More: Page 1 | Page 2 |
Islands in the Sky
Mountains also have a gentler side. Because they are so rugged and hard to traverse, they are home to some of the rarest and least seen species of animals and plants, such as giant pandas, snow leopards and big horn sheep, just to name a few high-profile mountain creatures.
What makes mountains prone to rare species is elevation and isolation. Where mountains soar alone above lowlands, the highland species are literally trapped. A panda, for instance, that lives off only one kind of bamboo, which grows only at one elevation, can't spread to a faraway mountain of the same height because it would starve in the intervening lowlands. These pandas and many other mountain species are hemmed in. They might as well be surrounded by water.
In Nevada, range after range of mountains rise out of the desert — each with small, rare verdant zones up high. Most host species that live only on one or a few ranges and nowhere else on the planet. The oldest living things on the planet are among these isolated species — the 5,000-year-old Bristlecone pine trees, for example. These mountains are true islands in the sky.
Riches & War Zones
Humans can bring new sorts of violence to mountains. Because we tend to prefer lowlands for agriculture and building cities and towns, mountain ranges have often served as borderlands between nations. As a result, many wars tend to take place in mountainous regions. It's been true from Kashmir to Cambodia. Struggles between governments and ethnic minorities often play out in rugged places, which give smaller forces better odds.
Mountains are also a major part of the world's illegal drug market. Almost all of the world's heroin and cocaine comes from mountainous regions of the Myanmar-Thailand-Laos border trisection, the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and the Bolivia-Columbia border.
There's also the mineral wealth of the Earth that's far more accessible in mountainous regions. Whole mountaintops are being torn down to extract coal in Appalachia. Copper and gold mines in Nevada and Utah remove nearly entire mountains. It's a new mountain-destroying force never before seen on Earth.
Good News
Because soils are meager in mountains and the land is rugged, humans still prefer lowlands. This is the mountains' greatest protection. People like to visit mountains to hike, ski or just escape the heat of lowlands in summertime. Tourism has spurred more protection efforts of these places. After all, no one wants to visit the mountains just to sit in traffic and peer through smoggy air.
