A FUTURE FOR WILDLIFE IN WESTERN CHINA - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 223

pristine nature but are so divorced from reality that they carry no weight. A new Nature
Reserve Law should abandon the current vision for “core zones,” in which even tempo-
rary and nonmotorized human presence is essentially prohibited. This vision is neither
realistic nor necessary for effective maintenance of even the most wild of western China's
nature reserves. Far more logical would be a simple policy dictating that core zones be
reserved for nonextractive, nonindustrial (and, if possible, nonmotorized) human pres-
ence. Permanent human occupation, livestock grazing, hunting, and mining would be
prohibited (as they are, on paper, at present), but research and small-scale tourism could
be accommodated.
Buffer zones surrounding core zones of western China's nature reserves are the logical
places to begin implementing the sustainable use concept so often invoked in Chinese
writing. Livestock grazing, hunting, and mining could occur, but would be restricted and
managed. Reserve staff would retain the rights to limit livestock numbers and enforce
seasonal grazing restrictions, and to require mitigations of industrial activities that devalue
native flora and fauna. Buffer zones would thus begin to look like their name implies, and
provide critical experience in the vital but currently missing art of balancing the habitat
needs of native species with the economic needs of people. Management of land use
within international hunting areas would also be similar to these buffer zones (the main
distinction being that hunting by foreigners would be an explicit objective, and also the
primary source of funding).
There is ample precedent for such a relaxation of overly stringent regulations. Consider
the following quote:
All commercial use of the reserves is prohibited. It is illegal to cut the timber; it is
against the law to run livestock on the reserves. It is illegal to remove minerals, or
to shoot game, or even to walk across the invisible fences that the law has erected
along . . . defined borders.
This quotation was not written to describe the regulations governing Chinese nature
reserves, although it does so accurately. Rather, it was a description of the legal status
of the forest reserves in the United States as of 1896, the year in which their scope was
expanded to reach 154,000 km 2 . These reserves subsequently became the first U.S. na-
tional forests, which, starting the very next year, were to become managed under a quite
different philosophy—one of sustainable use. 18 It is this very philosophy of prudent use,
leading toward long-term interest in conservation, that is lacking in western China, but
is required to reconcile the current conflict between protection and development.
The prudent-use philosophy can also be extended to some areas currently identified as
experimental zones. But some of the so-called experimental zones, which most reserve
plans envision playing host to a variety of economic enterprises (most of which conflict
with biodiversity protection in any case), should be abandoned by nature reserves, and de
jure management authority returned fully to the counties, townships, and collectives that
already possess it de facto . This may result in some reduction in overall size of the pro-
tected area system, which may strike at current Chinese pride in its enormous size. Jiang