Ecologies of Globalization: Mountain Governance and Multinatural Planetary Politics

Mountain governance has emerged as new node of planetary management of non-human nature. Referencing the common ecological fates suffered by mountains around the world because of climate change, it aims to fuse ecological, political, and cultural perspectives together in a new political object. One of its central organizing categories is the sacred landscape, which is neither a purely natural object nor a socially valuable one, but rather, an exceptional sacred one to be protected, conserved, and/or developed. This chapter enquires into the production of global mountains by secular governance regimes. Against a number of accounts of environmental governance, it first argues that mountains are multiple objects, not singular natural ones. It then suggests that sacredness is a particularly problematic way of rendering these multiple mountains as singular, in ways that undermine the very ends of mountain governance. Instead, in the service of finding a more politically plural, but also more multinatural, planetary politics, the chapter proposes an analytic and political focus on routes and routing, which better show the multiple mountains that are in play in these regions, drawing on the transboundary region surrounding Mt. Kailash in the Himalayas as a case study.