historic, anthropological, and ethnological variables (Sarmiento et al., 2016Sarmiento, F.O., Ibarra, T., Barreau, A., Pizarro, J.C., Rozzi, R., González, J.A., Frolich, L.M. & Milligan, A., 2016. Critical Biogeography of Mountains: Towards a biocultural landscape frontier of Montology. Abstract. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the American Asociation of Geographers, San Francisco, CA.). Hence, the 4D analysis is achieved when T is incorporated, not only as the passing of time, or T0-T1-T2-Tx, but also with the historicity of the actual framework affecting the type of changes or transformation through time, not only in the middle-mountains (Mittelgebirge) but also in the high mountains (Hochgebirge) of whitescapes (Pallister-Wilkins, 2022Pallister-Wilkins, P., 2022. Whitescapes: A posthumanist political ecology of Alpine migrant (im) mobility. Political Geography, 92: 102517. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102517 ). The scale of these changing variables highly depends on the political decisions taken to manage the MtSES. Only then, the structure and function of the mountain landscape, or mountainscape, can be grasped to its fullest extent.
Currently, the accepted definition of mountain is defined by geologists as a landform that rises at least 300 m above its surrounding area (Kapos et al., 2000Kapos, V., Rhind, J., Edwards, M., Price, M. & Ravilious, C., 2000. Developing a map of the world’s mountain forests. In: M.F. Price & N. Butt (Eds.), Forests in Sustainable Mountain Development: A State-of-Knowledge Report for 2000 (pp. 4-9). CAB International. https://doi.org/10.1079/9780851994468.0004 ). In areas between 300 m and 2,500 m altitude, a mountain requires a local elevation range of at least 300 m or a certain slope inclination (5° up to 1,500 m altitude or 2° above this limit) within 7 km surrounding area. Their mountain edifice size varies from the smallest islands to nations’ largest on the planet. About 22% of the Earth’s surface is covered by mountains, which provide between 60% and 80% of the world’s freshwater resources, and are home to 25% of the planet’s biodiversity and 28% of the world’s forests. Six of the 20 most important food crops originate from mountain regions, which also attract between 15% and 20% of global tourism (Escobar et al., 2020Escobar, F., Branca, D. & Haller, A., 2020. Investigación de montaña sobre y para la región andina. Revista de Investigaciones Altoandinas, 22(4): 311-312. https://doi.org/10.18271/ria.2020.191 ). However, current global changes such as warming and globalization triggering pollution at global scale threaten the inhabitants and the mountain environment, and, therefore, the planet as a whole (FAO, 2018FAO, 2018. Día Internacional de las Montañas. Organización de las Naciones Unidas para la Agricultura y la Alimentación http://www.fao.org/3/CA2244ES/ca2244es.pdf.; Schickhoff et al., 2022Schickhoff, U., Bobrowski, M., Mal, S., Schwab, N. & Singh, R., 2022. The World’s Mountains in the Anthropocene. In: Schickhoff, U., Singh, R., Mal, S. (eds) Mountain Landscapes in Transition. Sustainable Development Goals Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70238-0 ; Chakraborty, 2022Chakraborty, A., 2022. Relationship between Natural Disturbance Regimes and Landscape Diversity in Mountain Regions and Lessons for Nature Conservation. In: Proceedings, Annual Meeting of the Association of Japanese Geographers AJG.). With the global environmental changes and impending current climate crisis, a new consilient approach for integrating knowledge about mountains is imperative (Santana et al., 2022Santana, F., Monterrubio-Solís, C., Cortés, J., Perasso, P., Valdivieso, G., Vieli, L. & Ibarra, J.T., 2022. Transdisciplina: una propuesta participativa para enfrentar las crisis socio-ambientales por la agricultura familiar campesina. Abstract. Simposio de Etnoecologías transdisciplinares: cultivando redes colectivas para conservar la agrobiodiversidad y fortalecer la soberanía alimentaria. Memorias del VII Congreso Latinoamericano de Etnobiología y XII Congreso Mexicano de Etnobiología, Tlaxcala, Mexico.).
Mountainscapes, are part of biocultural heritage; they cross political borders, they blend past and present lifescapes, they are water tanks, hotbeds of biological diversity, watchdogs of global change (García Ruiz et al., 2015García-Ruiz, J. M., López-Moreno, J. I., Lasanta, T., Vicente-Serrano, S. M., González-Sampériz, P., Valero-Garcés, B. L., Sanjuán, Y., Beguería, S., Nadal-Romero, E., Lana-Renault, N. & Gómez-Villar, A., 2015. Los efectos geoecológicos del cambio global en el Pirineo Central español: una revisión a distintas escalas espaciales y temporales. Pirineos, 170: e012. https://doi.org/10.3989/Pirineos.2015.170005 ), and luring places to live and work (Borsdorf & Haller, 2020). In addition, almost one billion people live in mountainous areas, home to a huge variety of languages, ethnic groups, religions, and ideologies (de la Cadena, 2015De la Cadena, M., 2015. Earth beings: Ecologies of practice across Andean worlds. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11smtkx ; Urban, 2020Urban, M., 2020. Mountain linguistics. Language and Linguistics Compass 14(9):e12393. https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12393 ). There are some mountain protected areas (MtPAs) to protect and conserve small samples of biodiversity and geodiversity values. Nowadays, mountains are even sold, grabbed by either monocropping or gated exurbia, either as long-term private properties or as ephemeral spaces that can be experienced by elites, as is the case with mountain tourist destinations (Boscoboinik, 2018Boscoboinik, A., 2018. Becoming cities, losing paradise? Gentrification in the Swiss Alps. In: The Palgrave Handbook of Urban Ethnography. pp. 519-536. Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64289-5_29 ; Perlik, 2019Perlik, M., 2019. The Spatial and Economic Transformation of Mountain Regions: Landscapes as Commodities. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315768366 ; Branca & Haller, 2021Branca, D. & Haller, A., 2021. Urbanization, Touristification and Verticality in the Andes: A Profile of Huaraz, Peru. Sustainability, 13(11): 6438. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13116438 ).
Acknowledging that articulating strategies for crosscutting disciplinary silos, such as those of geomorphology, geoecology, neotectonics, and landscape ecology, into transdisciplinary science is a major challenge for consilience (Wilson, 1998Wilson, E.O., 1998. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Vintage Books, Random House Inc. New York.), this article aims to shape the agenda of montology as an application of transdisciplinarity and convergence in mountain landscapes. This application is required in the era of vertiginous and accelerated change (Steffen et al., 2015Steffen, W., Broadgate, W., Deutsch, L., Gaffney, O. & Ludwig, C., 2015. The trajectory of the Anthropocene: the great acceleration. The Anthropocene Review, 2(1): 81-98. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053019614564785 ) and the disaster risk reduction to obtain the homeorhetic state in transitioning to the culture-nature hybrid of the present from the homeostatic equilibrium-conceived nature pristine of the past (Alcántara-Ayala et al., 2022aAlcántara-Ayala, I., Pasuto, A. & Cui, P., 2022a. Disaster risk reduction in mountain areas: an initial overview on seeking pathways to global sustainability. Journal of Mountain Science, 19(6): 1838-1846. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11629-022-7468-5). Some authors made it clear that the time-tested local views should be integrated in the historicity of the mountainscape with the humanistic lenses of noetic science (Needleman, 1993Needleman, J., 1993. Questions of the heart. Noetic Sciences Review, 26: 4-9.) for its ability to explore the mind and intellect of human groups to incorporate earth ethics considerations and to avoid the “interdisciplinary fallacy” (Kramnik, 2017Kramnick, J., 2017. The interdisciplinary fallacy. Representations, 140: 67-83. https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2017.140.1.67 ; 2018Kramnick, J., 2018. The interdisciplinary delusion: saving disciplines is the only way to save ourselves. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 65(9).). Alternatively, convergent propositions are given for defining the sustainability of the planetary lifescape, for all biodiverse stakeholders (Gibbes et al., 2020Gibbes, C., Hoplins, A.L., Inurreta Días, A. & Jiménez-Osorio, J. 2020. Defining and measuring sustainability: A systematic review of studies in rural Latin America and the Caribbean. Environment, Development and Sustainability, 22: 447-468. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-018-0209-9 ). We will start by analyzing transdisciplinarity implications and theoretical developments of the crosscutting trend. Then, we will look into historic disciplinary changes and their major players, the epistemology framing critical literacy of mountains, and some examples of transdisciplinary work. We will end by using cultural terms to illustrate how longing for mountains influence the transgressivity of mountain lore, compounding the referentiality in realizing mountainscapes for sustainable and regenerative development.
This article scrutinizes onomastics to grapple with lexicographic domains that are not directly translated into English, grasping eccentric traditions of sense of place, as a way to dispel the interdisciplinary fallacy with a broader integrative effort. In so doing, we show several challenges to geographic realism with the completed dimensions 4D of sustainable MtSES, as shown in the Andes (Sarmiento et al., 2019aSarmiento, F.O., González, J.A., Lavilla, E.O., Donoso, M. & Ibarra, J.T., 2019a. Onomastic misnomers in the construction of faulty Andeanity and week Andeaness: Biocultural Microrefugia in the Andes. Pirineos, 174, e049. https://doi.org/10.3989/pirineos.2019.174009 ).
