'Sacred Mountains of the World' with Ed Bernbaum

In today’s episode, I’m speaking with Edwin Bernbaum about his book, Sacred Mountains of the World.

Originally published in 1990, the book has been revised and expanded for its second edition, published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.

Sacred Mountains of the World is a classic in the field. As its name suggests, the book covers a large number of sacred mountains across the globe, organized into regional chapters. It examines the spiritual and cultural importance of these peaks, showing how they inspire awe and meaning in people’s lives while also addressing contemporary concerns like climate change and conservation.

Ed earned a PhD in Asian Studies from the University of California Berkeley after finishing his BA at Harvard. In addition to being a scholar of comparative religion, Ed is also a mountaineer and a conservationist, having worked with institutions like UNESCO, the Smithsonian Institution, and Yosemite National Park.

Our conversation touches on topics like Ed’s early work in Asia preserving Tibetan manuscripts, how the idea of writing the book came to him, Mircea Eliade’s idea of Axis Mundi, climate change and tourism’s impact on mountains, the loss of connection to the sacred in modern culture, Ed’s conservation work, re-thinking our understanding of the “sacred” beyond religious contexts, how everyone can benefit by thinking about sacred mountains, and other topics.

To learn more about Ed and his work, visit: Peak Paradigms, Instituto de Montaña, and Cultural and Spiritual Values of Protected Areas.

Transcript

Jeremy Bassetti: Ed, welcome to the podcast.

Ed Bernbaum: Glad to be here.

Jeremy: I will have properly introduced you in the introduction, and I’m eager to chat with you about your work and the second edition of your book, Sacred Mountains of the World. Perhaps before we do that, maybe you can take a moment here to describe your interests and your background.

Ed: Okay. So, how far back do you want me to go?

Jeremy: Give us the cliff notes.

Ed: I grew up partly in South America. My father was in the Foreign Service. So my earliest memories are of snow-capped peaks on the equator in Ecuador. And there was something about snow that really fascinated me. We were living in Washington where there wasn’t much of it, but it transforms the landscape, it’s beautiful, it evokes a sense of the sacred.

So we returned to Ecuador when I was about 15, and I thought it would be really interesting to get up to snow on the equator, the conjunction of opposites. So I began climbing with an Ecuadorian Mountaineering Club. And then in college, I continued climbing. I went on an expedition to the second highest peak in Alaska, Mount St. Elias, where we climbed it by a new route, although I myself did not get to the top.

And then when I graduated from college, I was drawn to the Himalayas. So I went to the Himalayas with the Peace Corps. And while I was there, I got caught in a very large avalanche on Annapurna South, which is described in the second edition of Sacred Mountains of the World and also first edition at the end of the first chapter on the Himalayas.

After that avalanche, I went out to the Everest area and wound up trekking to Kathmandu through the Himalayas with the abbot, the Rinpoche, of Tengboche Monastery, which is the main Tibetan Buddhist monastery on the approach to Everest from Nepal. And I was the only Westerner in a group of about 12 or 13 Tibetans and Sherpas.

I was joking with them about Shangri-La from the novel Lost Horizon because his monastery evokes that comparison. It’s in a beautiful site at 12,000 feet, looking up to Everest with a very spectacular peak hanging over it called Khumbila, and another one called Ama Dablam. He didn’t know what it was, so I told him the story of Lost Horizon.

Lost Horizon is basically a place hidden in snow mountains north of Tibet, actually in the Kunlun Mountains. And the idea there is it’s supposed to preserve the best of Eastern and Western culture for a time in the future when everything will be lost in wars in the world outside, and then out of Shangri-La will come what’s needed to build a new and better world. It has to do with basic myths that you find in Western culture and other cultures as well.

So when I told him that story, he said that the old Tibetan texts speak of a place called Shambhala, which is the land of great kings somewhere to the north. And I got very interested in this. And on the way, we cooked up an idea to preserve the Tibetan texts at the monastery through microfilming. Because I’d been taking a lot of photographs and noticed that.

