Edwin Bernbaum, Author and Senior Fellow at the Instituto de Montaña

Edwin Bernbaum, Ph.D., is a Senior Fellow at the Instituto de Montaña and former Co-chair of the IUCN Specialist Group on the Cultural and Spiritual Values of Protected Areas (CSVPA). A scholar of comparative religion and mythology, he focuses on the relationship between culture and nature. He is the author of Sacred Mountains of the World, 2nd edition (Cambridge University Press, 2022). He initiated and directed a program at The Mountain Institute working with US National Parks such as Yosemite and Hawai’i Volcanoes to develop interpretive materials based on the evocative cultural and spiritual significance of features of nature in cultures around the world. Ed worked on a project at Badrinath, the major Hindu pilgrimage shrine in the Indian Himalayas, in which priests and scientists worked together to encourage pilgrims to replant trees for reasons coming out of their own religious and cultural traditions. He also guided the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) on efforts to get Mount Kailas in Tibet, the most sacred mountain in the world for up to a billion people, and the pilgrimage routes leading to it from Nepal and India nominated as a trans-boundary UNESCO World Heritage Site. Ed holds an A.B. in Mathematics from Harvard College and a Ph.D. in Asian Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. He has also done additional graduate work at Harvard in social psychology and anthropology.