Cultures at Risk Presenter Biographies

Edwin Bernbaum

On the impact of global change on the world’s sacred mountains

Dr. Edwin Bernbaum is director of the Sacred Mountains Program at The Mountain Institute (TMI). A guarantor of Mountain Wilderness International and a member of the World Commission on Protected Areas of the World Conservation Union (IUCN), he works on developing ways of taking the cultural and spiritual significance of different features of mountain environments into account in environmental programs. He initiated and now directs a project in the United States developing interpretive and educational materials and activities for the National Park Service. In collaboration with TMI’s Himalayan Program, he is also co-directing a project on Mountain Cultural Landscapes in Central Asia and working on a Sacred Sites Trail project in Sagarmatha National Park in Nepal.

He is the author of the award-winning Sacred Mountains of the World, the basis for a photographic exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution and the American Museum of Natural History, and The Way to Shambhala, a study of Tibetan myths of hidden valleys resembling the fictional Shangri-La of Lost Horizon. He has climbed and done research in mountains around the world and is a frequent lecturer on culture, art, religion, leadership, mountains, mountaineering and the environment.