At that time, this was 1968 more or less, Tibet was completely closed off to the outside world, and there was the danger that the Chinese who were occupying Tibet had destroyed most of the monasteries, and the texts would come over the mountains and destroy the texts in Nepal as well. So I got Harvard University, where I’d been as an undergraduate, interested in microfilming the texts if they knew what was there. So I came back on a project to list and microfilm the Tibetan texts.

And in the process I learned that there was a guidebook in Tibetan to the hidden kingdom of Shambhala, which is involved with a prophecy very similar to the Western one. The idea basically is that barbarians take over the world and destroy all true religion. Which, from the point of view of Buddhism, is Buddhism. And then they discover the existence of this hidden kingdom somewhere to the north, and out of the kingdom comes an army led by a bodhisattva king. And there’s a battle like Armageddon in Western culture, and then there’s a golden age that follows.

And there’s a guidebook that describes a journey there, which is part realistic and also very mythical in nature with all sorts of interesting supernatural creatures and events. So as a result of that, I wound up going back to graduate school and eventually got a PhD in Asian studies. I was writing this book, so I did it basically looking at comparative religion and mythology, in particular Buddhism and Hinduism in India and the Himalayas and Tibet.

I did my dissertation. I’d already published a book on this Tibetan myth, which was called The Way to Shambhala. And then I did a much more scholarly approach to this subject from a different point of view and got a PhD.

And in the process, I had given a talk. Well, actually, a weekend workshop for UC Berkeley Extension. And they liked it. And they said, can you do another one? So I said, well, I’m looking at myths and legends of the Himalayas, and the person said, Can you make it broader? So I said, How about sacred mountains of the world? So then I started doing it there and I did it at Smithsonian. And I realized there was a book there. So after I got my PhD, I did the first edition of Sacred Mountains of the World.

That’s how I got into it. And I became very interested in what mountains mean to people and cultures around the world, looking at it very broadly, the subject. And people will say the first reaction is that sacred mountains is an esoteric subject. And on the contrary, it really isn’t, because when mountains are sacred and they’re sacred in many different cultures, they become naturally associated with people’s highest, deepest, and most central aspirations and hopes.

So, the study of sacred mountains really takes you into the heart of cultures and what motivates people at a very deep level. So, it’s interesting from all sorts of points of view: philosophically, culturally, psychologically, spiritually.

Jeremy: That’s interesting. In your book, you write here I have it flagged. I guess you were speaking about hanging out in the Andes, going climbing in the Andes and then making your way to the Himalayas. And you write, “After I had gone to the Himalayas and learned something of the religious beliefs and practices of the people who lived there, did I realize that what drew me to the heights had much in common with traditional views of sacred mountains and the spiritual goals they symbolize.”

So I flagged that because it seems that when you were a young man climbing mountains, you had this kind of feeling or this idea about or this kind of attraction or this draw to the mountains that was only later kind of expressed or revealed to you when you were in the Himalayas? Is that fair to say?

Ed: Pretty much, yes. Well, I mean, actually, as I say, I did climb in the Andes and also in Alaska. And actually the first mountain I ever climbed with ropes was the Grand Teton when I was about 11 or 12.

Jeremy: Oh, wow.

Ed: I went to a school group camping across the country. But what I realized was, especially climbing in the Andes, you know, you start off and everything is green and then you go up above tree line, and then you go up into the glaciers into this really beautiful world of wind-sculpted glaciers and snow. And there’s a real sense of transcendence.

And I wouldn’t have put it back at that point in my life that I was seeking a sense of the sacred. But that’s what mountains were evoking for me, that idea of transcendence of going to a higher world. And I also had the sense that mountains and climbing mountains was a way of transforming oneself. And that’s another important role of sacred mountains. They’re places of transformation or revelation.

So in my book, I look at about ten themes that are very widely distributed around the world for which mountains are sacred. And as I say, one of them is mountains as places of revelation and transformation. But there are many other ways in which mountains are sacred as well.

Jeremy: Yes, I’ll ask you about those in a minute. But before we get there, maybe we can touch on a little bit of context here. You mentioned that you were doing your PhD in comparative religions, Asian studies, right? And my early introduction to the academic study or the historical study of mountains comes from the comparative religion scholar Mircea Eliade in his famous work, right? Well known scholar. He has this idea, as you know, of the axis mundi, this connection point between heavens and the earth and the underworld to a large degree.

