Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
has argued that Mongols traditionally had a decidedly nonanthropocentric world view.
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Whether or not that is true, interest in consumptive use among Mongols remains strong:
in my study areas within Qinghai and Gansu where Tibetans, Mongols, and Kazaks over-
lapped or abutted, opinion was universally expressed that the Mongols were the most avid
hunters, and most likely to run afoul of China's recent hunting prohibitions.
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Hunting,
both legal and illegal, remains popular in Mongolia.
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Hunting has also traditionally featured prominently in the lives of Kazaks,
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the third
major pastoral ethnicity of focus, who, being Muslim, have turned to the Koran rather
than to Buddhist ethics for guidance. Although visible manifestations of Islam among
Kazaks are subtle, I was once told by an elderly Kazak who had moved from Xinjiang to
Qinghai during the 1940s that the moral codes gleaned from the Koran were relevant to
his group's interactions with wildlife. As of the mid-1980s, government policies forcibly
moved most Kazaks back to Xinjiang. Noting that their former grazing land contained
among the healthiest concentration of wildlife anywhere in China, the elder explained to
me that, historically, “we took wildlife, of course, but why take more than you need? The
Koran teaches one to use things wisely; we never took more than we needed.”
ARE CHANGES AFOOT?
In recent years there have been expressions in Han China of a changing view on wildlife,
particularly among scientists. The same topic on Chinese nature reserves that referred
to “natural zoos”
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contains a good many rationalizations for the existence of nature re-
serves that sound as if they could come from Western scientists, for example, integrity of
ecosystems and “balance of nature.” Another recent, somewhat more scholarly, Chinese
topic on nature reserves also includes a variety of rationales, including those that are
recognizably ecologistic, scientistic, and naturalistic.
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Some Chinese scientists, notably
Zhao Qikun of the Kunming Institute of Zoology, have openly questioned the traditional
Chinese utilitarian attitude, and spoken admiringly (as well as in practical terms) of a
more spiritual perspective toward nature.
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In the popular literature, suggestions of a
new openness to recent, Western “ecologistic” thinking, at least among some writers and
presumably some readers, are clear.
The canonical text of the modern American environmental movement, Aldo Leopold's
1949 classic,
A Sand County Almanac
(usually published alongside
Essays on Conserva-
tion from Round River
), has been translated and published in Chinese, not once but twice.
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An incipient field of Chinese environmental ethics appears to be developing, at least if
Li Minghua's ambitious (if somewhat superficial)
A Return to the Wilderness
(2003) is
any indication.
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And the micro-explosion of environmental NGOs, both those connected
to larger, global efforts as well as small, homegrown efforts, suggests that traditional at-
titudes are not utterly immutable.
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But it is not at all clear that these changes, even if more widespread than a cursory
examination would suggest, auger any substantive abandoning of the use of wildlife
for human benefit. After all, Aldo Leopold's
Land Ethic,
whether it is read in Chinese
or English, is hardly preservationist; even as Leopold regrets his ignorant wolf-killing
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