Mount Kawagebo, so sacred that climbing is banned, sits on the border between Tibet and China’s Yunnan Province; its eastern side is part of the Three Parallel Rivers of Yunnan Protected Area UNESCO World Heritage site. In February 2011, a small gold-mining operation started near the village of Abin, which is on the western side of Kawagebo, along the path of an 800-year-old pilgrimage route that circles the mountain, attracting tens of thousands of Tibetans annually.

To the local people, who believe strongly in the sacredness of Mount Kawagebo, direct destruction of the mountain body, through activities like mining, is unthinkable. Further, villagers said the project was started without permission or prior consent. Thus began a community effort to halt the project.

Villagers said their attempts to deal directly with the mining company resulted in threats and violence from agents hired by the company, and harassment and arrests by local police. On two occasions, men armed with wooden sticks with nails attacked villagers, injuring more than a dozen.

After efforts to negotiate with the local government failed, villagers pushed $300,000 worth of mining equipment into the Nu River. A leader of the group was arrested, but later released when 100 villagers surrounded the local police station where he was being held. A few months later, however, mining resumed and tensions grew. Harassment, death threats and attacks on villagers increased, and some women and children fled to other villages to escape the violence.

On January 20, 2012, a village leader who had tried to confront the mining company was ambushed by local police, tased and arrested. Some 200 community members surrounded the police station, and an ensuing riot resulted in violence and injuries on both sides, with at least one villager sent to the hospital with serious injuries. The leader was released, but protests continued as villagers demanded closure of the mine, and hundreds more villagers from the surrounding area joined in.

This time, the local government held negotiations with the community, including the just-released leader, on behalf of the mining company, whose boss had reportedly fled the area. Villagers involved in negotiations said they were offered money in exchange for allowing the mining to continue, but they refused. On January 23, with tensions mounting, a vice-official from the prefecture government ordered the mine closed and the equipment trucked out of the village.

While the persistence of the community to protect its holy mountain ultimately paid off, some villagers suggested the mountain itself had a role to play. During the negotiations, many reported hearing the sound of a trumpet shell—used in Tibetan religious rituals—coming from the mountain, while others reported unusually windy weather, which stopped once the conflict was resolved.

A Tibetan hired to provide catering to the mine workers described being struck by a physical pressure that forced him to drop what he was carrying; only after he prayed did the sensation disappear. Several months earlier, according to another account, a village leader who had accepted bribes from the mining company died suddenly, and a member of his family was seriously injured in an accident.

He Ran Gao, a researcher who works for the Chinese NGO Green Earth Volunteers and has been closely involved with the communities of the area, described the context of these supernatural accounts. “In a place like Tibet, people have an unusual sense of divinity in nature, based on a whole system of worship and interaction, which sometime seems superstitious to modern citizens,” she said. “But it is not necessarily irrational or unreasonable.”

This sense of nature worship, Gao said, with its attendant conservation values, is “barely left due to past communism and later economic development.” But in the Himalayas and other mountain areas, where non-Han ethnicities reside and remain somewhat protected, those traditional values can still be found. She described Kawagebo as a success story showing “how sacred nature can be” and how it can “still be respected, protected and continue to make an impact in people’s lives.”

Unfortunately, Abin is but one of many villages threatened by mining activities—in most other cases, marble quarrying—and a greater overarching threat to the region: hydroelectric dam development.

Along the Nu (Salween) River, the longest free-flowing river in mainland Southeast Asia, a proposed 13-dam cascade—including several dams in or very close to the World Heritage site—would wipe out portions of the pilgrimage route around Mount Kawagebo and displace the communities of the river valley, likely dealing a blow to their traditional culture as well. Although the project was put on hold in 2004 in the wake of widespread protest, it is certainly not dead.

Last year, the World Heritage Committee issued a statement expressing concern over reports of unapproved construction under way at one dam site on the Nu River, and surveying work—including road-building and drilling—at three others. It warned that “the many proposed dams could cumulatively constitute a potential danger to the property’s Outstanding Universal Value.”