1.1 Transdisciplinary Implications and Theoretical Approaches
⌅The uptake of interdisciplinarity within landscape ecology took place by including ecology as a social science (Odum & Sarmiento, 1998Odum, E.P. & Sarmiento, F.O., 1998. Ecología: El Puente entre ciencia y sociedad. Editorial McGraw Hill/Interamericana de Mexico. Mexico, DF.) in an effort to better understand neotropical mountains’ function and structure. As part of the efforts to make ecology meaningful as a social science for Mountain Complex Adaptive Systems (MtCASs), scholars and educators (Naveh & Liebermann, 1984Naveh, Z. & Liebermann, A., 1984. Landscape ecology: Theory and application. New York: Springer-Verlag.) alerted about viewing landscape ecology as an educational imperative for the Total Human Ecosystem Science, based on general system theory, cybernetics, and complexity theory (Naveh, 2000Naveh, Z., 2000. The Total Human Ecosystem: Integrating Ecology and Economics. BioScience, 50(4): 357-361 https://doi.org/10.1641/0006-3568(2000)050[0357:TTHEIE]2.3.CO;2 ). In Europe, planning angles exhibited contrasting premises to the type of landscape ecology practiced in North America, which emphasized Geographic Information Systems (GIS) (Forman & Godron, 1984Forman, R. & Godron, R. 1984. Landscape ecology. New York: John Wiley & Sons.). A decade later, with the political ecology study of “third world countries”, paradigmatic cross-cutting of academic silos to study nature and culture hybrids from a non-Western, Global South perspective appeared (Forman, 1990Forman, R.T., 1990. The beginnings of landscape ecology in America. In Changing landscapes: An ecological perspective Pp. 35-41. New York, Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-3304-6_3 ; Naveh et al., 2002Naveh, Z., Lieberman, A., Sarmiento, F.O. & Ghersa, C., 2002. Ecología de Paisajes. Teoría y Aplicación. Edición de estudiantes. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires, EUDEBA.; Eibach & Haller, 2021Eibach, J. & Haller, T., 2021. Pioneering political ecology: perceptions of nature, Indigenous practices and power relations during Alexander von Humboldt’s travels in Latin America. Journal of Political Ecology, 28(1). https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.3028 ; Fúnez-Flores et al., 2022Fúnez-Flores, J.I., Díaz Beltrán, A.C. & Jupp, J., 2022. Decolonial discourses and practices: Geopolitical contexts, intellectual genealogies, and situated pedagogies. Educational Studies, 1-24. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131946.2022.2132393 ). A critical move to activate consilience of mountain themes further popularized alternative mountain ontologies (Messerli & Ives, 1997Messerli, B. & Ives, J.D., (eds). 1997. Mountains of the world: A global priority. New York: Parthenon.; Smith & Mark, 2003Smith, B. & Mark, D.M., 2003. Do mountains exist? Towards an ontology of landforms. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 30(3): 411-427. https://doi.org/10.1068/b12821 ; Naveh, 2007Naveh, Z., 2007. Transdisciplinary challenges in landscape ecology and restoration ecology - An Anthology. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-007-9171-x ; Lang et al., 2012Lang, D.J., Wiek, A., Bergmann, M., Stauffacher, M., Martens, P., Moll, P. & Thomas, C.J., 2012. Transdisciplinary research in sustainability science: practice, principles, and challenges. Sustainability Science, 7(1): 25-43. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-011-0149-x ; Pandian, 2014Pandian, A., 2014. Thinking like a mountain. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 4(2): 245-252. https://doi.org/10.14318/hau4.2.012 ; Gose, 2018Gose, P., 2018. The semi-social mountain: Metapersonhood and political ontology in the Andes. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 8(3): 488-505. https://doi.org/10.1086/701067 ; Texeiria, 2022Teixeira, M.T., 2022. The Ontology of Ecology. In: Process Cosmology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. Pp. 133-146. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81396-3_5 ).
A plethora of scholars recognized the goal of a new field of montology (Mahat & Boom, 2008Mahat, T.J. & Boom, D., 2008. Concept note 13. E-conference on “Overcoming fragmentation in mountain research and development. Is montology an answer?” Manuscript submitted to FAO’s international mountain conference. ICIMOD.; Veteto, 2009Veteto, J.R., 2009. From mountain anthropology to montology? An overview of the anthropological approach to Mountain Studies. Horizons in Earth Science Research, 1: 281-297.; Sarmiento, 2020Sarmiento, F.O., 2020. Montology Manifesto: echoes towards a transdisciplinary science of mountains. Journal of Mountain Science, 17(10): 2512-2527. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11629-019-5536-2 ; Haller & Branca, 2020Haller, A. & Branca, D., 2020. Montología: una perspectiva de montaña hacia la investigación transdisciplinaria y el desarrollo sustentable. Revista de Investigaciones Altoandinas, 22(4): 313-322. https://doi.org/10.18271/ria.2020.193 ; Sarmiento et al., 2022). With the realization of cross-cutting, integrative approaches and the convergence of transdisciplinary research in montology (Sarmiento & Frolich, 2020Sarmiento, F.O. & Frolich; L.M., (editors). 2020. The Elgar Companion to Geography, Transdisciplinarity and Sustainability. Edward Elgar Publishing. Glos, UK and Massachusetts, USA. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781786430106 ), the nuanced framing of sustainability and regenerative development required understanding 4D human-environmental relations from several angles at the same time (Dunlap & van Liere, 1978Dunlap, R.E. & Van Liere, K.D., 1978. The “new environmental paradigm”. The Journal of Environmental Education, 9(4): 10-19. https://doi.org/10.1080/00958964.1978.10801875 ; Dunlap et al., 2000Dunlap, R.E., Van Liere, K.D., Mertig, A.G. & Jones, R.E., 2000. New trends in measuring environmental attitudes: Measuring endorsement of the new ecological paradigm: A revised NEP scale. Journal of Social Issues, 56(3): 425-442. https://doi.org/10.1111/0022-4537.00176 ; Boillat, 2020Boillat, S., 2020. Decolonizing ecological knowledge: transdisciplinary ecology, place making and cognitive justice in the Andes. In: Sarmiento, F.O. & L.M. Frolich (Eds). The Elgar companion to geography, transdisciplinarity and sustainability (pp. 307-319). Edward Elgar Publishing. United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781786430106.00028 ) bringing post-phenomenological landscape studies into decolonial scholarship. Grappling with integrative modes to understand MtCASs and with the sustained stewardship MtSESs requires, prompted further inquiry into “montology” (Haslett, 1998Haslett, J.R., 1998. A new science: Montology. Global Ecology and Biogeography Letters, 7: 228-229. https://doi.org/10.2307/2997385 ; Schirpke et al., 2020Schirpke U., Scolozzi R., Dean G., Haller A., Jáger H., Kister, J., Kovács B., Sarmiento, F.O., Sattler B. & Schleyer, C., 2020. Cultural ecosystem services on mountain regions: Conceptualising conflicts among users and limitations of use. Ecosystem Services, 46: 101210. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoser.2020.101210 ). Notwithstanding the changing theoretical and practical framework of critical geography of MtSES from large landscapes to the microbiota scales, the field of mountain studies brings new approaches towards sustainable and regenerative mountainscapes (Hodges, 2006; Müller, 2020Müller, E., 2020. Regenerative development as natural solution to sustainability. In: Sarmiento, F.O. and L. Frolich (eds). Elgar Companion to Geography, Transdisciplinarity and Sustainability. Edward Elgar Publisher, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781786430106.00021 ; Wang et al., 2022Wang, J., Hu, A., Meng, F., Zhao, W., Yang, Y., Soininen, J., Shen, J. & Zhou, J., 2022. Embracing mountain microbiome and ecosystem functions under global change. New Phytologist, 234(6): 1987-2002. https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.18051 ). The bridging of science and humanities with montology is recognized as a best management practice to understand the complex topics and research questions in MtSES (Baer & Singer, 2014Baer. H. & Singer, M., 2014. The anthropology of climate change: An integrated critical perspective. Advances in Climate Change Research. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315818702 ; Foggin et al., 2021Foggin, J.M., Brombal, D. & Razmkhah, A., 2021. Thinking like a mountain: Exploring the potential of relational approaches for transformative nature conservation. Sustainability, 13(22): 12884. https://doi.org/10.3390/su132212884 ).
Transdisciplinary approaches became standard academic practice (Hadorn et al., 2008Hadorn, G.H., Hoffmann-Riem, H., Biber-Klemm, S., Grossenbacher-Mansuy, W., Joye, D., Pohl, C., Wiesmann, U. & Zemp, E. (eds). 2008. Handbook of transdisciplinary research. Vol. 10. Zurich, Switzerland: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6699-3 ), because they reflected three substantive trends: (1) holistic medicine (Klein, 2008Klein, J.T., 2008. Evaluation of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research: A literature review. American Journal of Preventive Medicine 35(2): S116-S123. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2008.05.010 ); (2) crosscutting of disparate fields (Veteto, 2009Veteto, J.R., 2009. From mountain anthropology to montology? An overview of the anthropological approach to Mountain Studies. Horizons in Earth Science Research, 1: 281-297.); and (3) the integration trend (Nanshan, 1998Nanshan, A., 1998. My perspective on montology. Journal of Mountain Research, 16: 1-2.). Realizing that mountainscapes were SESs, scholarship of decolonial turn towards explanations for synergies and nexuses of MtCAS’s sentient landscapes (Polk, 2014Polk, M., 2014. Achieving the promise of transdisciplinarity: A critical exploration of the relationship between transdisciplinary research and societal problem solving. Sustainability Science, 9(4): 439-451. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-014-0247-7 ; Xishi & Yuanchang, 1996Xishi, D. & Yuanchang, Z., 1996. The second discussion on montology. Journal of Mountain Research, 14(2): 83-88.).
1.2. Historicity: The Route Map to the Construction of Montology
⌅Mountain scholars find themselves navigating a capricious topography, with labyrinths and circuits of positivistic environmental cognition (Gade, 2011Gade, D.W., 2011. Curiosity, Inquiry and the Geographical Imagination. Peter Lang Publishers, New York. https://doi.org/10.3726/978-1-4539-0789-4 ; Castree, 2017Castree, N., 2017. Unfree radicals: Geoscientists, the Anthropocene, and left politics. Antipode, 49(S1): 52-74. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12187 ) and interacting haptic dimensions. The scholarly activity was siloed as either “physical” or “human” geography. Nevertheless, with input from social scientists and science communicators, geography is now seen as the environmental science combined with the study of human society par excellence (Wulf, 2015aWulf, A., 2015a. The forgotten father of environmentalism. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/12/the-forgotten-father-of-environmental-ism/421434/ (accessed March 28, 2022).). With this trend, an increasing number of scientists have, indeed, appropriated notions that navigating MtCASs requires agency cut-crossing the disciplinary poles, engaging with integrative, comprehensive, and critical views of sustainable and regenerative development (Wilcock & Brierley, 2012Wilcock, D.A. & Bierley, G.J., 2012. It’s about time: Extending time-space discussion in geography through use of “ethnogeomorphology” as an education and communication tool. Journal of Sustainability Education 3: 1-27.; Sarmiento et al., 2022aSarmiento, F.O., Chávez, R., Aguirre, Ch. & Abrahms, J., 2022a. Desarrollo Sustentable y Regenerativo de los Paisajes Socioecológicos de Montaña: Montología del Chimborazo como Referente Insigne del Cambio Global. Revista Antropologías del Sur, 9(17): 121-145. https://doi.org/10.25074/rantros.v9i17.2316 ) of current compressions of time and space in 4D (Massey, 1999Massey, D., 1999. Space-time, “science” and the relationship between physical geography and human geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 24(3): 261-276. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0020-2754.1999.00261.x ), counteracting predominantly archaic, morphological-minded past mountain geography (Wulf, 2015bWulf, A., 2015b. The invention of nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World. Borzoi Book, A.A. Knopf.) that highlighted dimensions Z over X or Y, but too often did not include T, much less H. Thus, “cross-disciplinarity” is now widely accepted by sustainability science and landscape ecology scholars (Naveh, 2005Naveh, Z., 2005. Epilogue: Toward a Transdisciplinary Science of Ecological and Cultural Landscape Restoration. Restoration Ecology, 13(1): 228-234. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1526-100X.2005.00028.x ; Wu, 2006Wu, J., 2006. Landscape ecology, cross-disciplinarity, and sustainability science. Landscape Ecology, 21: 1-4. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-006-7195-2 ; Wilson, 2018Wilson, E.O., 2018. Consilience Among the Great Branches of Learning 1. In: Pp. 131-150. Galison, P., Graubard S.R., & Mendelsohn, E. (Edis). Science in Culture. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351306928-5 ) with an emphasis on time, to which political ecologists and mountain geographers hone historicity for space/time couplings (Debarbieux & Rudaz, 2010Debarbieux, B. & Rudaz, G., 2010. Les faiseurs de montagne. Paris: CNRS-Editions; Pasini, 2022Pasini, R., 2022. A Dialectics of Ecology and Design in the Reform of Contemporary Landscapes. Sustainability, 14(10): p.6217. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14106217 ).
