The impact of increased levels of tourism activity in upland areas is a highly topical issue, particularly with greater awareness that many so-called soft tourism activities such as ecotourism and wildlife tourism may be far from impact-free. Indeed, the expansion of such activities is having a seriously deleterious effect on many fragile mountain ecosystems. This problem was highlighted in Chapter 13 of Agenda 21, derived from the UNCED (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development) held in Rio in 1992. Chapter 13 stresses the vital importance of mountain ecosystems to the global community. The agenda put forward at Rio has since been developed in many areas and by many organizations, varying in scale from international organizations through national governments to local NGOs.

The many, complex roles played by mountains in tourism (sometimes sports playground, sometimes cultural receptacle, sometimes pilgrimage center) are well illustrated by the 16 chapters of this book, which include a diverse set of case studies at different scales and from different regions. Not all are well known; while there are several from the Himalayas and Alps, the book also includes far less well documented areas such as the Gurvansaikhan National Park in Mongolia and the eastern highlands bioregion of Zimbabwe. The work starts with a scene-setting chapter and closes with a paper postulating strategies for future mountain tourism. In between, contributions are varied in content and complexity, but unity has been provided by the evidently tight editorial guidelines given to each contributor. This gives the book a pleasing consistency, with chapters structured in the same way, and it has clearly been subjected to a high level of editorial control.

Several chapters emphasize the perils of unplanned tourism development in mountains and many detail the disastrous environmental and cultural consequences that can result from such activities and from which it is almost impossible for the area to recover. Nor has the introduction of restrictive policies on tourism access necessarily been effective in anything but the broadest environmental terms since, even in areas such as Bhutan (widely regarded as the leader in the planned mountain tourism stakes), tourism development has had considerable cultural, if not environmental, impact.

Early chapters look at the impact of tourism on biophysical environments and the human inhabitants of mountain areas. Some fascinating cases are quoted, notably the work of Buckley, Pickering, and Warnken on alpine tourism resorts in Australia. Another excellent chapter has been contributed by Valaoras on the Prespa region of Greece, which emphasizes the role that a local community can have in setting appropriate limits for tourism and in developing appropriate mechanisms for tourism development. Later chapters look at economic and policy-making issues, especially in the implementation of so-called soft tourism policies, and there is a fascinating case study by Barkin on ecotourism in the Monarch butterfly reserve in the highlands of west-central Mexico-a highly topical issue in view of recently publicized threats to the area and a possible extension of the Reserve. Several papers deal with Nepal, lamenting the failure of the Nepalese government to develop a manageable tourism strategy for its mountain areas. Wendy Brewer Lama looks at Nepalese issues from the point of view of the role of women in community projects, and Gurung and DeCoursey examine the case of Upper Mustang, one of the fragile peripheral Nepalese Buddhist kingdoms opened to tourism in 1992 with grossly inadequate forward planning. The consequences of this decision, despite much investment in control strategies, have been very severe for the inhabitants of this remote and beautiful desert country.

The book has considerable integrity, with some more solid chapters balanced by more free-ranging contributions, notably a lively, if slightly peripheral, account of the role of storytelling in maintaining the integrity of indigenous aboriginal Canadian communities in British Columbia, Canada. Each chapter finishes with a good bibliography, though it would have been nice if these could have been collated into a single large bibliography at the end of the book, purely for convenience. The work has been produced to a high standard and illustrations have been reproduced well, although there are occasional errors of referencing and a few typos. At £45, it would certainly be out of the range of student purchases, except by a few postgraduates, but certainly constitutes a must-have for all academic libraries in institutions that deal with tourism, planning, development studies, regional studies, or the management of environmental change.

It is interesting that, at the time this review was written (November 2000), many scientists are predicting decreased levels of sports tourism in many mountain areas (especially in Europe) over future decades as a result of global warming. However, this decreased utilization level is likely to be matched by increasing utilization of other areas, consequent upon the proliferation of potential special-interest mountain tourism activities, the greater experience of the traveling public (both domestic and international), easier access to information, and a reduction in the real costs of air fares. This will increase, rather than decrease, the importance of systematically planning tourism activities in mountain areas and setting in place appropriate procedures to monitor the effectiveness of regulatory mechanisms, without which it is very easy to let degradation continue past the point of no return. Visitor education programs are also a vital tool, and virtually each case study included here emphasizes that local communities hold the key to success in sustainable tourism projects. Mountain environments must be viewed as a total ecosystem, where culture and environment are inextricably related and need to be integrated in successful development planning. This interesting book, which not only reviews case studies in past mountain tourism but suggests a strategic approach to developing sustainable mountain tourism in the future, undoubtedly makes a major contribution to the literature of the subject.