The committee asked China to submit by February 1 of this year a detailed list of all proposed dams, as well as mines, that could affect the World Heritage property, along with the environmental impact assessments of any proposed projects, prior to their approval. The committee also requested, by the same deadline, a report on the state of conservation of the property and on the progress made in completing a strategic environmental impact assessment on all of the proposed dams and related development that could impact the site’s World Heritage value.

Many thanks to He Ran Gao, who provided reporting and other source material for this report. He Ran wishes to thank villagers who provided her with information, but whose names have been witheld.

Gazprom said it could sign a contract by the end of the year, after which construction of transportation facilities could begin.

Meanwhile, our friends at Cultural Survival and the Altai Project report that Gazprom has begun intensive surveying work for the pipeline, even though UNESCO has warned that going forward with construction would constitute a threat to the site and thus lead to possible inscription on the List of World Heritage in Danger.

Cultural Survival and the Altai Project are are collaborating on a global campaign to help the Telengit people of the Altai reroute construction of the pipeline. The Telengit say the pipeline would destroy many of their sacred monuments, threaten endangered species such as the snow leopard, and damage the plateau’s permafrost, thus hastening the melting of nearby glaciers — as well as cause economic harm by compromising their sources of food and livelihood.

The Altai Project reports that the Ukok Plateau is undergoing extensive exploratory work, including permafrost drilling. Archeological researchers and other specialists have been hired to study cultural heritage sites such as burial mounds and petroglyph complexes, and have identified some 30 sites that require further research and either excavation or a pipeline bypass.

What you can do

The Cultural Survival/Global Response Campaign is asking for your help by sending letters to Russian and Chinese authorities urging a reroute of the pipeline. Full information, addresses and sample letters can be found here.

For more background, read our Aug. 11 news post.

This high plateau in the Altai Mountains has been a sacred burial ground for at least 8,000 years. Today, the Telengit people carry out their ancient rituals on the Ukok amid the burial mounds, stone stellae, and petroglyphs of their ancestors.

As SLFP reported in April, the 1,700-mile pipeline would cut through the heart of the Golden Mountains of Russia’s Altai Republic, a UNESCO World Heritage site and a region of sacred significance to the Telengit people.

The Telengit say the pipeline would destroy many of their sacred monuments. It would also inflict environmental damage to the World Heritage site, threaten endangered species such as the snow leopard, and damage the plateau’s permafrost, hastening the melting of nearby glaciers. They say the pipeline would also cause economic harm: The Telengit practice free-range animal husbandry, fishing and hunting, and are developing cultural and ecological tourism — and pipeline construction, contamination, and the melting of the permafrost will affect their economic activities and thus their sources of food and livelihood.

Talks between Russia and China over an export agreement had been stalled for years over price, but the two countries are reportedly very close to signing a deal, and Gazprom’s CEO said after the annual shareholders’ meeting in July, “We are completely ready to begin pipeline construction.”

What You Can Do

The Cultural Survival/Global Response Campaign is urging people to send letters to Russian and Chinese authorities. Full information, addresses and sample letters can be found here.

While initially focused on areas owned or revered by the world’s mainstream religious groups, the project — a collaboration with the Alliance of Religions and Conservation — has moved into a broader stage of mapping all “religious forests,” including those managed by much smaller groups and communities. The aim is to create a database to aid scientists working with community and religious groups on conservation efforts.

The research team, from the Biodiversity Institute in the Oxford Martin School, will carry out field studies and collect information in face-to-face interviews with local communities spanning the globe and representing a spectrum of beliefs and practices. Visits are already planned to India and Ghana. (Read our sacred site reports to learn more about sacred forest groves in India and Ghana.)

To create the database, researchers will collect information on boundary lines and land rights; a forest’s biodiversity value and role in carbon-dioxide absorption; and the local community’s relationship with the forest over generations — religious and cultural uses, including medicinal plant resources.