Annan-Diab & Molinari (2017)Annan-Diab, F. & Molinari, C., 2017. Interdisciplinarity: Practical approach to advancing education for sustainability and for the Sustainable Development Goals. The International Journal of Management Education, 15(2): 73-83. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijme.2017.03.006 , argued that disciplinary nexuses are required when considering priorities of sustainable and regenerative development (Sarmiento et al., 2022aSarmiento, F.O., Chávez, R., Aguirre, Ch. & Abrahms, J., 2022a. Desarrollo Sustentable y Regenerativo de los Paisajes Socioecológicos de Montaña: Montología del Chimborazo como Referente Insigne del Cambio Global. Revista Antropologías del Sur, 9(17): 121-145. https://doi.org/10.25074/rantros.v9i17.2316 ); “montology” advocates for the bridging of disciplines and nexus of humanities, arts, and sciences, for an improved mountain cognition (Mainali & Sicroff, 2016Mainali, K. & Sicroff, S. (eds). 2016. Jack D. Ives, Montologist: Festschrift for a mountain advocate. Lalitpour, Nepal: Himalayan Asociation for the Advancement of Science.). Mahat & Boom (2008)Mahat, T.J. & Boom, D., 2008. Concept note 13. E-conference on “Overcoming fragmentation in mountain research and development. Is montology an answer?” Manuscript submitted to FAO’s international mountain conference. ICIMOD., problematizing disciplinarity of mountain studies, pointed out that the term has been used orally and in-print several occasions in the last half century. Rhoades (2007)Rhoades, R.E., 2007. Listening to the mountains. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt. pointed out it was Frank Davidson who first used montology at the Munich Mountain Conference in 1974.
“Just as oceanography has spawned a number of major and minor institutions concerned with the protection and development of ocean resources, so mountainology, once its importance and implications are realized, will lead to a proliferation of institutional responses” (GTZ, 1974: 186GTZ. 1974. Münchener Konferenzbericht, 1: 186. Munich: GTZ. ). In subsequent discussion between Frank Davidson, Bruno Messerli, and Jack Ives, the term mountainology [sic] was dropped in favor of montology”.
Notwithstanding lexicographic difficulties with this call for montology in 1974, the “Club of Munich” strengthened it with the addition of American scholars such as Ben Orlove, Steve Brush, Paul Baker, and Colin Rosser. The formation of the International Mountain Society (IMS) and the creation of the journal Mountain Research and Development formed an active academic home (Ives 2005Ives, J.D., 2005. Himalayan misconceptions and distortions. What are the facts? Himalayan Journal of Science, 3(5): 15-25. https://doi.org/10.3126/hjs.v3i5.457 ). This juncture helped the multitude of sources on mountain studies evidenced needed crosscutting integration. The compilation of these findings by Susanne Fairclough (1982)Fairclough, S., 1982. The Mountain Environment Collection of M.I.T.’s Dewey Library and Associated Bibliographies. Manuscript. gave specific reference to montology:
At the Cambridge Mountain Conference in 1977, participants discussed the creation of a discipline for the study of mountains, as has been accorded to oceans, and gave it the name of montology, to denote an active, protective emphasis (Allen et al., 1998).
The work of Ives, Messerli, Rhoades, and other montologists allowed the inclusion of the term in the Oxford English Dictionary (2002) and several other sources in the web. It stirred counter voices of those who saw it as unnecessary jargon; however, others reiterated the imperative of professional prowl with this moniker, uniquely suited. Contention about the term montology among scientists ensued, and a call for moving “mountains” to higher global priorities with a term of their own was formalized (Bandyopadhyay & Perveen, 2004Bandyopadhyay, J. & Perveen, S., 2004. Moving the mountains up in the global environmental agenda. OP-CDEP 3. Center for Development and Environment Policy (CDEP). Calcutta: Indian Institute of Management.). Mountain scholars and practitioners required then to grapple with the “listening to the mountains” aphorism (Rhoades, 2007Rhoades, R.E., 2007. Listening to the mountains. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt.; Pandian, 2014Pandian, A., 2014. Thinking like a mountain. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 4(2): 245-252. https://doi.org/10.14318/hau4.2.012 ).
Mountainscapes face multiple challenges, not only for their propensity to disaster risk and increased rate of geological hazards occurring in the mountain environment-i.e., mass wasting, snow avalanche, flash flooding-induced glacial ablation, rock fall, 0 °C isotherm rise to high altitude, fires, volcanic eruptions, and forest dieback (Alcántara-Ayala et al., 2022bAlcántara-Ayala, I., Cui, P. & Pasuto, A., 2022b. Disaster risk reduction in mountain areas: a research overview. Journal of Mountain Science 19(6):1487-1494. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11629-022-7487-2 ) but also for their intrinsic contentious community’s dynamics (Debarbieux & Rudaz, 2010Debarbieux, B. & Rudaz, G., 2010. Les faiseurs de montagne. Paris: CNRS-Editions).
The challenges include the increasingly serious impact of climate crisis and environmental change, the impact that socio-economic and cultural globalization has on mountain populations and the ecosystems they inhabit (Haller & Branca, 2020Haller, A. & Branca, D., 2020. Montología: una perspectiva de montaña hacia la investigación transdisciplinaria y el desarrollo sustentable. Revista de Investigaciones Altoandinas, 22(4): 313-322. https://doi.org/10.18271/ria.2020.193 ). An example from Europe, the Feldafing Accord of 2010, prompting creation of institutions for mountain research among countries of Asia and Europe, depicts the globalization turn in the planetary acceleration. These trends are delineated in Sarmiento (2020)Sarmiento, F.O., 2020. Montology Manifesto: echoes towards a transdisciplinary science of mountains. Journal of Mountain Science, 17(10): 2512-2527. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11629-019-5536-2 , claiming for action to transgress silos, welcoming non-traditional institutions, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), charitable foundations, and community-driven mountain work, artistic and humanitarian groups, as well as in established research institutes of the ever more urbanized mountainscape (Branca & Haller, 2021Branca, D. & Haller, A., 2021. Urbanization, Touristification and Verticality in the Andes: A Profile of Huaraz, Peru. Sustainability, 13(11): 6438. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13116438 ).
2. Conceptualization and framing
⌅2.1. Onomastics, Conceptual, and Institutional Approaches
⌅Current tendency shifts away from orology (Greek for mountain and knowledge) to montology (mixed Greek and Latin for mountain discourse), positing to incorporate biotic elements and spiritual dimensions (Descola, 2013Descola, P., 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226145006.001.0001 ) in understanding mountains through historicity to achieve 4D. Annotated bibliographies on mountain geography (c.f., Resler & Sarmiento, 2016Resler, L., Sarmiento, F.O., 2016. Mountain geographies. Oxford Bibliographies in Geography. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199874002-0129 ) include now multifunctional approaches for MtCASs with holism and post-structuralism methods for mountain ontology (Sarmiento et al., 2017Sarmiento, F.O., Ibarra, J.T., Barreau, A., Pizarro, J.C., Rozzi, R., González, J.A. & Frolich, L.M., 2017. Applied montology using critical biogeography in the Andes. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 107(2): 416-428. (Special issue on mountains). https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2016.1260438 ; Fabian, 2014Fabian, J., 2014. Time and the Other. Columbia University Press, NY. https://doi.org/10.7312/fabi16926 ). Former pundits signaled against the etymological mingling, such as glaciology, mineralogy, sociology, etc. (Yuanchang, 1986Yuanchang, D.X.Z., 1986. A preliminary discussion on montology. Journal of Mountain Research, 4(3): 179-186.; Haller & Branca, 2020Haller, A. & Branca, D., 2020. Montología: una perspectiva de montaña hacia la investigación transdisciplinaria y el desarrollo sustentable. Revista de Investigaciones Altoandinas, 22(4): 313-322. https://doi.org/10.18271/ria.2020.193 ), and that a plethora of mountain names borrows from either Greek or Latin indistinctively.
To prevent that language affiliation could engage to a biased understanding of mountain lexicography, a genealogy of scholars from several origins who actively worked in montology was attempted by Axel Borsdorf, in his teaching the subject matter at Innsbruck, about stages of development and the group leaders of these effort. Other seasoned scholars also incorporated Ives’s vision of montology, namely: Yuri Badenkov, Robert Rhoades, Gregory Knapp, Christoph Stadel, Daniel Gade, Larry Hamilton, and Alton Byers (Ives et al., 2016Ives, J.D., Messerli, B. & Sarmiento, F.O., 2016. Obituary for a mountain champion: Lawrence Hamilton, 1925-2016. Mountain Research and Development, 36(4): 569-570. https://doi.org/10.1659/MRD-JOURNAL-D-16-00obit.1 ). Borsdorf’s term likened informal monikers of “mountain mafias,” popularized by Messerli & Ives (1997)Messerli, B. & Ives, J.D., (eds). 1997. Mountains of the world: A global priority. New York: Parthenon., was used to advocate convergent and transdisciplinary mountain science (Table 1).
