Montology manifesto:echoes towards a transdisciplinary science of mountains

Mountains as archetype frame some metageographies of the vertical dimension.Mountain metaphors,thus,have remained as key guidance in developing not only animistic belief systems and religious cults,but also military strategies,economic potential,and scientific innovation.This paper seeks to explain the need to integrate western knowledge,where mountains became known via natural history’s mechanistic explanations,with other epistemologies.Mountain scientists therein developed linear approaches that required exploration,experimentation,and pragmatic interpretation of generalizable mountain phenomena.Little is known,however,about other civilizations’more encompassing cognition due to heuristic explanations of mountain myths.Local knowledge holders therein developed approaches that required familiarization,observation,and romantic meditation about situated mountain phenomena.Using a multimethod approach of human geography that includes onomastics,geocritical discourse analysis,political ecology,and critical biogeography,the author posits that there is a paradigmatic shift of geographic fad,when even"nature"is thought of as a"social construct"in the socioecological mountainscapes.Between these tendencies of either Cartesian or Spinozan dogmas about scientific objectives,methods and implications,mountains continue to elicit geographical research.The author thus concludes that integrating narratives of mountain studies with geocritical analyses of political ecology that allow for transgressivity and referentialilty of mountain cognition can be done with transdisciplinary science.Montology,henceforth,couples dialectic thinking with the trifecta of spatiality,complexity and historicity in highlighting mountain microrefugia for biocultural conservation.Use of montological approaches will bring mountain scientists to a new level,where the application of local ecological knowledge and cutting-edge technological instrumentation could render sustainable mountain communities,in dynamic biocultural heritage scenarios.

Between plaza and peak: a montological perspective on verticality and urbanization in highland Peru

Under the influence of concentrated and extended urbanization,Andean cities and the different altitudinal zones of their“hinterlands”are experiencing profound changes in land cover—from the central plazas up to the highest peaks.The complex regional-geographic characteristics of these socioecological systems,such as the vertical complementarity of land use,require a montological perspective on verticality and urbanization:it transcends disciplinary approaches and can be crucial to properly interpret the trajectories of land cover change and formulate hypotheses for future practiceoriented research.Which trajectories of land cover change characterized altitudinal zones of Andean cities and their surroundings over the last three decades?Are there similarities that allow for the formulation of more general hypotheses?Using the Peruvian cases of Cusco and Huaraz,and combining a traditional altitudinal zonation model of land use in Peru with direct field observations and GIS-based analyses of remotely sensed data from 1991,2001,2011,and 2021,this study identifies the main trajectories of land cover change in the Quechua(>2300–3500 m),Suni(>3500–4000 m),and Puna(>4000–4800 m)regions—and finds insightful similarities between Cusco and Huaraz:(1)an impressive area of built-up land substitutes grassland in the Quechua,which,following regional altitudinal zonation models,is characterized by irrigated and rain-fed cropland;(2)an unexpected expansion of irrigated cropland takes place in the Suni,which,in theory,often lacks irrigation infrastructure and is mostly used for rain-fed tuber cultivation;and(3)a clear change from“other land”to grassland occurs in the Puna—where grassland is thought to predominate,anyway,since pre-Hispanic times.Hypothesizing that these changes reflect the interplay between speculative fallow,agricultural intensification,and ecological restoration,the results can be read as vertically complementary,local manifestations of concentrated and extended urbanization in a formerly peripheral mountain region of the Global South—and they underscore the need to overcome mental city-mountain dichotomies for a socially inclusive and ecologically balanced Andean development between plaza and peak.