The results could play a vital role in conservation, as well as native land rights efforts. “We urgently need to map this vast network of religious forests, sacred sites and other community-conserved areas to understand their role in biodiversity conservation,” research team member Dr. Shonil Bhagwat said. “Such mapping can also allow the custodian communities, who have protected these sites for generations, to secure their legal status.”

Under the deal, Russia’s state-owned Gazprom would pump 30 million cubic meters of natural gas annually to China. Talks have been stalled for years over price, but a Chinese source reportedly said that an agreement is now expected to be in place by June. He confirmed that the favored pipeline route would carry gas from Gazprom’s Arctic Yamal gas fields over the Altai Mountains and across the sacred Ukok Plateau to the Chinese border.

Local NGOs and communities have opposed the pipeline, citing potential impacts from the construction phase, including damage to the habitat of the endangered snow leopard and argali sheep and an influx of outsiders who may not share Altaian values. (See past Sacred Land News story.)

The Altai Republic is one of eight stories in our upcoming Losing Sacred Ground film series. To learn more about the Golden Mountains, read our sacred site report and check out an excellent photo essay by our colleague Gleb Raygorodetsky.

We highly recommend a new short film about Altai environmental problems associated with tourism, which Joanna helped translate from Russian to English. Produced by Lena Chevalkova, the film is titled The Pines of Askat. Please check it out!

On Dec. 21, the Ba Jawi community in Sarawak, in the Malaysian part of Borneo, lodged a collective-action lawsuit against Malaysian timber giant Samling and the Sarawak state government over 15,000 hectares of primary rainforest. The area covered by the claim is a key region of the Penan Peace Park, a self-administered conservation region in the Heart of Borneo that was proclaimed a nature reserve by 17 Penan communities in November 2009 and covers more than 600 square miles.

The Penan claim that the logging license held by Samling, which was issued by the Sarawak government in 1993, is unlawful because it covers lands held by the Penan under native customary rights and was issued without their consultation.

According the the Penan’s filed statement of claim, the land is not only their source of livelihood and sustenance but also “constitutes life itself as [it] is fundamental to the plaintiffs’ social, cultural and spiritual identity as the native Penan peoples of Sarawak.”

The case is the fifth such native customary rights case filed by Penan communities in this region since 1998, none of which have yet been resolved. The Penan’s active land-rights struggle stretches back to the 1980s, when they began blockading roads to halt logging activities, which have destroyed much of their native lands. While sometimes successful, these blockades also led to arrests, violent crackdowns, and possible murders of activists and indigenous leaders.

Samling timber operations have also posed another threat. In September of last year, a leaked Samling document indirectly acknowledged that employees at its Sarawak timber camps were involved in the alleged rape of Penan women and girls. The document, a directive from Samling’s general manager of forest operations in Malaysia, prohibited all employees from entering Penan villages or providing transportation to Penan people without management permission.

For more background information, read our Lands of the Penan sacred site report.

In a major victory for indigenous land rights, India’s environment minster on Aug. 24 struck down a controversial mining project in eastern Orissa state that would have threatened the survival of the 8,000-member Dongria Kondh tribe.

Citing violations of environmental and human rights laws, Jairam Ramesh denied permission for London-based Vedanta Resources to build an open-cast bauxite mine in the Niyamgiri Hill range. The company had set up an alumina refinery in Orissa in 2008 with the expectation that it would be allowed to annually extract three million metric tons of bauxite, the raw material for aluminum.

The Dongria Kondh consider the remote hills — home to their god, Niyam Raja — sacred, and they also depend on the hills for their livelihood. For the past eight years they have been fighting to protect their land and way of life. The tribe had gained the support of NGOs including Amnesty International and Survival International, which ran a successful global campaign comparing the Dongria Kondh’s plight to the Na’vi tribe in the award-winning James Cameron film “Avatar.” (Watch Survival’s film “Mine,” embedded below.)