| MAJOR PLAYERS | DECADAL ADVANCE OF MONTOLOGY | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GLOBAL NORTH | 60s | 70s | 80s | 90s | 00s | 10s | 20s |
| Carl Troll (DE) | |||||||
| Jack D. Ives (CA) | |||||||
| Eugene P. Odum | |||||||
| Bruno Messerli (CH) | |||||||
| Maurice Strong (UNEP) | |||||||
| Carol Harden (US) | |||||||
| Lawrence Hamilton (US) | |||||||
| Axel Borsdorf (AT) | |||||||
| Robert Rhoades (US) | |||||||
| Bernard Debarbieux (FR) | |||||||
| Teiji Watanabe (JP) | |||||||
| Jörg Balsinger (CH) | |||||||
| Zev Naveh (IL) | |||||||
| Nigel Allan (US) | |||||||
| Edwin Bernbaum (US) | |||||||
| Hermann Kreutzmann (DE) | |||||||
| Christoph Stadel (CA-AT) | |||||||
| Martin Price (UK) | |||||||
| Monique Fort (FR) | |||||||
| José María García Ruiz (ES) | |||||||
| Alton Byers (US) | |||||||
| Thomas Schaaf (DE) | |||||||
| Hans Hurni (CH) | |||||||
| Yuri Badenkov (RU) | |||||||
| Donald Friend (US) | |||||||
| Thomas Kohler (CH) | |||||||
| Alexey Gunya (RU) | |||||||
| GLOBAL SOUTH | |||||||
| Gerardo Budowski (CR-VE) | |||||||
| Misael Acosta-Solís (EC) | |||||||
| Trilok Singh Papola (IN) | |||||||
| Fausto Sarmiento (US-EC) | |||||||
| Víctor Toledo (MX) | |||||||
| Hugo Romero (CL) | |||||||
| Mesfin Woldemariam (ET) | |||||||
| Radu Rey (RO) | |||||||
| J. Gabriel Campbell (NP) | |||||||
| Guangyu Huang (CN) | |||||||
| Irasema Alcántara-Ayala (MX) | |||||||
| Esther Njiro (ZA) | |||||||
| Constanza Ceruti (AR) | |||||||
| Gustavo Martinelli (BR) | |||||||
| Virginia Nazarea (PH) | |||||||
| Elías Mujica (PE) | |||||||
| Arturo Eichler (VE-DE) | |||||||
| Eduardo Gudynas (UR) | |||||||
| Ricardo Rozzi (CL-US) | |||||||
Initial attempts to popularize Mountain Geography were promoted by the journal Geographical Review, crowning the effort of more than 100 years with the special issue on mountains in 2010. The establishment of the “Man and the Biosphere” (MAB) Program of UNESCO (https://en.unesco.org/mab). has been greatly augmented by the Mountain Biosphere Reserves Program, and the World Heritage Center’s Natural and Cultural Sites that have prioritized mountain protected areas as World Heritage Sites. Montology research institutions now comprise not only multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary teams, but also transdisciplinary 4D interpolations, links, and nexuses.
2.2. Transgressivity: The Montological Route
⌅The integration imperative is a skilled methodology, as mountain Geographies and neotectonics engage with convergent science, consilient trends, and simplified synoptic processes (Roberts & Smyth, 2022Roberts, L. & Smyth, E. 2022. A simplified convergence theory for Byzantine resilient stochastic gradient descent. EURO Journal on Computational Optimization, 10: 100038. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejco.2022.100038 ). Price et al. (2013)Price, M.F., Byers, A.C., Friend, D.A., Kohler, T. & Price, LW., (eds). 2013. Mountain geography: Physical and human dimensions. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. incentivized intersections of the physical with the human mountain geographies (Sarmiento, 2015Sarmiento, F.O., 2015. On the antlers of a trilemma: Rediscovering Andean sacred sites, pp. 49-64. In: R. Rozzi, S.T.A. Pickett, J.B. Callicot, F.S.T. Chapin III, M.E. Power, J.J. Armesto (eds) Earth stewardship: Linking ecology and ethics in theory and practice. New York: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12133-8_5 ). The trust here relies on a multimethod approach with statistical and mathematical equations conditioning the biophysical component of the experimental research; yet meristic and qualitative assertions affect the socioecological component of the observational system intertwined as the MtCAS settles in trajectory. Traditionally, the use of probability analysis and Bayesian modeling allow for understanding the likelihood of a null hypothesis to be falsified only if ‘all other things being ‘equal,’ and that the process is reliable and replicable. The functioning of MtSESs challenges the caeteres paribus since all processes continue their homeorhetic flow while scientists study a still-shot, a frozen-in-time portion of it, which is the basis for fluvial discontent in the riverine geocriticism of mountains (Pasini, 2022Pasini, R., 2022. A Dialectics of Ecology and Design in the Reform of Contemporary Landscapes. Sustainability, 14(10): p.6217. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14106217 ). The conditions for generalization with replicability and reliability are questioned by situational oddities that make mountain specificities in different parts of the world unique; therefore, requiring a selective multimethod approach. Experimental studies often play with the parameters of X and Y in direct Cartesian relation, while elevation (Z) is often assigned positive or negative values for vertical exaggeration (V). We challenge the idea of using T as an indirect Spinozan relation with H framing the inverse explanatory etiology of change.
We use Jodha’s (2003)Jodha, N.S., 2003. La Agricultura de Montaña, pp 403-428. In: F.O. Sarmiento (ed.) Montañas del Mundo: Una Prioridad Global con Perspecitvas Latinoamericanas. Quito: CEPEIGE. Ediciones Abya-Yala. specificities to describe the transgression and referentiality of mountain studies (Westphal, 2011Westphal, B., 2011. Geocriticism: Real and fictional spaces. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.; Tally & Battista, 2016Tally Jr., R.T. & Battista, C.M., 2016. Introduction: Ecocritical geographies, geocritical ecologies and the spaces of modernity, pp. 1-15. In: Tally et al. (eds) Ecocriticism and Geocriticism: Overlapping territories in Environmental and Spatial Literary Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137542625_1 ) by inverse definition methodology approach, with binomials that might be oxymora and hard to define, unless using their contrary meaning (Table 2).
| MONOMIAL | BINOMIAL | INVERSE DEFINITION | SOURCE |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sustainability | Sustainable development | Easily explained when unsustainable practices affect the mountain slope | Hamilton & Hurni (2003)Hamilton, L.S. & Hurni, H., 2003. Mountain Sustainable Development. Editorial. Mountain Research and Development, 23(3): 211. https://doi.org/10.1659/0276-4741(2003)023[0211:E]2.0.CO;2 |
| Health | Environmental health | Easily explained when sickness and disease are apparent in the environment | Dovjak & Kukec (2019)Dovjak, M., Kukec, A., 2019. Health outcomes related to built environments. In: Creating Healthy and Sustainable Buildings. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19412-3 |
| Harmony | Natural harmony | Easily explained when disruption in the balance break the equilibrium in the system | Botkin (1990)Botkin, D.B., 1990. Discordant harmonies: a new ecology for the twenty-first century. Oxford University Press. |
| Peace | Pax Romana | Easily explained when criminality pervades neighborhoods in the Roman empire | Kirkpatrick (2007)Kirkpatrick, J.J., 2007. Making war to keep peace. Harper Collins Publishers, New York. |
| Happiness | Satisfactory wellbeing | Easily explained when the malfunction of welfare affects largely on the emotional basis | Maddison et al. (2020)Maddison, D., Rehdanz, K. & Welsch, H., eds., 2020. Handbook on Wellbeing, Happiness and the Environment. Edward Elgar Publishing. United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781788119344 |
It can also be done with single terms (i.e., monomial) lacking direct translation into English (Figure 1) of the triad needed to problematize mountainscapes by rethinking the interacting spheres in the episteme of mountain cognition (Tadaki, 2017Tadaki, M., 2017. Rethinking the role of critique in physical geography. The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe Canadien, 61(1): 73-83. https://doi.org/10.1111/cag.12299 ):
-
Critical in or geoliterate, in the physical biogeographic mountain setting, encompassing descriptive, meristic variables; e.g., ontology of the space.
-
Critical of or ecoliterate, in the socioecological mountain production system, including analytical, non-meristic variables; e.g., ontology of the place.
-
Critical through or sopholiterate, in the mental mountain imaginaries, encircling spiritual, ethical and morality variables; e.g., ontology of the soul.
This approach seeks to radicalize geoecology and landscape ecology of mountains with linguistic artifacts conveying ideas without direct translation (Castree, 2017Castree, N., 2017. Unfree radicals: Geoscientists, the Anthropocene, and left politics. Antipode, 49(S1): 52-74. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12187 ; Lomas, 2018Lomas, T., 2018. Experiential cartography and the significance of “untranslatable” words. Theory & Psychology, 28(4): 476-495. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354318772914 ). Therefore, readers are compelled into using whole sentences in lieu of a simple term, to integrate ideas to execute transgression in mountain cognition (e.g., Prieto, 2011Prieto, E., 2011. Geocriticism, geopoetics, geophilosophy, and beyond, pp. 13-27. In: R.T. Tally Jr. et al. (eds). Geocritical explorations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230337930_2 ) toward sustainable and regenerative development. This jump from monomials to the phrasal lexicon of binomials or trinomials, often implies a much higher level of place attachment, which has been geovisualized from crowdsourcing social media and data mining in an Ecuadorian mountain setting (Kong & Sarmiento, 2022Kong, I. & Sarmiento, F.O., 2022. Utilizing a crowdsourced phrasal lexicon to identify cultural ecosystem services in El Cajas National Park, Ecuador. Ecosystem Services, 56: 101441. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoser.2022.101441 ). Some of these terms include Arabic (barzahk), French (terroir), German (Gemütlichkeit), Portuguese (saudade), Sanskrit (kharma), and Spanish (arraigo). With this artifact, we prompt geo-literacy to be more relevant than eco-literacy when dealing with hybrids of humanities, art, and science, because eco-literacy emphasizes “nature only” judgement of the biophysical landscape, whilst geo-literacy stresses “nature-culture linkages” of the biocultural mountainscapes immersed in the sopho-literacy of their vernacular cultures (Prieto, 2016Prieto, E., 2016. Geocriticism meets ecocriticism: Bertrand Westphal and environmental thinking, pp. 19-35. In: R.T. Tally Jr. and C.M. Battista (eds) Ecocriticism and geocriticism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137542625_2 ; Franco, 2022Franco, F.M., 2022. Ecocultural or biocultural? Towards appropriate terminologies in biocultural diversity. Biology, 11(2): 207. https://doi.org/10.3390/biology11020207 ).
2.3. Collective efforts for convergent montology
⌅This crosscutting collective effort to understand MtSESs, such as in farmscape transformation (Sarmiento et al., 2022), food sovereignty, and agrobiodiversity (Zimmerer et al., 2017Zimmerer, K.S., Córdova Aguilar, H., Mata Olmo, R., Jiménez-Olivencia, R. & Vanek, S., 2017. Mountain ecology, remoteness, and the rise of agrobiodiversity: Tracing the geographic spaces of human-environment knowledge. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 107(2): 441-455. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2016.1235482 ; Sarmiento et al., 2019bSarmiento, F.O., Ibarra, J.T., Barreau, A., Marchant, C., González, J., Oliva, M. & Donoso, M., 2019b. Montology: A research agenda for complex foodscapes and biocultural microrefugia in tropical and temperate Andes. Journal of Agriculture Food and Development 5: 9-21. https://doi.org/10.30635/2415-0142.2019.05.2 ), crop vulnerability (Conzo, 2022Conzo, D.M., 2022. Reclaiming the future through small-scale agrioculture: autonomy and sustainability in the Caribbean. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Massachusetts, Amherst.), or glacier retreat and climate change in mountain communities’ disaster risk (Carey, 2010Carey, M., 2010. In the shadow of melting glaciers: Climate change and Andean society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195396065.001.0001 ), explains the strengthening of montology, as important networks for mountain research operate, led by Swiss-funded Mountain Research Initiative (MRI) for a global reach (https://www.mountainresearchinitiative.org). Another network operates out of the Austrian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Interdisciplinary Mountain Research (IGF) (https://www.oeaw.ac.at/igf). Also of note is the Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment (IMHE) (http://english.imde.cas.cn) that operates out of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The synergy of montology is manifested recently with the creation of an Interdisciplinary Centre for Mountain Research (ICMR) at the University of Lausanne (UNIL) in Switzerland (https://www.unil.ch/centre-montagne).
