The uptake of interdisciplinarity within landscape ecology took place by including ecology as a social science (Odum & Sarmiento, 1998) 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, 1984) 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, 2000). 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, 1984). 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, 1990; Naveh et al., 2002; Eibach & Haller, 2021; Fúnez-Flores et al., 2022). A critical move to activate consilience of mountain themes further popularized alternative mountain ontologies (Messerli & Ives, 1997; Smith & Mark, 2003; Naveh, 2007; Lang et al., 2012; Pandian, 2014; Gose, 2018; Texeiria, 2022).

A plethora of scholars recognized the goal of a new field of montology (Mahat & Boom, 2008; Veteto, 2009; Sarmiento, 2020; Haller & Branca, 2020; Sarmiento et al., 2022). With the realization of cross-cutting, integrative approaches and the convergence of transdisciplinary research in montology (Sarmiento & Frolich, 2020), the nuanced framing of sustainability and regenerative development required understanding 4D human-environmental relations from several angles at the same time (Dunlap & van Liere, 1978; Dunlap et al., 2000; Boillat, 2020) 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, 1998; Schirpke et al., 2020). 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, 2020; Wang et al., 2022). 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, 2014; Foggin et al., 2021).

Transdisciplinary approaches became standard academic practice (Hadorn et al., 2008), because they reflected three substantive trends: (1) holistic medicine (Klein, 2008); (2) crosscutting of disparate fields (Veteto, 2009); and (3) the integration trend (Nanshan, 1998). Realizing that mountainscapes were SESs, scholarship of decolonial turn towards explanations for synergies and nexuses of MtCAS’s sentient landscapes (Polk, 2014; Xishi & Yuanchang, 1996).

Mountain scholars find themselves navigating a capricious topography, with labyrinths and circuits of positivistic environmental cognition (Gade, 2011; Castree, 2017) 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, 2015a). 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, 2012; Sarmiento et al., 2022a) of current compressions of time and space in 4D (Massey, 1999), counteracting predominantly archaic, morphological-minded past mountain geography (Wulf, 2015b) 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, 2005; Wu, 2006; Wilson, 2018) with an emphasis on time, to which political ecologists and mountain geographers hone historicity for space/time couplings (Debarbieux & Rudaz, 2010; Pasini, 2022).

Annan-Diab & Molinari (2017), argued that disciplinary nexuses are required when considering priorities of sustainable and regenerative development (Sarmiento et al., 2022a); “montology” advocates for the bridging of disciplines and nexus of humanities, arts, and sciences, for an improved mountain cognition (Mainali & Sicroff, 2016). Mahat & Boom (2008), 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) pointed out it was Frank Davidson who first used montology at the Munich Mountain Conference in 1974.

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 2005). This juncture helped the multitude of sources on mountain studies evidenced needed crosscutting integration. The compilation of these findings by Susanne Fairclough (1982) gave specific reference to montology:

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, 2004). Mountain scholars and practitioners required then to grapple with the “listening to the mountains” aphorism (Rhoades, 2007; Pandian, 2014).

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., 2022b) but also for their intrinsic contentious community’s dynamics (Debarbieux & Rudaz, 2010).

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, 2020). 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), 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, 2021).

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, 2013) in understanding mountains through historicity to achieve 4D. Annotated bibliographies on mountain geography (c.f., Resler & Sarmiento, 2016) include now multifunctional approaches for MtCASs with holism and post-structuralism methods for mountain ontology (Sarmiento et al., 2017; Fabian, 2014). Former pundits signaled against the etymological mingling, such as glaciology, mineralogy, sociology, etc. (Yuanchang, 1986; Haller & Branca, 2020), 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., 2016). Borsdorf’s term likened informal monikers of “mountain mafias,” popularized by Messerli & Ives (1997), was used to advocate convergent and transdisciplinary mountain science (Table 1).

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.

The integration imperative is a skilled methodology, as mountain Geographies and neotectonics engage with convergent science, consilient trends, and simplified synoptic processes (Roberts & Smyth, 2022). Price et al. (2013) incentivized intersections of the physical with the human mountain geographies (Sarmiento, 2015). 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, 2022). 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) specificities to describe the transgression and referentiality of mountain studies (Westphal, 2011; Tally & Battista, 2016) by inverse definition methodology approach, with binomials that might be oxymora and hard to define, unless using their contrary meaning (Table 2).