Vedanta had claimed the mine would cause little disturbance to the hills and that, along with the refinery, it would help alleviate poverty in the region. However, in a report commissioned by Ramesh, a committee of experts found that the project would “drastically alter the region’s water supply, affecting both ecological systems and human communities,” and threaten “the very survival” of the Dongria Kondh. The committee found that Vedanta had acted illegally and with “total contempt for the law,” and that to allow the mine to go forward would be “illegal.”

Vedanta reportedly intends to push for an alternative mine site in the region. “There is no question of abandoning this project,” CEO Mukesh Kumar said. The alumina refinery, which has polluted rivers and damaged crops along with the livelihood of the local people, will also continue to operate.

Radio Free Asia reported on May 15 that five people were beaten and tear-gassed in protests against three gold mines in the county. Some 5,000 troops were in the area, with reinforcements expected.

“Thousands of local Tibetans — young, old, men, and women alike — have attempted to block the Chinese from resuming mining activities,” one local Tibetan source said. “But [Tibetan Autonomous Region] Party Secretary Zhang Qingli has given orders to ahead with the mining, even if this means using force against protesters.”

Last year in Markham similar protests took place against mining on a sacred mountain called Ser Ngul Lo, a site where Tibetans have historically worshipped. However, talks ultimately resolved the standoff with a promise to end mining operations.

According to another local source, on May 4 — the day the mining company was ordered to resume operations at the three sites — 13 Tibetans were detained. “All of those detained were Tibetan businessmen and leading figures who successfully blocked the Chinese mining company in 2009,” the source said.

What you can do

Go to the Intercontinental Cry website for a sample letter to send to China’s permanent representative to the United Nations, calling on the Chinese government to withdraw their police forces and protect the Tibetans’ sacred mountains.

To learn more about the history, beliefs and practices surrounding sacred mountains in Tibet, read our Mount Kailash sacred site report.

The third edition of the Global Biodiversity Outlook (GBO-3), released May 10 by the Convention on Biodiversity and the U.N. Environmental Program, confirms that governments around the world have failed to meet targets set eight years ago to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010. Instead, the five main pressures driving the loss  — habitat change, overexploitation, pollution, invasive alien species and climate change — have either remained constant or are increasing.

“Humanity has fabricated the illusion that somehow we can get by without biodiversity or that it is somehow peripheral to our contemporary world,” Achim Steiner, executive director of the U.N. Environment Program, said in a press release announcing the report. “The truth is we need it more than ever on a planet of six billion heading to over nine billion people by 2050.”

The report is based on 110 national biodiversity reports and other scientific assessments, including an analysis carried out by the Biodiversity Indicators Partnership, published last month in the journal Science, which represents the first assessment of how targets made through the 2002 Convention on Biological Diversity have not been met. That assessment noted that since 1970 the world’s animal populations have been reduced by 30 percent, the area of mangroves and sea grasses by 20 percent, and the coverage of living corals by 40 percent.

The GBO-3 outlines a possible new strategy for reducing biodiversity loss, learning the lessons from the failure to meet the 2010 target. It includes addressing the underlying causes of biodiversity loss, such as patterns of consumption, the impacts of increased trade and demographic change.

“The assessment of the state of the world’s biodiversity in 2010 should serve as a wake-up call for humanity,” Ahmed Djoghlaf, executive-secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, said. “Business as usual is no longer an option if we are to avoid irreversible damage to the life-support systems of our planet.”

The report will be a key input into discussions by world leaders at a special high-level segment of the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 22, as well as negotiations by world governments at the Nagoya Biodiversity Summit in October.

The GBO-3 draws attention to indigenous sacred sites, noting the thousands of community conserved areas around the world — including sacred forests, wetlands, and landscapes — and observing that “indigenous and local communities play a significant role in conserving very substantial areas of high biodiversity and cultural value.”