Lately, funding agencies of the Global North prioritized transdisciplinary teams for grants given in coordinated and shared fashion, as the creation of the Belmont Forum (https://www.belmontforum.org) to fund climate change research on mountains. Also, federal funding in the USA awarded TARN (Transdisciplinary Andean Research Network) as a Collaborative Research Network (Polk et al., 2017Polk, M.H., Young, K.R., Baraer, M., Mark, B.G., McKenzie, J.M., Bury, J. & Carey, M., 2017. Exploring hydrologic connections between tropical mountain wetlands and glacier recession in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca. Applied Geography, 78(1): 94-103. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2016.11.004 ); SENTINELS for mountain observatories (https://mountainsentinels.org/); MtnSEON (Mountain Social Ecological Observatory Network (https://webpages.uidaho.edu/mtnseon/); GEO Mountains (http://geomountains.org/); and, the Neotropical Montology Collaboratory (https://montology.franklinresearch.uga.edu).
In addition, the Belmont Forum’s project VULPES (Vulnerability of Populations Under Extreme Scenarios) that looked into microrefugia conservation research into mountain forests worldwide (https://vulpesproject.wixsite.com/vulpes) (Cheddadi et al., 2017Cheddadi, R., Henrot, A., François, L., Boyer, F., Bush, M., Carré M., Coissac, E., de Oliveira, P., Ficetola, F., Hambuckers, A., Huang K., Lezine, A.M., Nourelbait, M., Rhoujjati, A., Taberlet,P., Sarmiento, F.O., Abel-Sschaad,, D., Alba-Sánmchez, F. & Zheng, Z., 2017. Microrefugia, climate change, and conservation of Cedrus atlantica in the Rif Mountains, Morocco. Frontiers of Ecology and Evolution, 5(114): 1-15. https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2017.00114 ). Implementation by the German International Cooperation for Development (GIZ) of its policy to exclusively fund projects observing transdisciplinary tenets shows the wherewithal in favor of montology.
The United Nations University’s (UNU) Institute of Advanced Studies in Sustainability (IAS) invigorates this effort by hosting a successful International Program called “Satoyama Initiative” (IPSI) (http://satoyama-initiative.org/), working globally with headquarters in Tokyo. In addition, sustainability science researchers, who have identified transdisciplinarity in mountain basins (Lang et al., 2012Lang, D.J., Wiek, A., Bergmann, M., Stauffacher, M., Martens, P., Moll, P. & Thomas, C.J., 2012. Transdisciplinary research in sustainability science: practice, principles, and challenges. Sustainability Science, 7(1): 25-43. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-011-0149-x ), and the work of the Mountain Partnership of FAO (https://www.fao.org/mountain-partnership/), with its recent incorporation of the Latin American and Caribbean Mountain Research and Innovation Network (LACMONT) in Brazil (https://www.fao.org/mountain-partnership/events/event-detail/tr/c/1381033/) contribute to montological strengthening. This can be seen in case studies from across the globe, incuding the Satoyama landscapes of Soteapan community in Mexican Yucatan, of Cauca valley headwaters in Colombia, of Imbakucha watershed in highland Ecuador, of the vicuña herders of Pushka Warmi in the Argentinean puna, and of the Galtür and Ischgl municipalities in Austrian Tyrol.
In the ‘city of science’ near Tokyo, a UNESCO chair of cultural heritage (http://nc.heritage.tsukuba.ac.jp/UNESCO-Chair/) keeps scholars at the University of Tsukuba grappling with Biocultural Heritage and Nature-Culture Linkages. This chair contributes to updating practitioners from around the world with capacity building, and to training students in a Master’s program on mountains through an impressive Center for Mountain Research, with many field sites in Japan. However, some initiatives in the Global South are starting to bring the transdisciplinary approach to their work, such as the group Lab Natural ANDES del Sur, Austral University of Chile.
Mountain Research and Development adopted a guide for inclusion of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) to understand the Global North-Global South dynamics of mountain sustainability. The journal promotes sharing of applied research and knowledge generation with hard and soft sciences. Founded by Jack D. Ives and published by the IMS until 2000, MRD became an open journal, edited by Hans Hurni at Bern. At present, editors-in-chief Thomas Breu (CDE), Pema Gyamtsho (ICIMOD) and Yanfen Wang (UCAS) work with associated editors Sarah-Lan Mathez-Stiefel, Brigitte Portner, and Susanne Wyman von Dach, at the Center for Development and Environment at the University of Bern. Coincidentally, another journal also created by Jack Ives, covering Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research (AAAR) interdisciplinary perspectives, that initiated his tenure as director of INSTAAR founded at the University of Colorado, Boulder, is very active in the United States. Bibliometrics of mountain research output is now enhanced by the collaboration of Springer and the Academia Sinica producing the Journal of Mountain Science (JMS), with an active international editorial board, coordinated by Professors Peng Cui and Dunlian Qiu of the IMHE in the Institute for Mountain Hazards located in Chengdu, China.
Pirineos Journal of Mountain Ecology underwritten by the National Council of Science and Technology of Spain, is published by the Pyrenean Institute of Ecology in Jaca; the publication of open access online promoted by editors Teodoro Lasanta-Martínez and Estela Nadal-Romero led an innovative production, emphasizing European and Iberoamerican authorship. In addition, the Journal of Alpine Research (JAR)/ Revue de Géographie Alpine (RGA) produced by the Institute of Alpine Research at University of Grenoble, France, continues editorial leadership on mountain research as the oldest mountain journal running uninterruptedly since creation in 1913. Lastly, eco.mont, the Journal on Protected Mountain Areas Research and Management, edited at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, includes montological research and conservation in MtPAs worldwide.
3. Results and discussion
⌅3.1. Mountains as Ontological Subject Matter
⌅The advent of critical social theory with decolonial scholarship pushes to incorporate dialectics, meristic metrics, and trialectics, which not only requires a new conviction for 4D, but also different protocols, such as critical biogeography, biocultural heritage paradigms, onomastics and term causation, and political ecology explanatory tropes (Sarmiento, 2016aSarmiento, F.O., 2016a. Neotropical mountains beyond water supply: Environmental services as a trifecta of sustainable mountain development, pp. 309-324. In: G. Greenwood, J. Shroder (eds) Mountain ice and water. New York: Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-444-63787-1.00008-1 ). Delving mountain theory, grasping it from both sides of the Cartesian or Spinozan divide (i.e., single trajectory or multiple tracks), the consilient imperative is obvious (Painter, 2008Painter, J., 2008. Cartographic anxiety and the search for regionality. Environmental and Planning A, 40: 342-361. https://doi.org/10.1068/a38255 ; Hansson, 2012Hansson, D., 2012. Unpacking Spinoza: Sustainability education outside of the Cartesian box. Journal of Sustainability Education, 3: 1-17.). This “cartographic anxiety” created by the nature-culture hybridity (Gregory, 1994Gregory, D., 1994. Geographical imaginations. Oxford: Blackwell.), pleads the trifecta of critical in-, critical of-, and critical through- of the literacy about the mountain environment (i.e., geoliteracy, ecoliteracy, sopholiteracy) (Figure 1). Therefore, montology became a stapple in novel thinking about mountain research, particularly in the less developed countries, where most humans speak languages other than English and practice non-Western thought.
Al-barzahk in Arabic, could be equivalent to “purgatory” in Christian thought. Nevertheless, it goes deeper in describing the fuzziness binding neighboring fields that are hard to discriminate. This Al-barzahk lemma or monomial connotes the boundary line that bounds death and life, or the moving crepuscular line of darkness and light, or the tempusculus of past and present tenses, or the fuzzy realm of the imagined and the seen; sometimes it mediates what constitutes the domain of humans and gods. Montology binds this trifecta of mountains, by forming a complete picture of mountainscapes. For instance, the trinomial dimension in the Andes, given by the trilemma of identity can be (in)ducted from the meaning of what is planned, conceived, and calculated -or Andeaness, can be (de)ducted from the appearance of what can be touched and measured -or Andeanity, or can be (sub)ducted from the imaginary of revelations and dreams -or Andeanitude. The Andean identity of this trilemma interplays affecting effective MtPAs conservation (Sarmiento, 2016bSarmiento, F.O., 2016b. Identity, imaginaries and ideality: Understanding the biocultural landscape of the Andes through the iconic Andean lapwing (Vanellus resplendens). Revista Chilena de Ornitología, 22(1): 38-50.) in reference to the fluid process (or ducted) of reciprocity (or ayni) of Andean mountainscapes. In tropandean landscapes, the Sarmiento’s trilemma explains sentience from toponymy and onomastics of ancient descriptors that genderize mountains (e.g., Mama Tungurawa and Tayta Chimburasu) without specific bodily metaphors. Sentient mountainscapes elsewhere find their essence in other latitudes, with consideration of landscape dynamics in their deep ecology graticule. In this vein, you may think of Alpinity, Himalayaness, and Appalachitude, when exploring the physical features of the Alps, or hidden mental constructs of the Himalayas, or spiritual and sacred confines of the Appalachians.