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, 2017):

This approach seeks to radicalize geoecology and landscape ecology of mountains with linguistic artifacts conveying ideas without direct translation (Castree, 2017; Lomas, 2018). 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, 2011) 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, 2022). 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, 2016; Franco, 2022).

This crosscutting collective effort to understand MtSESs, such as in farmscape transformation (Sarmiento et al., 2022), food sovereignty, and agrobiodiversity (Zimmerer et al., 2017; Sarmiento et al., 2019b), crop vulnerability (Conzo, 2022), or glacier retreat and climate change in mountain communities’ disaster risk (Carey, 2010), 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., 2017); 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., 2017). 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., 2012), 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.

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, 2016a). 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, 2008; Hansson, 2012). This “cartographic anxiety” created by the nature-culture hybridity (Gregory, 1994), 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, 2016b) 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.

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, 1997; Wu & Hobbs, 2002). 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, 2021). 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, 1997; Skutnabb-Kangas et al., 2003; Zimmerer et al., 2017).

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) 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., 2016), making it an envisioned investment of urbanites for fulfillment of ambitious goals by the mountainside.

Padoan (2021) reminds us that mountains’ metageography is an important part of “the Self” identity, which easily converts a mountaineer in “the Other” (Fabian, 2014), 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, 1987; Ives & Messerli, 1989; Debarbieux, 2008), 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., 2020) and more intangibles of biocultural diversity (Termorshuizen & Opdam, 2009; Hommes et al., 2019) for regenerative and sustainable mountain futures. Furthermore, mountains provided refuge for survival from global epidemics (Cheddadi et al., 2017). 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, 2016; Sarmiento, 2022).

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, 2011). Conversely, the transdisciplinary spatial turn to incorporate the fourth dimension (4D) is underscored in the edge of urban complexes (Soja, 1996) and mainly in the use of multimethodologies to study shifting mosaics in mountain environments (Zimmerer, 1994; Henderson & Wang, 2005) operating in n-dimensional space and time. Moreover, to integrate mountain knowledge, the sequence of events requires a Gestalt Systems’ thinking (Naveh et al., 2002). 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, 2014), 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). 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, 2017; Bernbaum, 2022a).

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, 2015). 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, 2015) 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) 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., 2023).

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, 2012). 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.

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, 2021). 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, 2020). This method improved his naturgemälde, using Humboldtian views of his visit to Apu Chimborazo, Mt. Cotopaxi, Mt. Pichincha, and Mt. Antisana in 1802 (Wulf, 2015b); 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, 1968), that was later called ‘landscape ecology’ (Naveh et al., 2002), now termed ‘montology’ (Sarmiento et al., 2020).

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, 2004; Snethlage et al., 2022; Myster, in press). The high level of endemism in mountainous environments is hefty, especially on the tall isolated prominent edifices (Steinbauer et al., 2016; Noroozi et al., 2018) 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, 2010) 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., 2019). In addition, the mountain’s ‘ecological geographies’ were swayed by island biogeography theories of isolation, colonization, and extinction (MacArthur & Wilson, 2001). Thus, mountain’s ‘geographical ecologies’ were highlighted as apolitical spaces, interesting only to natural scientists (Ives, 1980). 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, 1994), but also for inclusion of their perspectives of self-governance and endogenous cosmophany (Sarmiento, 2000), and for the endurance of anarchists leaving within Zomia (Scott, 2009).

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., 2022b). 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, 2000; Bernstein, 2015). 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, 2002). 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, 1999).

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) 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., 2023). 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, 2016a) with a twist for the regeneration and rewilding of sentient mountainscapes (Taylor, 2010). 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., 2014; Gade, 2015; Rozzi et al., 2015).

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, 2011). 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, 2019).

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, 2011).

In summary, montology allows for spatiotemporal identities-or tempusculus-in transgressing disciplines (Tadaki, 2017) 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, 2013). “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, 2022b), 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.