This deep association between sacred sites and biodiversity conservation is highlighted in many of SLFP’s sacred site reports. To learn more, check out our Beyul of the Himalaya, Gamo Highlands, Kaya Forests and Mount Sinai reports, among others.

In January, the U.N. released its first-ever report on the “State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples,” which presents a global view of the current situation of indigenous peoples, examining poverty and well-being, culture, education, health, human rights, environment and emerging issues.

Authored by indigenous peoples, the report offers statistics and information to raise awareness about indigenous development, advance the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and influence the U.N. Development Program’s 2010 Human Development Report, themed “Rethinking Human Development.”

The report highlights the critical situation for indigenous peoples around the world and translates the urgency into hard statistics. Indigenous peoples make up about 5 percent of the world’s population and 15 percent of its poor, as they are the first population to be affected by industries that harm the environment or resource-intensive projects.  In the United States, nearly a quarter of Native Americans and Alaska Natives live below the poverty line, with lower life expectancy and higher death rates from causes including diabetes, homicide, suicide and car accidents. The statistics are grim.

Although indigenous peoples are caretakers of some the world’s greatest regions of biodiversity and enrich global culture in a plethora of ways — from traditional knowledge in herbal remedies and land management to environmental principals — their plight has yet to enter mainstream conversation or find serious discussion in major news outlets.

Yet every effort counts, and actions such as the release of “State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples” will further the urgently important dialogue on global interdependence, land rights, resistance to the loss of biological and cultural diversity, and hope for a collaborative future.

Nine Sacred Mountains, China—Throughout China’s history, Buddhist and Daoist pilgrims have gone to mountains seeking spiritual sustenance and solace; there are five sacred mountains that are preeminent for Daoists and four sacred mountains that are paramount to Buddhists. In the 20th century, political upheaval led to the violent repression of religious expression, and sacred sites across China were destroyed. Despite losses, the devotion of monks and local residents to the holy reputation of these mountains prevented total destruction.

Now, as China gradually moves away from its past of religious intolerance and forges a new social and political identity amid unprecedented economic growth, the sacred mountains continue to attract traditional pilgrims and a considerable number of secular visitors. With these dual roles as spiritual destinations and economic enterprises, the sacred mountains face new challenges, such as uncontrolled tourism and habitat destruction. In this modern era, Buddhists and Daoists are turning to age-old philosophies as an impetus for environmental conservation.

Bogd Khan Uul, Mongolia—Considered the world’s oldest officially and continuously protected sacred site, this mountain massif was declared a sacred mountain reserve in 1778, and evidence of its protected status dates back to the 13th century. During the decades-long rule of communism in the 20th century, religion was repressed and nearly all of Mongolia’s 900 Buddhist monasteries were destroyed.

However, reverence persisted and the post-communist era ushered a revival of the national tradition of nature conservation, the restoration of monasteries and resanctification of sacred natural sites, including Bogd Khan. Unfortunately, real estate and tourism development, including a ski resort, now threaten Bogd Khan, and Mongolia’s deep-rooted conservation ethic must face yet another modern challenge.

Lands of the Penan, Malaysia—Living in the rainforests of Borneo, the Penan people are one of the last indigenous groups in the world with members who still follow a traditional nomadic lifestyle, relying solely on their natural environment for material and spiritual sustenance. In recent decades, logging has destroyed or altered the rainforest, forcing most Penan into a settled or seminomadic lifestyle marked by impoverishment, political marginalization, and increasing difficulty finding traditional sources of food in a diminishing rainforest.

These circumstances have driven many Penan into activism that began in the 1980s with road blockades against lumber companies and legal battles over land rights. Today, the Penan are fighting to save their rainforest home in the face of hydroelectric dam construction and a misguided race to plant oil palm plantations for biofuel.

