INTRODUCTION - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 8

But it is with an extraordinary array of large-sized mammals that western China's rich
fauna stands out as noteworthy among arid biomes. I have had the experience of standing
on a particularly productive chunk of alpine meadow and identifying the fresh tracks or
droppings of seven different wild ungulate (hoofed-mammal) species, all within a few
bounds' distance. If North Americans think of the pronghorn antelope as symbolizing the
arid steppe of the New World, it is worth noting that western China is home to four species
of gazelles and another odd-looking antelope (the recently extirpated saiga), not to men-
tion the emblem of the Tibetan Plateau, the chiru (which is actually a goat even though it
looks like an antelope). If North America has its bison and Europe its wisent, China can
answer with the wild yak (although it's not a competition). Scrambling along cliffs and
skating along talus slopes are blue sheep (on the Tibetan Plateau), Himalayan tahr (along
the Himalayas), and Asiatic ibex (in Xinjiang). On the rolling hills below, China's wild
sheep, the argali, make the headgear of North American bighorns seem small. Western
China has never had lions, but it did have tigers until recently, and still has common
leopards reaching up into eastern Qinghai and snow leopards in most mountain chains.
There is, put simply, quite a lot to conserve and, put more darkly, quite a lot at risk.
THE ENORMITY OF THE TASK
As is well known, China is the world's most populous country (although India will soon
surpass it, and other countries have more densely concentrated populations). Although its
human population only seemed to explode in the twentieth century, China has been rela-
tively heavily populated for a long time. Even as early as 1200 C . E . there were about 100
million people living within today's borders (Figure 1.2). As is also well known, China's
people have, for at least 4,000 years and perhaps longer, organized themselves into societies
bound by language, use of irrigation, protection by armies, and common culture. So long
and deep is China's history that Chinese understandably tend to view most other cultures
as rather immature and untried. Not in many countries could one legitimately consider an
event that occurred in the year 1368—the establishment of China's second-to-last imperial
dynasty, the Ming—as being relatively recent. People—with their agriculture and their
livestock, their cities and towns, their dams and irrigation canals—have been heavy on
the land for a long time. Pearl S. Buck titled her 1931 classic extolling the hardships of
simple Chinese peasant life The Good Earth . In 1984, Canadian geographer Vaclav Smil
published one of the first topics warning of China's environmental problems, entitled
The Bad Earth . 7 When I look at today's Chinese landscape, so much of which bears the
unmistakable footprint of man, the earth seems not so much bad as simply tired. The
lands that make up China have done a yeoman's job in providing sustenance for untold
millions, ceaselessly and without rest for a few thousand years. They seem to be asking
for a bit of a break.
Of the societies known today as the “modern industrialized West,” none began to take
wildlife conservation seriously until the late nineteenth century. By that time, many species
that are now abundant—and that we take for granted—were at the brink of extinction.
Thus we are hardly in a position to take China to task for being a bit late in recognizing