Annie Smith Peck, Social Systems, and Landscape Change in the Cordillera Blanca from 1908 to the Present

Annie Smith Peck reached the summit of Peru’s Huascarán Norte in the Cordillera Blanca in 1908, the first person to reach the top of what was thought to be the highest mountain in the Americas. If she were to stand on the peak today and look downslope into the valleys east and west of the mountain range, Peck would see a transformed landscape. Her writings are a lens by which we can examine changing social and ecological systems in the Cordillera Blanca between then and now to provide context for geo-environmental changes. In this chapter, we first focus on social systems that experienced major transitions in the 1960s onward because of the direct ties to governance and land management. The agrarian reform and the 1970 earthquake and landslide supplied the ingredients that would develop into the complex social dynamics that affect management and use of landscapes in the Cordillera Blanca. These two unrelated political and geo-environmental events are entangled with the establishment of Huascarán National Park and gave rise to social tensions. We then synthesize the current state of knowledge of the major Cordillera Blanca ecosystems using nine land cover types: snow and ice, barren, lakes, woodlands, shrublands, grasslands and wetlands, agriculture, and developed areas. Each of these ecosystems are either in flux or stasis due to various ecological factors and land management decisions made by the park and local communities. To conclude, we describe road construction, non-native forest plantations, mining, tourism, and overgrazing as current and emerging threats that are concurrent with geo-environmental change. This chapter highlights current and future challenges of the Cordillera Blanca and its people that are tied to agro-pastoral mountain social-ecological systems and closely linked to global and regional economic forces.