Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
pastures, one would find non-native grasses (planted by reserve staff) on approximately
27 km
2
to provide supplemental forage, and these areas would be surrounded by some
80 km of wire fencing. To reduce their use of livestock dung for fuel, these pastoralists
would make use of wood from some 5 km
2
of planted fuel-wood forest, irrigated by a
system of canals and aqueducts from various tributary streams.
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Something that our traveler of 2020 would not see in Yeniugou would be the diminu-
tive rabbit relative, the pika. This is because reserve management would already have
eliminated this unwanted species through a program of poisoning (as well as unspecified
“biological controls”). While perhaps unintended by the reserve proposal, this likely means
that many other species, from the flocks of rufous-necked snow finches to the lithe and
colorful Tibetan fox to the awe-inspiring brown bear, would also have become greatly
reduced in abundance, if present at all.
Would our visitor to the Kunlun Nature Reserve of 2020 see wild yaks, white-lipped
deer, or argali? No management policies for these (or any other) species are included
within the proposal and clearly its writers hoped these species would still be present.
But given the magnitude of increased human presence and activity the proposal suggests
we would encounter in 2020, it seems unlikely that these species would have survived
in anything resembling their abundance of the late 1990s. Argali and chiru would likely
be gone entirely, and wild yaks would have retreated to the most remote meadows and
grasslands. (In one of the greatest ironies of the Kunlun Nature Reserve proposal, a prin-
cipal raison d'être was declared to be protection of the chiru, and the document assumed
that Yeniugou had 2,000 to protect. Alas, the proposal's authors neglected to investigate
whether those animals were still present: by the time of the proposal's writing, the chiru
had already been extirpated from Yeniugou.
8
)
In short, the Kunlun Nature Reserve would, by 2020, have destroyed the very wild
quality that had allowed Yeniugou's amazing fauna to survive into the 1990s. Locating
permanent staff (inevitably accompanied by families and serviced by a support network)
directly in the most sensitive areas (ostensibly to protect the wildlife) would have had
the perverse effect of displacing the very animals they were intended to protect. En-
couraging large-scale tourism would have yielded educational benefits for the visitors at
the price of reduced function of the very habitat needed by those animals being visited.
Pastoralists, whose earlier lower density and dispersed use of rangelands had allowed for
coexistence with all the native wildlife, would have been squeezed into an experiment in
North American-style ranching, the sustainability of which in such a fragile environment
is quite unknown. A keystone of the area's biodiversity, the plateau pika, would have
been removed in deference to preconceived notions of harmful and beneficial species.
Museums, captive-reared animals, and scripted ethnic dances would have replaced the
natural flora and fauna as Yeniugou's principal attraction to visitors.
Perhaps those seemingly stubborn provincial officials knew what they were doing
after all.
How could a proposal to prioritize nature conservation in Yeniugou produce such a per-
verse result? Why would the architects of this plan, entrusted with providing for one of
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