Yet you seem to kind of, in your book, resist this idea of over-applying this concept of the axis mundi to all of the sacred mountains around the world. So I was wondering if maybe you could touch on why do you resist that generalization?

Ed: Well, I wouldn’t say I resist it. It’s just in looking at sacred mountains of the world, there are certain mountains that do fit that idea. And Eliade, you have to understand, his earliest works had to do with Indian mythology, in particular yoga and that sort of thing. And in that culture, there is a mountain which is an axis mundi, which is a mythical mountain called Sumeru in Buddhism or Meru in Hinduism. And it rises from the depths of hell to the heights of heaven. It’s eighty thousand yojanas high, where a yojana can be anywhere from a mile to three miles. So it kind of dwarfs Everest. And around it are continents, and we live in the southern continent. So it makes sense there.

But in looking at sacred mountains in cultures, not every mountain fits into that pattern. So that was the point I was trying to make. And if you try, we have a tendency to say, well, okay, we want to reduce something to one thing. And in doing that, you’re reducing the power of the mountains because they can evoke a sense of the sacred in many different ways.

So for example, many mountains are very important because they are sources of water and life that may or may not come from a central place. There are mountains that are important because they define the perimeters, the boundaries within which you live. So, for example, in the southwest of the United States, you have these patterns of four sacred mountains. And for example, for the Navajo, the Diné, there are four sacred mountains, and within it is Dinétah, which is their sacred land. But the mountains that are important are not the central mountain, but the mountains that define this perimeter.

Other mountains, for example, are places of power or they’re abodes of deities, and the deities may or may not be at the center of the universe. So that’s why I said this is an important theme. But it was overgeneralized. And I think you often find with scholars in particular what they started doing for their things, their PhD theses, for example, then that becomes something that they overgeneralize to other things.

So there was a scholar, for example, at the University of Chicago in religion called Jonathan Z. Smith. And he worked originally with Jerusalem. And Jerusalem was a sacred place because of its political associations. David chose it as a sacred site to unify the northern and southern parts of Israel, Judea and Israel. And it’s just looking at mountains themselves and looking at them in different cultures. It’s just there are a lot of mountains that are not sacred because they’re axis mundi. They’re sacred for other reasons, and it’s important to take those into consideration.

Now what I did, you know, there is this tendency to kind of try to look for something that unifies things. And I think what you find in all these different ways in which mountains are sacred is that they’re viewed as sacred. And there’s a juxtaposition. For example, there’s a mountain called Kailash in Tibet, which is the most sacred mountain in the world for almost a billion people, followers of at least four religions, beginning with Buddhism and Hinduism and some others. And that mountain is viewed as the abode of a deity.

So what you have is the mountain and then what it’s associated with. And what you get is there’s a resonance that happens between the physical mountain and then what it symbolizes. And out of that resonance, you get a sense of the sacred. And that underlies a lot of these different views of mountains.

So I have two analogies that I developed in the book about this. The way I approached things in the book was I first wanted to look at what mountains meant in different cultures and also their geology and history in different areas, for example, China, Japan, Africa, so on. And then look at their meanings there. And then looking at this, what conclusions can you draw out? So later in the book, there’s a chapter on the symbolism of mountains where I deal with this.

So, for example, you have two different views of a mountain. You have the mountain and then what the mountain symbolizes, in Eliade’s case, Kailash. And it is, in the culture, it’s viewed as the center of the world and the cosmic axis. And you see the mountain and those two things. And it’s a little bit like looking through a stereoscopic viewer. You have two slightly different views of something, and when you put them together, all of a sudden a third dimension pops out. In the sense that the sacred is in that third dimension, so to speak.

Jeremy: Yeah, that’s a nice metaphor. Yeah, I’m looking here at the table of contents of the second edition of your book, and it is a fabulous resource because you break down the mountains around the world by region. So you have the Himalayas, China, Central Asia, Japan. So on and so forth, basically covering all the continents without Antarctica. Most of them are here, though.

