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Voices from the mountainPosted: 20 Sep 2002
The London-based Panos Institute has been working with community organisations in selected highland areas training local people to record interviews to communicate their personal experiences on a range of mountain issues from deforestation, development schemes, especially dams and mining projects, tourism, and migration. The result is a wealth of material - vivid, challenging, full of human detail and variety.
Over 250 testimonies have been collected, transcribed and translated to date from countries as wide-ranging as China, India, Nepal, Ethiopia, Kenya, Lesotho, Peru, Mexico and Poland. And, as part of its Oral Testimony Programme, Panos has started to produce a series of booklets based on these testimonies.
Each collection in the Voices of the Mountain series contains a fascinating blend of anecdote, information, history, culture, knowledge, opinion and experience. These absorbing accounts illustrate the complexities and realities of mountain living and bringing the day to day challenges faced by ordinary mountain people to life.
As the pace of development accelerates in mountain regions, so the social and physical environment is changing. Yet the demand for mountain riches - timber, minerals, water, tourism facilities - is more often driven by urban, lowland populations and industry than by highland communities. Mountain people are the custodians of diverse, sometimes unique, environments essential to the survival of the global ecosystem. Further erosion of their ability to care for those assets will be the world's loss, not just theirs.
Copies are available free to the media and to resource-poor organisations in the South. Otherwise, copies are available for �5.00 plus postage and packaging. Collections are published in A5-sized booklets, 50pp, maps, photos, index, glossary. To order please contact Kelly at
Already published in the series:
- Oral Testimonies from Cerro de Pasco, Peru;
- Oral Testimonies from southwest and northeast China;
- Oral Testimonies from Wollo, Ethiopia;
- Oral Testimonies from the Lesotho Highlands;
- Oral Testimonies from Mount Elgon, Kenya and
- Oral Testimonies from the Sudety mountains, Poland
- Oral Testimonies from Nepal
- Oral Testimonies from Uttaranchal and Himachal Pradesh, India.
Still to come later: Oral Testimonies from; the Karakorum (Pakistan); and the Sierra Norte (Mexico).
Related link:
Panos Oral Testimony Programme
Mountain voices - an on-line archive of in-depth interviews with mountain people around the world.
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