3.2. Longing for Critical Montology
⌅In spite of having mountains in large urban scenarios, such as Tokyo, Mexico City, Shimla, Gangtok, Quito, Valdivia, or Innsbruck, the diminution of the appeal of the mountain livelihood conflates the urbanite modalities afforded by city infrastructure and municipal facilities, allowing for fast connections, diminished travel times, unobstructed terrain, or industrial parks for factories and harbors to export globally, generally located in the lowlands and by the river deltas (Messerli & Ives, 1997Messerli, B. & Ives, J.D., (eds). 1997. Mountains of the world: A global priority. New York: Parthenon.; Wu & Hobbs, 2002Wu, J., Hobbs, R., 2002. Key issues and research priorities in landscape ecology: An idiosyncratic synthe-sis. Landscape ecology 17(4):355-365. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1020561630963 ). Mountain civilizations of the past, nevertheless constructed their centers in forgotten valleys, isolated from others, remaining in the hinterland, on peripheral areas where to build hegemony, even in challenging topography (Sarmiento & Sarmiento, 2021Sarmiento, F.O. & Sarmiento, E.V., 2021. Flancos Andinos: Paleoecología, Biogeografía Crítica y Ecología Política en los Climas Cambiantes de los Bosques Neotropicales de Montaña. Fondo Editorial. Universidad Nacional Toribio Rodríguez de Mendoza de Amazonas. UNTRM. Chachapoyas, Perú. https://doi.org/10.5281/Zenodo.5670892 ). The endemicity generated by this spatial isolation produced different creeds and languages, with distinct use in the creation of mountain myths and langscapes’ identity markers in different continents (Lewis & Wigen, 1997Lewis, M.W. & Wigen, K., 1997. The myth of continents: A critique of metageography. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.; Skutnabb-Kangas et al., 2003Skutnabb-Kangas, T., Maffi, L. & Harmon, D., 2003. Sharing a world of difference: the earth’s linguistic, cultural and biological diversity. UNESCO.; Zimmerer et al., 2017Zimmerer, K.S., Córdova Aguilar, H., Mata Olmo, R., Jiménez-Olivencia, R. & Vanek, S., 2017. Mountain ecology, remoteness, and the rise of agrobiodiversity: Tracing the geographic spaces of human-environment knowledge. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 107(2): 441-455. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2016.1235482 ).
Saudade, in Portuguese, describes something good that has been lost, that is longed for at present, but with a great potential to recur due to the past opulence. Most citizens, including the amenity migrants, exurbanites and suburbanites of cityscapes or farmscapes, tend to incorporate “specificity” to secure survival in those urbanized places, stress-riddled megalopolises, and harbors. The Portuguese monomial saudade is expressed in the longing experienced by people who want to be closer to MtPAs for their high quality of cultural ecosystem services (CES). Moss (2006)Moss, L.A., (ed.). 2006. The amenity migrants. Seeking and sustaining mountains and their cultures. Cambridge, MA: Wallingford. https://doi.org/10.1079/9780851990842.0000 pointed out that one of the manifestations of expats and retirees around the world is the development of second home residential areas or summer cottages and retreats that evidence this longing for mountain lifescapes. The archetype of the “American dream” that moves many migrants into developed areas is given the moniker of “Home on the Range” as one of the aspirations of its citizens (Johnson et al., 2016Johnson, I.L., Lin, Y., Li, T.J.J., Hall, A., Halfaker, A., Schöning, J. & Hecht, B., 2016. Not at home on the range: Peer production and the urban/rural divide. In: Proceedings of the 2016 CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 13-25). https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858123 ), making it an envisioned investment of urbanites for fulfillment of ambitious goals by the mountainside.
Padoan (2021)Padoan, T., 2021. On the semiotics of space in the study of religions: Theoretical perspectives and methodological challenges. In: Sign, Method, and the Sacred: New Directions in Semiotic Methodologies for the Study of Religion (pp. 189-214). De Gruyter. http://dx.doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110694925-012 reminds us that mountains’ metageography is an important part of “the Self” identity, which easily converts a mountaineer in “the Other” (Fabian, 2014Fabian, J., 2014. Time and the Other. Columbia University Press, NY. https://doi.org/10.7312/fabi16926 ), as an archetype found from Aconcagua to Atlas, and from Ausangate shrine to Atna peaks. An old anonymous Irish aphorism puts it better:
Deeply established notions of lifescape and livelihood, exerted in the mountains by problematized political ecologies (Sarmiento, 1987Sarmiento, F.O., 1987. Antología Ecológica del Ecuador: desde la selva hasta el mar. Quito, Ecuador: Editorial Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana.; Ives & Messerli, 1989Ives, J.D. & Messerli, B., 1989. The Himalayan dilemma: Reconciling development and conservation. London: Routledge.; Debarbieux, 2008Debarbieux, B., 2008. Le montagnard: imaginaires de la territorialité et invention d’un type humain. Annales de Géographie, 660: 90-115. https://doi.org/10.3917/ag.660.0090 ), often puts personalized perspectives. Mountains supply a respite in the acceleration of current globalization space-time schemes; not only to defy a plain’s monotony, but also to improve quality of urban life with ecosystem services, including fresh air, ample vistas, resource extraction potential, fresh water, wildlife refuge, and CES (i.e., sanctuaries for ancient rites of spiritual fulfillment, theophanies and epiphanies, cosmophany, historical memory, national pride, recreation and tourism (Schirpke et al., 2020Schirpke U., Scolozzi R., Dean G., Haller A., Jáger H., Kister, J., Kovács B., Sarmiento, F.O., Sattler B. & Schleyer, C., 2020. Cultural ecosystem services on mountain regions: Conceptualising conflicts among users and limitations of use. Ecosystem Services, 46: 101210. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoser.2020.101210 ) and more intangibles of biocultural diversity (Termorshuizen & Opdam, 2009Termorshuizen, J.W. & Opdam, P., 2009. Landscape services as a bridge between landscape ecology and sustainable development. Landscape Ecology, 24(8): 1037-1052. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-008-9314-8 ; Hommes et al., 2019Hommes, L., Boelens, R., Harris, L. & Veldwisch, J., 2019. Rural-urban water struggles: urbanizing hydrosocial territories and evolving connections, discourses, identities. Water International, 44(2): 81-94. https://doi.org/10.1080/02508060.2019.1583311 ) for regenerative and sustainable mountain futures. Furthermore, mountains provided refuge for survival from global epidemics (Cheddadi et al., 2017Cheddadi, R., Henrot, A., François, L., Boyer, F., Bush, M., Carré M., Coissac, E., de Oliveira, P., Ficetola, F., Hambuckers, A., Huang K., Lezine, A.M., Nourelbait, M., Rhoujjati, A., Taberlet,P., Sarmiento, F.O., Abel-Sschaad,, D., Alba-Sánmchez, F. & Zheng, Z., 2017. Microrefugia, climate change, and conservation of Cedrus atlantica in the Rif Mountains, Morocco. Frontiers of Ecology and Evolution, 5(114): 1-15. https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2017.00114 ). Therefore, it is in publishing various texts de novo as palimpsests, and their diffusion through today’s mass media and online browsers, that montology grips on this transdisciplinary geoliteracy (Tally & Battista, 2016Tally Jr., R.T. & Battista, C.M., 2016. Introduction: Ecocritical geographies, geocritical ecologies and the spaces of modernity, pp. 1-15. In: Tally et al. (eds) Ecocriticism and Geocriticism: Overlapping territories in Environmental and Spatial Literary Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137542625_1 ; Sarmiento, 2022Sarmiento, F.O. (Ed), 2022. Montology Palimpsest: A Primer of Mountain Geographies. Springer/Nature-Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13298-8 ).
3.3. Crosscutting Mountain Lore
⌅Crosscutting of humanities and sciences has flourished with the fusing of geopoetics, archaeology, religion, history, ecological criticism, geocritical epistemology, and other disciplines as proxies to understand fluxes towards sustainability. This recognition fuels the training of scientists as part of STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and medicine) education, complementing old STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education. Current multiversities are now replacing the individualistic universities in the Global South in their search for urgent multiethnic and pluricultural solutions to the climate crisis in local communities. Hybrid multifunctional teams are becoming popular across the world’s mountains.
Transgressivity took down borders meshing sciences and humanities (Westphal, 2011Westphal, B., 2011. Geocriticism: Real and fictional spaces. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.). Conversely, the transdisciplinary spatial turn to incorporate the fourth dimension (4D) is underscored in the edge of urban complexes (Soja, 1996Soja, E., 1996. Third space: Journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places. Oxford: Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1111/cag.12299 ) and mainly in the use of multimethodologies to study shifting mosaics in mountain environments (Zimmerer, 1994Zimmerer, K.S., 1994. Human geography and the “new ecology”: The prospect and promise of integration. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 84(1): 108-125. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1994.tb01731.x ; Henderson & Wang, 2005Henderson, J. & Wang, H., 2005. Aspects of the rural-urban transformation of countries. Journal of Economic Geography, 5: 23-42. https://doi.org/10.1093/jnlecg/lbh052 ) operating in n-dimensional space and time. Moreover, to integrate mountain knowledge, the sequence of events requires a Gestalt Systems’ thinking (Naveh et al., 2002Naveh, Z., Lieberman, A., Sarmiento, F.O. & Ghersa, C., 2002. Ecología de Paisajes. Teoría y Aplicación. Edición de estudiantes. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires, EUDEBA.). In Gestaltism, different factors work to auto-generate order out-of-chaos. The integration of scientific methods and traditional wisdom follows Gestalt principles of spatial arrangement (sensu Bradley, 2014Bradley, S., 2014. Design principles: Visual perception and the principles of Gestalt. Smashing Magazine. March 28.), including past experiences towards landscape memory, aids in the popularization of montology.
The monomial Sanskrit Kharma, denotes an ancestral practice of Hindus River civilizations, a framework to Buddhists and Hinduists everywhere, for the accumulative deeds of the Self propels the individual towards complex levels of integration to aid retributive justice in the mind while attaining the ultimate reality. The karmic idea of spiritual account for improving soul and body, as well as the environment of the Himalayas, was presented by Ives (2013)Ives, J.D., 2013. Sustainable mountain development: Getting the facts right. Lalitpour, Nepal: Himalayan Association for the Advancement of Science.. This flow reinforces achieving higher organization and complexity, and prompts to better understand sustainable and regenerative MtSESs at the spiritual level in the new convergence of montology (Sarmiento & Hitchner, 2017Sarmiento, F.O. & Hitchner, S., (eds). 2017. Indigeneity and the sacred: Indigenous revival and the conservation of sacred natural sites in the Americas. New York: Berghahn Books. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvw04ck0 ; Bernbaum, 2022aBernbaum, E., 2022a. The spiritual and cultural importance of mountains. Pp. 213-224. In: Sarmiento, F.O. (Ed). Montology Palimspest: A Primer of Mountain Geography. Springer-Nature, Switzerland.).
3.4. Referentiality of Mountainous Environments
⌅Mountains are heterotopic spaces. They follow imprints marked by ancestral effects that anthropogenic pressures left in what we consider literary palimpsests, often with iterative modifications that have been sustained by conviction, rituals, or force. This engages us to learn our own rendering of the mountainscape with renewed optics, apart from paradigmatic narratives. We agree that historicity and political maneuvers of the 4D have created the idealized mountain entity (Debarbieux & Rudaz, 2015Debarbieux, B. & Rudaz, G., 2015. The mountain: A political history from the Enlightenment to the present. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226031255.001.0001 ). When tabulating mountain diversity of either polar regions or neotropical forests that “look” pristine (fundamental mountainscape), it is hard to imagine that they have been “manufactured” as hidden MtSESs and MtCASs (realized mountainscape). Since millennia, paleoecological dynamics of these built anthromes, respected and cared for by mountain dwelers, have interventions creating actuoecological manufactured landscape structure, function, and change (Scheiber & Zedeño, 2015Scheiber, L.L. & Zedeño, M.N., (eds). 2015. Engineering Mountain Landscapes: An anthropology of social investment. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press.) perpetuated as ancient ecological legacies.
