Host: ALISON SMITH
Date: 020127
Time: 22:00:00 ET - 23:00:00 ET
CBC-TV SUNDAY REPORT
The world's mountains are in danger
ALISON SMITH: They are as old as the earth and seemingly indestructible, but a new report says mountain ranges around the world are in danger. The study, done by the Tokyo-based United Nations University, says mountains are threatened by pollution, tourism, mining, and logging and it says the effects are already trickling down to us. The CBC's Eve Savory has the details.
EVE SAVORY (Reporter): Mountains may seem serene, distant and impregnable. They're not. Humans are putting mountains and the life on them in danger. And since they supply fresh water to over three billion people, when mountains are in trouble, so are we.
JACK IVES (Mountain Ecologist, Carleton University): And if we don't do something about it to protect them, then we are going to suffer very severely in the coming century.
SAVORY: Jack Ives has spent fifty years studying mountains and has seen how tree-cutting on steep slopes, tourism, pollution, mining and a warming climate threaten mountain ecology. So does warfare. Twenty-three of the world's twenty-seven on-going armed disputes are happening in mountain regions. Afghanistan and Kashmir are both in one of the world's most threatened regions. The Himalayan Karikorn Hindu Kush chain.
IVES: Give a young soldier a day off with his high-powered rifle and what does he do? He goes and shoots snow leopards or else he indulges in illegal trafficking with timber.
SAVORY: And that erodes the soil.
IVES: Here is one example of a catastrophic land slide that occurred in the Darjeeling Himalaya. One of 20,000.
SAVORY: His report says the European Alps are also threatened by avalanche and landslide flooding. Some researchers predict if alpine glaciers continue to recede, the great rivers of Europe will start drying up in summer months within two to three decades. And, they say, the Alps are suffocating under the weight of 125 million visitors a year.
SUZANNE BAILEY (Biologist, University of Alberta): They don't have any wildlife, they have horrible crowding, horrible air pollution, immense numbers of car parks, displacing sort of the peoples who used to live there.
SAVORY: Biologist Suzanne Bailey despairs that the fate of the Alps awaits the third great range in the study, the North American Rockies. In the US, wildlife has been pushed aside for mining, logging, development. In Canada skiing, resource and commercial development and people are crowding our wildlife.
BAILEY: People think that we've got a beautiful wilderness and we don't really have to do anything to maintain it. That's not true. In our crowded earth, nature cannot any longer take care of itself without a lot of help from humans.
SAVORY: The scientists hope International Year of the Mountains will alert people that human well being depends on healthy mountains. Eve Savory, CBC News, Vancouver.