Packing transdisciplinary critical geography amidst sustainability of mountainscapes

Abstract

This Elgar Companion book seeks to frame sustainability as an exemplar of transdisciplinary science informing critical geography while improving future scenarios for the world communities that are debating prospective fates between the rich North and the poor South, the modern urban and the backwards rural, and everything in between. Through the following pages the reader will find unorthodox views about sustainable development and sustainability science, challenging dialectics and incorporating alternative propositions for defining sustainability as the maintenance, improvement or regeneration of living conditions in the planet for both human and more-than-human constituents (Gibbes et al. 2018). The use of mountain studies exemplifies the new narrative of integrative, holistic approaches for geoliteracy about mountainscapes and will serve to motivate further research in the field of transdisciplinary mountain science. Earlier calls for transdisciplinary approaches to understanding landscapes were made by Naveh and Liebermann (1984) who viewed landscape ecology as a transdisciplinary, ecosystem-education approach, based on general system theory, cybernetics and ecosystemology as a branch of the total human ecosystem science. Yet, despite the more comprehensive planning angle exhibited in Europe contrasting to the more geospatialbased landscape ecology of North America (Forman & Godron 1984), the notion of transdisciplinary science still retained the character of positivistic Western Ecological Knowledge (WEK). It was not until 1992 with the development geographies of the Global South approach to Political Ecology that transdisciplinarity became a paradigm to understanding nature and culture from a Latin American perspective (Naveh et al. 2002) and from the critical move to activate interdisciplinary studies and multidisciplinary studies favoring the integration of alternative epistemologies (Lang et al. 2012). “Mountains” as an exemplar of the challenge of packing sustainability from frameworks of development geographies, area studies and biogeography of socio-ecological systems (SES) add to a decadal effort from a plethora of mountain scholars of inserting a recognizable goal of a new transdisciplinary field, montology (Mahat and Boom 2008). The reason for this contemporary framing of sustainability is the impetus that new paradigms to understand human–environmental relations from several perspectives at the same time (Dunlap and Van Liere 1978; Dunlap et al. 2000; Boillat, Chapter 19, this volume) bring to post-phenomenological landscape studies in the geographies’ frontier of decolonial theories and hybrid narratives. Recently, the search for integrative approaches to the understanding of Complex Adaptive Systems (CASs) and the long-term stewardship of mountain ecosystems as SESs has led to a renewed focus in “montology” (Haslett 1998). Thus, the evolving theoretical and practical applications of critical geography