Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
ence of humans rapidly consuming increasing amounts of wood, minerals, water, fossil
fuels, and adding increasing amounts of greenhouse gases to the environment, come to
China. And then, once there, add to what you see now another 200 million people who
will be coming along soon, all 1.5 billion of them living at a higher standard than today.
Allowing some of China to prioritize the thousands of nonhuman species that also con-
sider it home is not going to be easy.
Thus, regardless of what strategies they decide to adopt, Chinese leaders with an inter-
est in conserving the country's irreplaceable wildlife will be faced with a Herculean task.
And by offering alternative opinions and often criticizing the approaches currently taken,
I do not mean to imply that conserving wildlife in China's west is a simple proposition.
Today's leaders are in an unenviable position, having inherited a legacy of hundreds of
years of unsustainable agriculture and forestry practices, compounded by the folly of
Mao Zedong's twin concepts that man need not heed the limits of nature, and that an ever
larger population would lead to an ever stronger China. Were China's leaders gifted with
uncanny vision and granted perfect knowledge, their task would still be enormous.
That said, there is increasingly little reason to excuse a poorly functioning wildlife
conservation system in China. The country is a nuclear power, a permanent member of
the UN Security Council, and the third (or second, depending on how it's calculated)
largest economy on earth. China has its own Antarctic research program and has put a
man in space.
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Still relatively poor on the whole and very crowded, China is almost all
grown up now, having largely pulled itself up by its own bootstraps to join the ranks of
the powerful and influential. It is quickly on its way to being what it has always wanted
to be, indeed, what it always felt it deserved to be given its history: a world power. It has
a relatively strong education system, and, among almost all of its citizens across a broad
array of various cultures, traditions of hard work and ability to put up with hardship. Isn't
it time that Chinese justifiably feel as proud of their husbandry of their natural resources
as they do of their cultural and economic successes?
CHINA'S WILDLIFE INSTITUTIONS IN BRIEF
A Chinese graduate student on his way to the United States to work on a Ph.D. once told me
starkly, “China has no wildlife management.” What he meant, I think, was that China lacks
institutions and staff specifically dedicated to adjusting human-caused wildlife mortality in
order to achieve management objectives, and that it lacks land-management policies that
consider the needs of, and conflicts posed by, wildlife. In this he was correct, but it doesn't
follow that there is no management or policy in China at all, because humans affect the
natural world so dramatically that even doing nothing is doing something. In the various
attitudes possessed by its citizens, its land-use policy, its nature reserves and international
trophy-hunting areas, its donor-assisted development projects, and of course, its laws and
regulations, China has, like it or not, a wildlife policy, and thus indirectly, a conservation
system. Assessing this system is the task of the remaining chapters in this topic. First, how-
ever, I will touch on the administrative schemes that exist nominally to deal with wildlife,
and to which foreigners might first look for information about wildlife in China.
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