We learned when we arrived that our friend, shaman Maria Amanchina, had become very sick after we filmed her in the summer of 2007. When I saw Maria I apologized for any role our filming might have had in her illness and she said, “No, it wasn’t you or the equipment, but I should not have allowed filming inside my yurt.” Initially, we heard Maria would not permit filming on this trip and that she would not accompany the group on a pilgrimage after the conference. As the meeting went on, however, she changed her mind and allowed filming (“no tight shots please”) and agreed to come with the group on a long journey to the Ukok Plateau.

On the final day of the conference, the participants took a journey with Danil Mamyev, the founder of Uch Enmek Park, into the heart of the Karakol Valley, where Danil explained how the three communities within the park protect both the ecology and spirituality of the valley through traditional customary law that guides careful management of biodiversity and sacred sites. We stood in a carpet of wildflowers richer and more diverse than any I have ever seen.

Danil is racing to survey and map the entire Uch Enmek Nature Park by the end of December 2009 to prevent the Russian government from privatizing the land within the sacred valley, which would allow distant hotel operators to buy land and build tourism facilities. We filmed Danil working with two students from Moscow University doing GPS mapping near an offering site by a tranquil mountain lake. The mapping work will be used to manage tourism by re-routing roads and trails and building a visitor education center. Danil’s mapping work received a great boost this month with a National Science Foundation grant that should enable him to complete the survey work by the end of the year.

After the sacred site guardian meeting in the Karakol Valley ended, the participants journeyed to the Ukok Plateau, a World Heritage Site known even to the ancient Greeks as a hallowed burial ground. Before attempting to go over the pass to the plateau, Maria Amanchina led a sunrise ceremony with Danil and FSDA’s Chagat Almashev and Maya Erlenbaeva offering milk to the four directions. After the ritual the group made a circuit of 13 springs before heading off for the far reaches of the Ukok Plateau, where they hoped to make it to the Mongolia-China border and the burial site of the renowned Ukok Princess, a 2,500-year-old mummy unearthed in 1993 by Russian archaeologists.

After a six-hour ride in indestructible Russian-built vehicles known as Uazis, passing ancient standing stones, the group made it to the now-empty burial site. The young woman had been buried in permafrost and her skin was well preserved, still bearing intricate tattoos, her clothing in perfect shape. Altaians immediately protested the removal of their ancestor and demanded her return. A major earthquake rocked the region soon after, and the locals attributed the earth tremor to the disturbance of the dead. Maria and Danil conducted a solemn ritual at the site of the excavated kurgan and prayed for the return and re-burial of the Ukok Princess.

When the Ukok pilgrimage concluded, we traveled to sacred Mt. Belukha and met a group of Europeans making a spiritual journey with a Russian-born healer named Ahamkara. As the drumming shaman invoked the Altaian nature deity, Erlich, the wolf, two members of the group began growling and writhing on the ground as they transformed into wolves. Tourism is on the rise in the Altai and native shaman have voiced growing concern about outsiders conducting such rituals, which the traditionalists describe as a form of “spiritual pollution.”

Back now at our new home in Berkeley, I feel as if one of the mountains I watched all day lying quietly at the edge of the Ukok Plateau, Nairamdal, is still calling out to me. From half way around the world I can see its brightness hovering in my mind and I wonder: is it touching my soul? The Altaian mountains are potent and alive. When I close my eyes I see a series of softly rounded snow peaks stretching along the horizon under blue sky and puffy white clouds — a dazzling being whose name means “Friendship.” The mountain was my first view of Mongolia. In front of Nairamdal I can also still see the endless barbed wire fence running to infinity along Russia’s southern Siberian border.

Beyul of the Himalaya; Nepal, Tibet, India — Throughout the famed Himalayan mountains are large, hidden valleys known as beyul, places of peace and refuge revered by Tibetan Buddhists. Because of their remote and isolated location, and the respect with which they have been treated by the communities that reside in or near them, the beyul contain high levels of biodiversity in a setting of tremendous beauty. However, outside influences like globalization, nationalization, cultural assimilation and tourism have begun to erode the power of the traditional beyul concept in many places, while development encroaches on the physical landscape. If modern conservation and management efforts are to be successful, they must find ways to preserve and integrate longstanding traditional beliefs and practices.

