There is no evidence that indicates mountains are unfairly disadvantaged when compared to adjacent plains.
During this century, Switzerland has managed to develop that honourable mountain occupation, smuggling, into a profitable international enterprise better described today as clandestine banking. Consequently, they have abundant money to spend on topics of their choice.
And so we have here the Swiss-financed promised follow-up volume to Agenda 21, the 1992 Rio "Earth Summit" conference document on environment and development. Mountains of the World: A Global Priority, edited by Bruno Messerli and Jack D. Ives (Parthenon, London and New York, 1997), was published in time for the United Nations General Assembly´s "Rio+5" exercise in June 1997 in New York City. There was an earlier companion volume to this book, The State of the World´s Mountains, edited by Peter Stone, also bankrolled by the Swiss, and produced for the 1992 Rio Summit (and reviewed in this magazine, July/August 1992, pp 45-46).
The move towards the Rio conference had its origins in former West German chancellor Willy Brandt´s "North-South Report", which expressed the hope that economic growth would be based on policies that would sustain the environment as well as expand the resource base. In 1983, the UN General Assembly had called for a global agenda for change using this framework, later revealed in the Brundtland report, Our Common Future.