Arraigo in Spanish, is the lemma that describes love and respect to the motherland, not only in the construction of their territoriality, but also in their customary practices and national identity. Borsdorf & Stadel (2015)Borsdorf, A. & Stadel, C., 2015. The Andes: A geographical portrait. Berlin: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03530-7 showed that highland people exhibit a trait of deep arraigo. Yet, the notion is more than rootedness of a person in the place of residence; it is inherently tied to the MtSES. This nexus requires recognizing that social belonging to a place is made with intimate linkages with various characters of the mountainscape. The term Pachamama in Kichwa or ‘Runashimi’, not only refers to the ground’s agricultural production, but also to the collective communal effort of 4D; reciprocity is viewed as central to time-tested (T) cohesion and agency of historicity (H) of the diverse mountain social groups, or ayllu in ranges (X), valleys (Y) and ridges (Z). Offerings, or pagapu, to mother Earth links ritualized elements in X-Y-Z-T space, with the three commandments for Inka cosmology wellbeing, or sumak kawsay, when they are balanced timely within the trilemma: Do not steal (ama shua), do not lie (ama llulla), and do not be lazy (ama killa) (Sarmiento et al., 2023Sarmiento, F.O., Inaba, N., Iida, Y. & Yoshida, M., 2023. Mountain Graticules: Bridging Latitude, Longitude, Altitude, and Historicity to Biocultural Heritage. Geographies, 3(1): 19-39. https://doi.org/10.3390/geographies3010002 ).
They are intricate in time, as they train youngsters in land labor, and in the respect to the elderly by providing them a hierarchical place of power. Heightening the T dimension in their mountain communities, elders exert political will in narrow citadels, or llakta, or in ancestrally protected sacred sites. The temporal link (T) tracks the historicity of several generations (H), because of the practice of burial the ancestors, or an unborn child, under their homes, recalling the practice of mummification in antiquity. This intimate relationship with the land makes “arraigo” a cherished value (Sarmiento, 2012Sarmiento, F.O., 2012. Contesting Páramo: Critical Biogeography of the Northern Andean Highlands. Matthews, NC: Kona Publishing, Higher Education Division.). Consequently, the worst punishment in the region is to extirpate them from their homeland. Banished expats and prisoners of war, or mitima, were obliged to colonize faraway areas for Inka territorial expansion, so far as achieving the largest-known mountain empire: Tawantinsuyu. This trend is manifested in the Andean communities’ foremost political platforms of struggle: ownership of property, official ethnic territorial titling, and plural rights for water of their motherland, or manta.
3.5. Impacts on Mountain Ecosystem Services
⌅Montology, posed as a consilient vogue to convergent mountain science, was first attempted in the 1800s by Alexander von Humboldt, the “father of ecology” (Eibach & Haller, 2021Eibach, J. & Haller, T., 2021. Pioneering political ecology: perceptions of nature, Indigenous practices and power relations during Alexander von Humboldt’s travels in Latin America. Journal of Political Ecology, 28(1). https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.3028 ). He was stimulated by pragmatic romanticism to characterize the landscape of mountains to re-asses natural history, the so-called Humboldtian method. Instead of understanding mountains from a mechanistic perspective, as if they were machine-like beings assembled from individual parts, Humboldt conceptualized mountains as a web of life, where all things depended on each other, being more than the sum of all the individual parts (Haller & Branca, 2020Haller, A. & Branca, D., 2020. Montología: una perspectiva de montaña hacia la investigación transdisciplinaria y el desarrollo sustentable. Revista de Investigaciones Altoandinas, 22(4): 313-322. https://doi.org/10.18271/ria.2020.193 ). This method improved his naturgemälde, using Humboldtian views of his visit to Apu Chimborazo, Mt. Cotopaxi, Mt. Pichincha, and Mt. Antisana in 1802 (Wulf, 2015bWulf, A., 2015b. The invention of nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World. Borzoi Book, A.A. Knopf.); the Tableau Physique populated with species names, elevation, temperature, and atmospheric pressure, confirmed his views of the human impact on tropical mountains, which has not only guided scholarly inquiry of geographers, but also of anthropologists, volcanologists, ecologists, and other researchers of ‘geoecology’ (e.g.,Troll, 1968Troll, C., 1968. Geo-ecology of the Mountainous Regions of the Tropical Americas: Proceedings of the UNESCO Mexico Symposium 1966. Colloquium Geographicum 9. Bonn, Germany: Ferdinand Dümmlers Verlag.), that was later called ‘landscape ecology’ (Naveh et al., 2002Naveh, Z., Lieberman, A., Sarmiento, F.O. & Ghersa, C., 2002. Ecología de Paisajes. Teoría y Aplicación. Edición de estudiantes. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires, EUDEBA.), now termed ‘montology’ (Sarmiento et al., 2020Sarmiento, F.O., Bush, M.B., Church, W., Van Valkenburgh, P., Oliva, M., Delgado, E., Fernandez, S. & Rojas, N., 2020. Mountain science poised to help ecotourism in Peruvian cloud forests. PAGES, 28(1): 22-23. https://doi.org/10.22498/pages.28.1.22 ).
Mountains represent diverse ecosystems due to their elevational gradient, different climatic zones in a small area, and summits acting as islands in the sky (Körner, 2004Körner, C., 2004. Mountain biodiversity, its causes and function. AMBIO, Journal of the Human Environment, 33(13): 11-17. https://doi.org/10.1007/0044-7447-33.sp13.11 ; Snethlage et al., 2022Snethlage, M.A., Geschke, J., Ranipeta, A., Jetz, W., Yoccoz, N.G., Körner, C., Spehn, E.M., Fischer, M. & Urbach, D., 2022. A hierarchical inventory of the world’s mountains for global comparative mountain science. Scientific data, 9(1): 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-022-01256-y ; Myster, in pressMyster, R., (in press). Ecological Gradients. Springer-Nature/Switzerland.). The high level of endemism in mountainous environments is hefty, especially on the tall isolated prominent edifices (Steinbauer et al., 2016Steinbauer, M.J., Field, R., Grytnes, J.A., Trigas, P., Ah-Peng, C., Attorre, F., Birks, H.J.B., Borges, P.A., Cardoso, P., Chou, C.H. & De Sanctis, M., 2016. Topography-driven isolation, speciation and a global increase of endemism with elevation. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 25(9: 1097-1107. https://doi.org/10.1111/geb.12469 ; Noroozi et al., 2018Noroozi, J., Talebi, A., Doostmohammadi, M., Rumpf, S.B., Linder, H.P. & Schneeweiss, G.M., 2018. Hotspots within a global biodiversity hotspot-areas of endemism are associated with high mountain ranges. Nature-Scientific reports, 8(1): 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-28504-9 ) and hard to climb cornices. The highest alpha-diversity index of bryophytes in the nival zone, of forbs in the alpine zone, of epiphytes in the montane zone, and of angiosperms in the colline zone (Gradstein & Homeier, 2010Gradstein, S.R. & Homeier, J., 2010. Tropical mountain forest: patterns and processes in a biodiversity hotspot. The University of Akron Press.) exemplify rich mountain biodiversity. As such, mountains are the acute crucible of deep evolutionary processes and are critical repositories for species maintenance and conservation efforts (Rahbeck et al., 2019Rahbek, C., Borregaard, M.K., Antonelli, A., Colwell, R.K., Holt, B.G., Nogues-Bravo, D. & Fjeldså, J., 2019. Building mountain biodiversity: Geological and evolutionary processes. Science, 365(6458): 1114-1119. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aax0151 ). In addition, the mountain’s ‘ecological geographies’ were swayed by island biogeography theories of isolation, colonization, and extinction (MacArthur & Wilson, 2001MacArthur, R. H. & Wilson, E. O., 2001. The theory of island biogeography. In: The Theory of Island Biogeography. Princeton University Press.). Thus, mountain’s ‘geographical ecologies’ were highlighted as apolitical spaces, interesting only to natural scientists (Ives, 1980Ives, J.D., (ed.). 1980. Geoecology of the Colorado Front Range: A study of Alpine and Subalpine environments. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.). The realization of conflictive power struggles with the agency of mountain peasant communities was made evident not only for mining and agroindustries of countries in the Global South (Zimmerer, 1994Zimmerer, K.S., 1994. Human geography and the “new ecology”: The prospect and promise of integration. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 84(1): 108-125. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1994.tb01731.x ), but also for inclusion of their perspectives of self-governance and endogenous cosmophany (Sarmiento, 2000Sarmiento, F.O., 2000. Human impacts in man-aged tropandean landscapes: Breaking mountain paradigms. Ambio, 29(7): 423-431. https://doi.org/10.1579/0044-7447-29.7.423 ), and for the endurance of anarchists leaving within Zomia (Scott, 2009Scott, J.C., 2009. The art of not being governed: An anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.).
Far from emphasizing ecosystem services and biodiversity, montology is claimed an environmental education toolkit for the cognition of benefits of mountains to people (Sarmiento et al., 2022bSarmiento, F.O., Rodríguez, J. & Yepez-Noboa, A., 2022b. Forest Transformation in the Wake of Colonization: The Quijos Andean-Amazonian Flank, Past and Present. Forests, 13(11): 1-19. https://doi.org/10.3390/f13010011 ). With 4D dimensions, mountains are also anchored in the emotional geographies of biocultural heritage of ancestral lineage, and in the trope of sustainable, regenerative development (Zhong, 2000Zhong, X.H., 2000. Montology outline and mountain research in China. Chengdu: Sichuan Science and Technology Press.; Bernstein, 2015Bernstein, J.H., 2015. Transdisciplinarity: A review of its origins, development, and current issues. Journal of Research Practice 11(1): Article R1.). Furthermore, the horizontally segmented slopes (so-called Humboldtian paradigm) have been aided with new vertical integration, with ecotonal borders in lowland/highland dynamics, comprising the anthropic landscape change and social gradients (Sarmiento, 2002Sarmiento, F.O., (ed.). 2002. Las Montañas del Mundo: Una Prioridad Global con Perspectivas Latinoamericanas. Quito, Ecuador: Editorial AbyaYala.). A bronze plaque rests at a Chimborazo’s snowline cairn (Figure 2), immortalizing Alexander von Humboldt in the monument, including the words ‘montology’ and ‘geoecology’, written in kichwa for the Andean world, in castellano for Latin America, and in English for the Global North (Sarmiento, 1999Sarmiento, F.O., 1999. To Mount Chimborazo: In the steps of Alexander von Humboldt. Mountain Research and Development, 19(2): 77-78.).