McCloud River Watershed, California — The CALFED Bay-Delta Program, adopted by Congress in 2004, proposes to raise Shasta Dam, on the McCloud River, by between six and 200 feet, which would significantly impact the native people in the area. However, the voices of the Winnemem Wintu, whose cultural identity as winnemem or “middle river people” derives from their ancestral homeland along the river, have been left out of the debate. The threat posed by raising the dam led the Sacred Sites International Foundation to include the McCloud River Watershed on its 2008 list of endangered sacred sites.

Mount Tenabo, Nevada — Mount Tenabo and its environs are part of Newe Sogobia, the ancestral land of the Western Shoshone, which has never been legally ceded to the federal government. Nevertheless, U.S. politicians and multinational corporations have ignored an 1863 federal treaty acknowledging Western Shoshone ownership of the land, treating sacred land as a public resource to be mined for gold. Today, Barrick Gold, the world’s largest multinational mining corporation, is planning an open-pit gold mine on Tenabo, the highest peak in the Cortez Range.

Yucca Mountain, Nevada — For more than two decades, the Shoshone and Paiute peoples, scientists, environmentalists, the federal government, Nevada citizens and politicians have wrestled over the fate of Yucca Mountain. The federal government had advocated for the mountain as the nation’s primary dumping ground for deadly, high-level nuclear waste; however, it has recently signaled intentions to phase out the project. Meanwhile, the Western Shoshone fight off federal efforts to sell their land in order to give multinational corporations access to its mineral resources.

Mount Kinabalu, Malaysia — Emerging from the mist that covers the island of Borneo, multi-peaked Mount Kinabalu is known to the indigenous Kadazan as akina-balu, resting place of the ancestral spirits. It plays a key role in their creation stories and legends, which inform traditional land relationships and conservation practices, and it is also home to a spectrum of exotic plants and endangered animal species. From 1975 to 1999, copper mining on the mountainside damaged the landscape, contaminated the water supply, and left behind millions of tons of tailings that continue to pose an environmental threat. Meanwhile, the area has become increasingly exposed to eco-social pressures stemming from logging, oil-palm plantations, settlements and tourism, while the Kadazan are experiencing threats to the durability of their traditions. The Kadazan, NGOs and the Sabah government, however, are taking steps to respond to these threats and preserve the mountain’s cultural and ecolological treasures.

Rila Monastery, Bulgaria — Rila Monastery is a symbol of national identity representing the persistence of Bulgarian culture and faith despite centuries of foreign rule, and the preservation of the surrounding land, the Rila Monastery Nature Park, is intimately linked with Bulgarian Orthodox Christianity, the dominant national religion. As Bulgaria emerges from its recent post-communist era, the government grapples with a legacy of corruption and the pressures of rapid development, even as it positions Bulgaria as a preeminent destination for ecotourism. As part of that strategy, a management plan for the park has been drafted with the participation of the church, establishing specific strategies for managing tourism and conserving plant and animal species. Lingering bureaucratic obstacles, legal conflicts between church and state, and controversies over hydropower, however, hinder Bulgaria’s public commitment to sustainable development in the Nature Park.

San Francisco Peaks, Arizona (updated) — From many places in northern Arizona, the horizon is dramatically marked by three 12,000-foot volcanic peaks that rise out of the Colorado Plateau south of the Grand Canyon and north of Flagstaff. The San Francisco Peaks are sacred to 13 tribes, including the Navajo and the Hopi. However, it is the U.S. Forest Service, not the tribes, that determines what activities can take place on the Peaks, and they have permitted a ski resort since 1979. In 2009, the resort received legal clearance to use reclaimed wastewater to make additional snow — a desecration of the sacred slopes and a threat to the pure drinking water supplied by the mountain aquifer.