Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
the general reform of government operations in China, reserves have increasingly been
expected to generate their own income, often resulting in reserve staff exploiting the very
resources they are tasked with protecting, or promoting schemes to generate revenue
externally (usually by encouraging tourism).
22
Further, the detailed “engineering standards” that followed upon the documents of the
mid-1990s and were intended to apply nationwide, echoed themes in resource management
that had been promulgated outside the realm of biodiversity conservation. Thus, for ex-
ample, we find detailed standards (and implicit assumptions that reserves will thus contain
them) not only for informational signs, boundary markers, and necessary guard stations,
but also for fire protection lookouts, meteorological stations, fencing, reforestation, and
pest control. When it comes to captive rearing of wildlife (usually termed “rescuing” in
these documents), national standards go so far as to mandate the size of cages by species
(e.g., 16m
2
for a bear, 5m
2
for a wolf, and 0.7m
2
for a marmot). Thus, priorities arising
from the fields of livestock raising, commercial forestry, zookeeping, and other interests
find their way into national-level standards, which planners and administrators of local
nature reserves ignore at their peril.
23
Given the general tendency—inculcated by centuries of Confucian thought and
supplemented by a half-century of Leninist Party rule—to follow existing patterns
rather than break new ground, it is not surprising to see that nature reserve proposals
and management plans treat the regulations and subsequent documents as templates,
adding specific local data only where absolutely necessary. The task of producing a
management plan has thus become one of filling in the blanks of a standardized form.
Under such a conception, conserving nature becomes not so much a question of deter-
mining what the threats are and how they might be resolved, as an exercise in matching
expectations already published by higher authorities. Let's see: Guard stations? Check.
Fencing? Check. Preventing forest fires? Check. Restoring degraded grasslands? Check.
Controlling harmful rodents and insects? Check. A rescue and captive-breeding center
for saving wildlife? Check. (Alas, after these are built, few funds are available for
anything else.
24
)
Further, the problem with such human “engineering” (sometimes also called “con-
structing”) is only partly that by building houses, offices, exhibition halls, meteorological
stations, fire lookouts, tourist facilities, roads, and other structures, humans necessarily
congregate and create their own demands on the natural resources they are supposed to
protect. The larger problem is that “constructing” nature reserves is often intended to be
taken quite literally, that nature reserves as existing at the time of legal recognition are
not considered sufficient or whole but instead require additional improvement by human
means. Thus, we have planting of forests (even where none ever existed), “restoration” of
grasses (regardless of grassland state), erection of raptor platforms (because more raptors
must be a good thing), and artificial propagation and “rescuing” of individual animals
(whether they need it or not). This leads, naturally, to pika poisoning as a sanctioned
activity within nature reserves, even though livestock, with which pikas might conceiv-
ably conflict, are nominally prohibited. Thus we get our Kunlun Nature Reserve, which
proposes to remove the keystone of its own biodiversity.
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