Ed: The question is whether the mountains there are sacred for penguins or not.

Jeremy: But it’s a fabulous resource. I was first introduced to your the first edition of your book, which is jam-packed with images, and I was surprised to see this new edition come out after so many years. I was wondering very briefly, if you could maybe speak to some of the updates that you did for this second edition.

Ed: Okay, well first of all it’s in a very different format, as you said. The first edition has about 120 almost all color photographs, a few black and white, and maybe a third of them were taken by me, and then I got them from other people. The second edition has about 20 pictures in black and white, almost all of which I took, and I converted from color to black and white.

And that was deliberate because what I found was if you have a large format book with a lot of photographs, people tend to look at it as a coffee table book. And so they pay attention to the pictures and not the text. And to me, the heart and the most interesting part of the book was the text. Which is actually much longer than most books. It’s 100,000 words. A lot of books are around 60,000 words.

In the smaller edition, it’s easier to pick up and read, and I wanted people to sort of focus on the text and what was there. Now, as far as what the updates go, it’s maybe 20% updated, hard to say. There were a number of mountains that I did research on at a distance in libraries, talking to people, but I hadn’t actually gone to or done direct field research on them. It was published in 1990 and the second edition in 2022. So over those years, I was able to visit quite a few of the mountains. So there’s a lot of more updated material on them and also my experiences on those mountains.

Also, there was new material that came out on mountains that I’d written about, so I updated that. And I included new sections on climate change, for example, and the environment. And after the book was published, partly as a result of the book, I originated, created and then directed a program for a nonprofit called the Mountain Institute, which worked with mountains and people and cultures around the world.

And the project was with National Parks, where we worked with the interpretive staff at National Parks to come up with interpretive materials signs, exhibits, ranger talks, and so on that would focus on the evocative, cultural, spiritual, and aesthetic meanings and associations of different features of nature in these parks. So I worked with that, and then I was working also with an organization called the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which is the largest environmental organization in the world. And I have been co-chairing a group there on the cultural and spiritual values of protected areas.

So I drew on a lot of that work that we did at national parks, for example, Hawaii Volcanoes, Mount Rainier, Smoky Mountains National Park, Rocky Mountain National Park, and Yosemite.

Jeremy: So you mentioned that through your work on conservation and that side of your life and your work, that climate change is a threat to mountains and sacred sites. I was wondering if you could maybe touch on that, talk a little bit about the threat that mountains face through climate change and how we are destroying these mountains. But also, when I was reading your book, I was thinking about globalization and the threat that has on culture through the sacred sites. So I was wondering if you had any thoughts on that as well.

Ed: Well, a lot of thoughts in that area. Mountains, in a very real way, are the canary in the coal mine because the effects of climate change are registered very quickly on mountains ahead of everywhere else. So I start off the section on climate change.

When I was in college, as I say, I was climbing in Ecuador, and this was in the late sixties. And I came back some thirty years later in the 1990s and then 2003. And for example, there was a 17,000 foot peak I climbed that was covered with glaciers. When I came back 30 to 40 years later, almost all the glaciers were gone. You could just see it. It was right there.

And in fact, it’s impacted. For example, I talk about there’s a sacred mountain in Ecuador called Cotacachi, which is north of Quito, just north of the equator. It’s sacred to a group called the Otavalo people from Otavalo. And there the mountain is over 16,000 feet high. It used to have glaciers on it and was permanently snow-capped. And now that’s almost entirely disappeared. And that’s created a lot of problems for the local people because they see that as a mark of displeasure of the deity of the mountain, Mama Cotacachi, and they’re afraid that this is a sign of bad things to come.

So in a number of areas, for example, in the Himalayas, climate change is having devastating effects in terms of what it’s doing to melting glaciers. So, what you have are these temporary lakes that form below peaks Mount Everest because of the melting glaciers, where it used to be a glacier, there’s now a lake. But it’s held in place by a dam of very loose rocks that was originally a moraine at the end of the glacier.

So these moraines can break, and when they do, you have what are called glacial outburst floods where they have these tremendous floods that sweep down the mountain and sweep everything out. It’s a major concern, for example, to the Sherpas who live on the north side of Everest. And there have been a number of outburst floods.

