Mountain hazards

The review examines mountain land risks, especially those that involve sudden, more or less localized bouts of damage and disasters. Geographers' studies to date have mainly dealt with natural hazards, emphasizing those like avalanches, large landslides or natural dams that are uniquely associated with mountain environments. Such work is briefly reviewed. Earthquake risks are then singled out to help define and discuss problems faced by this work. They are shown to depend strongly upon aspects of mountain environments other than seismicity. Human vulnerability appears to be mainly dependent upon socioeconomic and habitat conditions which, although they determine seismic impacts, may and usually do develop independent of it. Moreover, these ingredients of risk are most closely associated with, or definitive of, the mountain people and areas. They are most strongly influenced by human agency, both in deciding who and what are exposed to risk, and in actually increasing or decreasing unfavorable responses to earthquakes. Recent earthquake disasters in the mountains also record how rapid changes in these social and habitat conditions, rather than seismicity, are increasing the scale and altering the forms of damage. These changes in turn, however, are largely dependent upon developments, initiatives and penetration from outside the mountains, and responses of mountain people more or less enforced by them. The importance of so-called highland-lowland interactions, is even more obvious in the most destructive of human hazards discussed, those of war and other armed violence. Mountain lands and peoples are shown to have been subject to recurrent warring, and a disproportionate share of the deployment of state violence in this century. Most of the casualties are resident civilians. They have been usually threatened by other uses of armed violence, including insurgency and counter-insurgency warfare and genocidal actions by state forces. Refugees and expellees from war zones have included great numbers of mountain folk. Another fast growing hazard of the late twentieth century, not unrelated to war and militarism, the international trafficking in and addiction plagues of hard drugs, has a unique relation to mountains. The South American growers of the coca leaf, and Southwest and Southeast Asian growers of the opium poppy are mountain farmers. Their participation is bringing a range of severe risks to their high valleys, as well as benefits. Finally the paper addresses the conceptual problems brought about by the compounding of determinist assumptions in both mountain land and hazards research. These include not only environmental determinist notions, or related Neo-Malthusian and Social Darwinist ideas, but the various historicist ones of assumed technological, economic and political stages of development. It is argued that such social constructions of the problem of hazards and disaster are dubious, and have become a major impediment to understanding and risk mitigation. Alternative frameworks require more attention to the regional, state, and global patterns of influence shaping risk in mountain lands, but also to the human ecology of mountain societies taking account of matters to which the expediences of technocratic expertise have made us blind.