The rate at which deforestation of montane cloud forests of the Tropical Andes is documented, and the extent of different productive land uses in those areas, make it difficult to forecast appropriate conservation scenarios for countries that occupy the crescent of the Northern Andes, abode of one of the richest biological and cultural diversity of the world. Because of ancient human impacts on soils and wildlife, as well as current intensive land-use practices, Tropandean landscapes are being depleted not only of nutrients and organic matter in cultivated soils, but also water catchment and other resources, including fisheries, forestry, mining, agriculture, and livestock that mountain peoples are producing as a result of the governmental policies of subsidized capital inputs. The exodus of young people to the cities in the Andean world exacerbates the deterioration of the rural quality of life and brings issues of marginality, poverty, and neglect into the cultural landscape. In view of this critical situation, novel conservation approaches are suggested, reflecting needed changes to contemporary paradigms of mountain studies; with the use of case examples from Andean countries, mainly Ecuador, are questioned axioms of tropical ecology. These are less clear in the field than in the scanty literature on tropical mountains, offering a holistic view of the Tropandean landscape. Hence, verticality, marginality, centrality, power and violence, expansion, religion and myth, ethnic pride and inspiration, are seen as conventional paradigms of montology that have to be re-examined in light of modern environmental thought in the Andes.