Mountains

Among other appointments he holds, Martin Price has a UNESCO chair in sustainable mountain development. In this book you will find out how much there is to know about mountains that you never suspected. Two of the chapters indicate their content with the titles 'the world's water towers' and 'centres of diversity'. They have also become tourist destinations, a trend that started in the mid-19th century with people like Sir Leslie Stephen taking their students to the Alps during the summer. It is interesting to learn that 100m in height is an equivalent change to moving 100 miles towards a pole and that mountains cover 24% of the Earth's land surface. Agriculture on mountains has to be undertaken on terraces and can benefit from an agro-ecological approach. Mountains have to be protected in order to preserve their appeal and natural features, but the scale of human impact is still considerable: 12 tons of excrement are collected yearly from the Everest base camp and 23 tons of waste was found in 2013 along a 53 kilometre route on Mt Kailash. The effect of climate change on mountains is plain to see, and there is a photo of the author in the Morteratsch Valley in Switzerland where the glacier has retreated by 1 kilometre in his lifetime. The book conveys a vivid impression of the many ways in which mountains are important to us.