INTRODUCTION - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 10

had yet to arrive en masse. These early conservationists had the vision to develop game
regulations when habitat was still sufficiently abundant to allow most of the species that
had been ravaged by the unregulated slaughter of the nineteenth century to recover. They
also had the vision to carve from their midst substantial chunks of landscape where natural
processes would enjoy priority well before these parcels of land had become the subject
of intense human demands. When China reached an analogous stage in conservation, it
had a human population density over ten times what the pioneers of the North American
conservation movement dealt with.
As is also well known, China has embarked on the most ambitious program of
population stabilization in world history (popularly, if somewhat inaccurately, known
as the “one-child policy”), and has enjoyed considerable success in lowering its rate of
population growth. Today its population growth rate is similar to that of countries many
times wealthier (hence its impending loss of the dubious honor as world's most popu-
lated to India). But the twin legacies of son preference (owing to the traditional pattern
of farming families gaining daughters-in-law by having sons, but losing everything by
having daughters) and Maoist pro-natalism (a combined Marxist and Confucian belief
that because human labor or wisdom can overcome any obstacle, the more Chinese the
better) have doomed twenty-first-century China to continued population increase despite
its tremendous achievements in family planning. It is currently estimated that China's
population will not peak and begin to slowly recede until it reaches about 1.5 billion. 9
Furthermore, Chinese citizens of the 1980s, while poor by international standards, were
already expecting to live according to industrialized standards, and thus their require-
ments of the land (in terms of crops, livestock products, minerals, water, waste disposal,
and other assorted features of modern civilization) were incomparably higher than those
of North Americans in the early twentieth century.
The reason that wildlife conservation is difficult—indeed the reason there is need
for conservation at all—is that we humans tend to appropriate as much of the earth's
resources and the sun's energy as we possibly can. Wildlife—meaning biodiversity in all
its fullness—is dependent on these same resources, with each species finding a unique
way of using a small part of them. Whereas human development depends on channeling
resources and energy into a very few products we find useful, and simplifying systems
so that they work most efficiently for our own species, intact ecosystems that support
wildlife depend on diversity and complexity. The calories and proteins wrapped up in
diverse vegetation, the fresh water needed by fish, and the large expanses of space needed
to escape predators are all required by healthy, natural ecosystems. Yet to humanity, with
its overriding interest in development, these and other features of diversity are simply
waste. Just as Westerners have been doing for the past few centuries, Chinese citizens—not
only those living in cities that have long since ceased to harbor much wildlife, but also
those living on mountain slopes, deserts, reclaimed wetlands, and vast grasslands—are
furiously working to elevate their degree of creature comforts by controlling and convert-
ing the earth's matter and energy into forms useful for themselves.
Most of us possess an abstract understanding of modern civilization's demands on the
natural world. If you want to see this up close and personal, if you want a visceral experi-