3.6. Modifying the Mood of Mountain Minds
⌅The inclusion of non-linearity of mountain Gestalt systems, transitioning to sustainable mountain communities gets fuzzy, as farmscape transformation affects the MtCASs. In this sense, ‘mountain’ is a heterotopic space extremely fragile. Lima (2013)Lima, M., 2013. The book of trees: Visualizing branches of knowledge. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. stated the imperative to accept another mountainscape health metaphor: we now require a new approximation of rhizomic interactions, in lieu of dendritic or arborescent descriptions, allowing horizontal synergies and bottom-up approaches instead of a cascading hierarchy and rigid top-down decisions. Whereas humans cohabitate slopelands with upward adaptations, they also inhabit the inverse verticality of canyonlands or the modified relief of former hills now transformed into deep holes, such as in the Appalachian’s mountaintop removal fields in Kentucky or the gold mining digs of Serra Pelada in Brazil.
Terroir, in French, is the monomial that defines unifying multisensorial inputs to recall a fulfilling emotional reality of landscape memory. Terroir is not only the aroma or flavor integrated into the wine, but also those intangible site conditions of cherished moments, all in a tasted memory sentient landscape. Like terroir, montology integrates heritagescapes, both tangible and intangible, with a Gestalt behavior that is non-linear, decentralized, interconnected, interdependent, abiding cartographic anxiety in a 4D scenario, where the integration of vectors X, Y, Z, and T define the graticule heavily determined by interaction of T and H of the heritagescape (Sarmiento et al., 2023Sarmiento, F.O., Inaba, N., Iida, Y. & Yoshida, M., 2023. Mountain Graticules: Bridging Latitude, Longitude, Altitude, and Historicity to Biocultural Heritage. Geographies, 3(1): 19-39. https://doi.org/10.3390/geographies3010002 ). To solve the mathematical function that these interactions define, the simple linear regression of physical conditions gives way to a quadratic equation that relativizes T in favor of H for the sentiment created to feel appropriated conditions in the MtCASs. This place attachment informs sacred geographies to partake in MtSESs’ route towards sustainability (Sarmiento, 2016aSarmiento, F.O., 2016a. Neotropical mountains beyond water supply: Environmental services as a trifecta of sustainable mountain development, pp. 309-324. In: G. Greenwood, J. Shroder (eds) Mountain ice and water. New York: Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-444-63787-1.00008-1 ) with a twist for the regeneration and rewilding of sentient mountainscapes (Taylor, 2010Taylor, B.R., 2010. Dark green religion: Nature spirituality and the planetary future. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520944459 ). Mountain responses to climate change have often been considered the manifestation of an intangible sentiment or a salient demonstration of sentient more-than-human entities that conform the mountain community’s memoryscape (Grover et al., 2014Grover, V.I., Borsdorf, A., Breuste, J., Tiwari, P.C. & Frangetto, F.W. eds., 2014. Impact of global changes on mountains: responses and adaptation. CRC Press. https://doi.org/10.1201/b17963 ; Gade, 2015Gade, D.W., 2015. Spell of the Urubamba: anthropogeographical essays on an Andean valley in space and time. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20849-7 ; Rozzi et al., 2015Rozzi, R., Chapin III, F.S., Callicott, J.B., Pickett, S.T., Power, M.E., Armesto, J.J. & May Jr, R.H., eds. 2015. Earth stewardship: linking ecology and ethics in theory and practice (Vol. 2). Springer. https://doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.111956 ).
3.7. The Route Map: Using the Altimeter to Look for Paradise?
⌅One of the most important learning objectives for instruction to promote youngsters’ understanding is geographic literacy. In the United States, the National Geographic Society (NGS) suggested “Geoliteracy” as primary target (Edelson, 2011Edelson, D.C., 2011. Geoliteracy. National Geographic Education. March 25 (revised May 28, 2014).). The International Geographical Union (IGU) welcomed the Three-I’s slant into the headquarters of geographical academies worldwide, including Italy’s “Home of Geography”. This Three-I’s approach (Interconnectedness, Interdependence, and Implications) in mountain studies, posits that montology merits highlight as de facto method to promote geoliteracy about the world’s mountains. By using convergent montology, we are including new content material that affects the objective and subjective mountainscape (Avriel-Avni & Dick, 2019Avriel-Avni, N. & Dick, J., 2019. Differing perceptions of socio-ecological systems: Insights for future trans- disciplinary research. Advances in Ecological Research, 60: 153-190. https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.aecr.2019.03.001 ).
Gemütlichkeit, in German, is a lemma that defines a feeling of prosperity perceived peacefully only in the place you love, or hominess. This term does not refer to the house’s physical settings (Umwelt) in the hilly terrain, neither to the felt agreement of the home environment with the domestic imaginary (Lebenswelt) of the mountain place. Rather, it evokes social constructs of the shared, built-environment, real or imagined (Mitwelt) of the MtSES (Westphal, 2011Westphal, B., 2011. Geocriticism: Real and fictional spaces. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.).
In summary, montology allows for spatiotemporal identities-or tempusculus-in transgressing disciplines (Tadaki, 2017Tadaki, M., 2017. Rethinking the role of critique in physical geography. The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe Canadien, 61(1): 73-83. https://doi.org/10.1111/cag.12299 ) in space and time. This 4-D approach would help with transgressed factors as the parsimonious explanation to comprehend holistic mountain landscapes, juggling myths of the “heavenly bliss”, the “dark green religion” or the “axial age”, as drivers of sustainable futures (Provan, 2013Provan, I., 2013. Convenient myths: The axial age, dark green religion, and the world that never was. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press.). “As ageless quests for finding paradise require, many ethnic groups have often imagined paradise onwards and upwards, somewhere nice upslope, in the nursery of apical summits, pleasant mountaintops, or hanging valleys” (Bernbaum, 2022bBernbaum, E., 2022b. Sacred Mountains of the World. 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press. UK. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108873307 ), described in the myths and languages of their arcane cultures (e.g., Shambhala, Shangri-La, Xiguanmu, Tian Shan, Meru, Burkhan Khaldun, Hlidskjal, Odin Valhöll, Janaidar, Gokuraku mine, Okuyama, Takamagahara, Maya-san, Kahiki, Maungapoluhatu Havai’i, Sumanakuta Sri Pada, Sídh Munsalvaesche, Avalon, Eden, Teengir-Too, Xanadu, Kari Kö Ruwa, Arcadia, Hallĕlūyāh Edinu, Sumak Wak’a, Urku Apu, Tepuy, Zomia, etc.). Using montology to frame sustainable and regenerative development makes mountains’ heterotopia of space/place/landscape/inscape ontologically viable and universally alluring.
4. Conclusion
⌅The continuous but also renewed interest in mountains has been mirrored by the new-flanged cross-chapter on mountains in the IPCC reports (Adler et al., 2022Adler, C., Bhatt, I., Huggel, C., Muccione, V., Prakash, A., Alcántara-Ayala, I., Allen, S.K., Bader, M., Bigler, S., Camac, J., Chakraborty, R., Cuni Sanchez, A., Cuvi, N., Drenkhan, F., Hussain, A., Maharjan, A., Marchant, R., McDowell, G., Morin, S., Niggli, L., Ochoa, A., Pandey, A., Postigo, J., Razanatsoa, E., Rudloff, V.M., Scott, C., Madison, S., Stone, D., Thorn, J., Thornton, J., Viviroli, D. & Werners, S., 2022. IPCC WGII Sixth Assessment Report Cross-Chapter Paper 5: Mountains.). Mountains are a geo-socio-ecological system that have taken on great importance worldwide, particularly for humanity and, in general, for biocultural diversity, by becoming priority areas for intervention of microrefugia, being the subject of numerous scientific and empirical studies.
Framing montology within mountain geography informs critical, decolonial scholarship towards sustainable futures. Mountain onomastics translate frameworks and concepts illustrating the need for consilience and of transdisciplinarity, to guide effective teachings about mountains. The cultural terms obviate the competency of montology transgressing disciplines, and offering the referentiality of a new panoptic corpus, with a mountain lexicon of updated terminology. The use of foreign words, without direct English translation, bridges reductionism that separates pieces of knowledge in discrete academic silos, favoring holistic translational ecologies of development, with an eye on the sustainability and renewability of mountain communities in the era of climate crisis. Historicity, as the H dimension of MtSES, helps branding of “Mountain Studies” instead of a separate new field, as an alternative for mountain epistemology. Montologists should integrate applied as well as basic research with the new approach, generating a stronger body of evidence in support of montology. The argument exhibited in mountain geoliteracy, ecoliteracy and sopholiteracy of newer panoptic and synoptic epistemologies, evidences the new mountain ontology.
Because of the immanent nature of sentient mountainscapes, the co-production of knowledge is imperative. Multi-methodological approaches are needed to converge in the character and value of transdisciplinarity (Sarmiento & Frolich, 2020Sarmiento, F.O. & Frolich; L.M., (editors). 2020. The Elgar Companion to Geography, Transdisciplinarity and Sustainability. Edward Elgar Publishing. Glos, UK and Massachusetts, USA. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781786430106 ). Mountain scholars and their students of the greater South shall contribute with reinforcing the development of montology for a sustainable mountain lifescape. Mountain geography necessitates a new approximation in the study of MtSESs, not only in intradisciplinary specialization, or in multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary works, but also transdisciplinary convergent science, as a paradigmatic shift of scalar significance of the decolonial turn (Frolich at al., 2020Frolich, L.M., Guevara, E. & Sarmiento, F.O., 2020. Introduction: the scale of sustainability-the limiting universe where everything and nothing is sustainable. In: Sarmiento, F.O. & L.M. Frolich (Eds). Elgar Companion of Geography, Transdisciplinarity and Sustainability. Edward Elgar Publishers. United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781786430106.00005 ). Those crosscutting collective efforts are imperative for a better understanding of the ontology of mountainscapes. It is essential to create new collaborating networks, research alliances, and learning clusters, or to enliven those already formed, translating hard science into practice. While soft science delves into power relations to shift in favor of equitable development policies that are meaningful for studying mountain phenomena, hard science keeps at work with innovation and technical solutions. By permitting consilience of all research done about mountains-whether from the physical or social sciences, the humanities, or the traditional and indigenous ecological knowledge-and its concomitant reification of mountain arts, politics, and management, the affirmation of convergent, transdisciplinary intervention will acquire the luring road leading to a sustainable and regenerative future of moutainscapes.