A FUTURE FOR WILDLIFE IN WESTERN CHINA - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 209

can be considered fully mature until it finds ways to link these two aspects. Habitat and
population management are biologically inseparable, but the fragmented nature of their
jurisdiction in the current Chinese system makes linking them fraught with difficulty.
Currently, government bureaus at all levels charged with wildlife management in
China are trapped in a vicious cycle of incapacity: they are ill-funded to determine what
the problems are, but have no constituency to which they might address their funding
needs. They are not empowered to intercede on behalf of wildlife habitat, in part because
they can offer no tangible benefits that might be traded for such power. How to get this
ineffective system unstuck?
TOWARD A MODEL WILDLIFE CONSERVATION SYSTEM
FOR WESTERN CHINA
I contend that a future wildlife conservation system appropriate for western China would
include a larger component of consumptive use of truly wild resources than does the
current one. Further, such consumptive use need not be constrained to a single method
of limiting consumption to that which is sustainable. Some parts of it might look similar
to a subsistence (or “bush meat”) system. Some parts of it might borrow from Aldo
Leopold's “split-rail” mentality, the logical successor to the early hunting conservation-
ists of North America, in which an inherent desire to emulate frontier conditions leads
hunters to deliberately devise rules that make their own hunting success more difficult.
Yet other parts of it might look a bit like standard market economics, with resources
extracted solely for their commodity value, albeit with harvest controlled by a system
of feedback loops that act to limit offtake rates. These models of consumptive use all
relate to different strands of Chinese thought regarding wildlife, although they share
a common bond in affirming, rather than denying, wildlife's utilitarian value. 1 More
importantly, they share a deliberate intention of providing wildness with a tangible,
economic value in the lives of local people, thus reinforcing its historic importance in
their daily lives and giving it some measure of economic clout. In turn, both those living
directly on the land and those who would exploit it from afar would be required, through
socially or legally enforced mechanisms, to refrain from pursuing those developments
most damaging to wildlife.
LINKING PEOPLE WITH WILDLIFE THROUGH
THE DEVIL'S BARGAIN
International Hunting
The place to start is with the existing international (i.e., trophy) hunting programs, not
because they ultimately would loom large in overall importance, but because they contain
the germ of the Devil's bargain from which other programs can develop. Rather than
viewing them as complete packages, ready for expansion and replication throughout
western China, they should be viewed as seeds from which a more fully developed and