So the other problem, of course, is that mountains are extremely important around the world, and one of the reasons why they’re sacred, which is not necessarily connected to being a cosmic axis, but which is sacred from a very important practical and spiritual point of view. Mountains are sources of water. In fact, over half the world’s population depends on mountains for their water. I live here in California, and the water that we get comes from the Sierra Nevada mountains and the snowmelt. And if it doesn’t snow much in the winter, the reservoirs really drop down. It’s a real problem.

So for traditional cultures, the water that comes from mountains is not just the physical water, it’s also the waters of life, of spirituality. It’s an expression of something much deeper. And what happens with climate change is as the snow disappears because of climate change and rising temperatures, then the sources of water on which people depend for their livelihood, their very lives, starts to disappear, and that becomes a great concern.

Now you talked about globalization. The problem with sacred sites is a number of them are places, well, they’re either places of pilgrimage and a combination of pilgrimage and tourism. And a number of tourist sites around the world, they’re being loved to death so that too many people come. And that can have if you don’t have management plans in place to deal with that, the sacred sites can be overrun. And of course, you have the impacts of globalization in which rituals and ceremonies that are performed for deep religious purposes then become shows for the tourists, and they sort of become shells of what they were.

Jeremy: They become Mickey-Mouse-ified in a way, unfortunately.

Ed: Exactly yeah yeah so it’s a big problem. The Himalayas, for example, now, there’s a lot of dust and smoke that comes up from the plains of India, and it’s gotten worse and worse because of climate change and overpopulation. So now, if you go to the Himalayas, the views of the mountains are often obscured because of this haze. You can’t even see them until you’re right up among the high peaks. And the glaciers are retreating with disastrous effects.

Now, the Tibetan Lama I met, who was the abbot of Tengboche Monastery, Tengboche Rinpoche, who sadly passed away a couple of years ago, he was very concerned about the effects of climate change. He attributed it to the weakening of the practice of religion around the world. So what he was trying to do was he was making what are called bumpa, which are sacred vases you create through a ritual with sacred substances in them. And then he was giving them to Sherpas to put in critical places of the environment to arrest climate change the summit of Mount Everest.

There was a big lake coming off the peak next to Everest called Lhotse. He had some put up there, and according to him, the lake stopped growing as much. And he gave me one of these vases to bring back to California and plant in the mountains here. Which is, if you have a moment, it’s an amusing story. Shall I tell it?

Jeremy: Sure.

Ed: Yeah. It’s not in my book, but I’ll tell it here. I mean, I refer to it very briefly in the book, but not the story itself. I was at the airport going through security and the security guy said, what’s inside? And I said, I don’t know. And he said, well, you’ve got to open it up. And I said, well, look, this is a religious object. If I open it up, it’s sealed. It won’t work anymore. And he said, you’ve got to open it up. So I said, can I talk to your supervisor? So the supervisor came over. Same thing.

So I said, you know, Apa Sherpa, who was a national hero at the time, he climbed Everest 19 times more than any other person. I said, he took one of these up to the summit of Mount Everest. So the guy said to me, Are you a climber? And I said, yes, although I hadn’t climbed in a long time, getting old for it. And he said, okay, you can take it through.

So I took it through and I got back to California. And there’s a Tibetan Lama who lives near me, Lama Kunga, who’s into making the rituals with vases for other reasons, but he knew how to do it. So he and my son, the three of us went up to Tilden Park, which is a regional park above Berkeley, surreptitiously with a spade, because you’re not supposed to dig holes in state parks. And we dug a hole and we did the ritual and we buried it. And a few years later, I ran into the superintendent of all the East Bay Regional Parks around the east side of San Francisco Bay. And I said, Well, we did something illegal at Tilden Park. And I told him what it was. And he said, It’s okay, don’t worry about it.

Jeremy: That’s funny. If you ever find a hidden vase, don’t open it. Yeah, that was interesting. I’m going to circle back to what you were saying about the dust coming up from India into the Himalayas. When you were saying that, it just sounds so wonderfully sadly ironic that that’s happening because I was thinking in some of the old Chinese poetry, the poets would describe going up into the mountains to get away from the dust of the world. And the dust of the world was the metaphor that they used to describe the mundane world, right? They wanted to get rid of that. Sad, wonderful, sad, poetic. It’s just this nice parallel there.

