A FUTURE FOR WILDLIFE IN WESTERN CHINA - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 213

Figure 10.1 A conceptual diagram of the potential for sustainability in a subsistence hunt
under conditions in which knowledge and control are imperfect. The best prospect
(bottom, front) is found where market interactions are weak, population density of
target species as a function of its resource renewal rate is high, and institutional
oversight is deliberate rather than incidental. Worst prospects (top, back) are
at the opposing set of conditions. This conception assumes that the level of
technology is constant.
built-in constraints against overharvesting are considerably weakened. If wildlife can be
exchanged for money that can be hoarded (or worse yet, accrue interest at a rate higher
than its own renewal rate), an incentive will exist to extinguish the resource as soon as
possible. Indeed, the left-hand axis of Figure 10.1 simply reiterates the integrity of “sub-
sistence” as a principal underlying this type of use. Wildlife killed for truly subsistence
purposes must be consumed relatively locally and relatively quickly, weakening incen-
tives to overharvest. An increase in the degree of integration with distant markets (and
thus wildlife's substitutability) corresponds with a lessening of the subsistence nature
of the hunt.
Finally, even in subsistence hunts, it is necessary to have institutions that bind individual
citizens together for the greater good. Traditional subsistence hunts of premodern cultures
are sometimes viewed as having been sustainable based only on taboos, rituals, or inherent
conservation ethics, but a sober analysis often suggests that lack of technological ability
to overexploit usually played an important part. That is not to suggest that governments
necessarily must exert a heavy hand, or that traditional conservation values and mores