Circling back here, we’re talking about globalism. And I was asking you this question because growing up in mainstream American, globalized, neoliberal culture, we’ve kind of lost our reference to the sacred and we’ve lost our references to mountains, right? Despite, you know, us growing up in this kind of Judeo-Christian background where mountains are kind of fundamental to those religions.

I was going back through the Old Testament and in Exodus, you know, God is referred to as El Shaddai, right? Literally, the God of the mountain. With mountains being so fundamental to Judeo-Christian, which is kind of being replicated and exported around the world through this thing that we have going on with neoliberalism, it’s just interesting how far removed we are from the mountains now. And it just made me feel that with globalization, exporting this culture around the world, we’ll be further away from something that connects us to, I guess, the infancy of our species, right? This is something that’s so hardwired into us as animals, and we’re getting further and further away from this. I don’t know. That’s what I was thinking as I was reading your book. And I was wondering if you had any thoughts about that.

Ed: Yeah, well, I do. Well, first of all, when you say we, there are an awful lot of people in this country, especially out where I live, who are drawn to the mountains and experience them as sacred, but in a secular way. You know, because what I say in a deep way. Mountains evoke an experience of something of deeper reality or significance that gives meaning and vitality to people’s lives. And that’s why a lot of people, whether they realize it or not, are drawn to mountain climbing or drawn to hiking in the mountains or going to places Yosemite and being moved by it.

And if you look historically at the origins of the modern environmental movement, you’ll see it really comes out of the writings of people John Muir, Thoreau, Emerson. In which mountains in particular and wilderness more generally was a place you could go to for spiritual renewal. And that’s a major view of sacred mountains. And I think that’s what gave a lot of drive to the environmental movement. And I think it’s important to go back to those origins of the environmental movement because that’s what really moves people, often much more than just scientific reasons or economic reasons for preserving things.

Now when I came up with the idea, or just before the idea of the Sacred Mountains book, I gave an all-day seminar at the Smithsonian in Washington. And I said to the audience, You may think you’re very far away from a sacred mountain here in Washington, D.C., but just up the mall is Capitol Hill. And the origins, the idea of Capitol Hill, probably associated with the idea of Moses receiving the tablets of the law on Mount Sinai, which is something that’s very deeply ingrained in Western culture and civilization.

And I sort of said this over the top of my head, and about a year or so later, one of my sons went on a school trip to Washington, D.C. and they went into the chamber of the House of Representatives on Capitol Hill. And around the ceiling were these sort of small murals depicting famous lawgivers. And the one in the center, of course, was Moses with the Ten Commandments.

So, you know, as you pointed out, the three most important events in the Torah, you know, the first five books of the Bible, are the covenants that are made. And they’re all associated, all three of them, with sacred mountains. And in Judaism, for example, the single most important traditional event in traditional Jewish history is the Revelation and Covenant at Mount Sinai, which is burned in. So I think it’s there.

And I think it’s important that people sort of look within themselves to what it is in their own culture or their own experience that does it. And I look at the sense of the sacred very broadly in the sense that it doesn’t have to be connected with religion. It can be a sense of being in touch with something that gives a deeper significance. It can be a sense of being one with nature, a sense of awe that you feel there. And a lot of people do seek this.

I think it’s a mistake to say that we’ve lost contact with it. Yes, there are a lot of people who do lose contact with it. And one of the things that’s making it harder and harder, of course, is social media. Computers, what we’re doing right here, iPhones.

You know, I was, as I say, I worked with national parks. And one of the parks I worked with was Mount Rainier National Park, where we did some very interesting projects. And the superintendent of Mount Rainier eventually became director of the entire National Park Service, Jonathan Jarvis. And I was talking to him when he was in charge later on, before he became director of the National Park Service of the Pacific West Region. And he pointed out there was a book called Last Child in the Woods. I don’t know if you’ve seen this book. It’s Nature Something Deficiency Disorder. And it starts off by a quote from a kid saying, I don’t go out in the woods. There aren’t any electrical outlets there.

But it was a real concern to the National Park Service that kids these days aren’t getting out and getting that experience of being in nature unless they go to camps and so on. And yeah, it’s what you say is partly true. On the other hand, there are a lot of people who are drawn to the mountains and are drawn to the mountains not necessarily for competitive commercial reasons, but because they feel inspired and revitalized when they go to the mountains. Right.

Jeremy: Yeah, I guess I was thinking about this from the pessimistic view, you know because we see tourism boards kind of package mountains as tourism products, right? As kind of the antidote to working in the office by packaging nature in this kind of consumptive product, right? And come here, kind of, you know, take a break from work and shop and enjoy and dine. And it’s just…

Ed: Yeah, that’s true. There is a great deal of that. But I think it’s important for people to have respect for each other’s views. And one of the things that we emphasize working with national parks is Native Hawaiians, American Indians the Chumash near the Santa Monica Mountains, they have their views of mountains and why they’re important.

And it’s not a matter of I think the commercialization would be to do things where you imitate what they’re doing, but you’re saying Here are other ways of viewing the mountains. What do mountains mean to you? And get people to start thinking about what’s authentic for them.

Yes, an awful lot of this is being packaged and has you have all these problems with commercialization. Packaging things all over the world. But also in the past, when one culture has come in that has a different view of nature from another. They’ve often imposed their view on the local people and destroyed what the local people had. It’s not something new that’s happened now. It happens over and over throughout history.

Jeremy: So as you were talking, I wrote in my notes that sacred means different things to different people, and it’s not necessarily religious, and we have to embrace all the diversity of approaches to connecting with mountains. But more broadly, why do you think it’s important to think about sacred mountains?

Ed: Actually, I have this quote from the beginning of one of the chapters. Should I read that?

Jeremy: Yes.

Ed: Let me go get the book.

It’s at the beginning of the last chapter. I’ll just read it. “For most of us, sacred mountains are remote from the experience of everyday life. They lie far off in space and time, revered by distant cultures, many of which vanished long ago. Even the peaks that we manage to climb and visit rise on the borders of our lives, removed from the cities and plains where most of us live. What is the value, then, of thinking about them?” Your question. “It is simply this: the contemplation of sacred mountains, with their special power to awaken another, deeper way of experiencing reality, opens us to a sense of the sacred in our own homes and communities, a sense that we need to cultivate in order to live in harmony with our environment and with each other. In looking up to the heights and reflecting on the world around them, we discover within ourselves something that enables us to lead deeper and more meaningful lives.”

Jeremy: Thank you. I did underline that passage too.

Ed: Well, you set me up for it.

Jeremy: Well, Ed, thank you so much for chatting with me. It’s been a pleasure. If you don’t mind. Can you just plug where we can find you online? You mentioned the Mountain Institute. Where can we find you?

Ed: Oh, well, let’s see. I mean, if you put my name in Google or whatever search, you’ll find a number of things about there. Some of the work, the work that the Mountain Institute actually has now in the U.S. sadly, it went out of business, so to speak. Although there’s a branch of it that’s taken over down in Peru called Instituto de Montaña. And you can go there to see what they’re doing. It’s not so much what I’m doing now. I’m a senior fellow with it. But that’s at institutodemontana.org.

Then there’s also the group I co-chair at the IUCN, and that’s csvpa.org. That’s cultural and spiritual values, the protected areas. And then I used to, and I’ve got the website up there and it has information, but it’s rather dated. I used to do a lot of leadership seminar programs with a friend of mine who is a professor of leadership at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. We do it in the Himalayas, in the Alps and other places. So I do this leadership stuff. And there’s information on what I’ve been doing in the background. And that’s at edmountains.org.

Jeremy: Great. I’ll put all of those into the show notes.

Ed: But the main place is the book, the second edition, which is Sacred Mountains of the World, and it’s published by Cambridge University Press.

Jeremy: Very good. Well, thank you so much, Ed.

Ed: Okay. Well, thank you. It’s been a pleasure talking with you.