Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
ture, county, or township level. Unfortunately, with only the occasional exception, there
are no personnel at all dedicated to wildlife at lower levels in western regions. With the
exception of some nature reserves and international hunting areas, the few paper pushers
at the national and provincial levels constitute the entire wildlife infrastructure in China. 16
Most counties and prefectures lack staff trained in wildlife biology entirely, and even nature
reserves and hunting areas are poorly funded and staffed. Nor are there game wardens per
se. Although some counties have “forest police,” these employees have multiple duties
that extend beyond apprehending poachers (mostly to preventing forest and range fires),
they are unarmed and minimally trained in wildlife, and only have authority to monitor,
but not to apprehend or arrest, violators.
In the United States and Canada, by contrast, most wildlife is managed by states and
provinces. Hunting and fishing licenses support a broad infrastructure of biologists,
wardens, and refuge managers, usually based in regional centers within each state.
These regional-level wildlife personnel usually get to know given areas quite well, and
divide their time between office- and field-based tasks. Thus, compared with that of
the United States, for example, the current structuring of wildlife authority in China is
excessively top-heavy, with many supervisors and few workers, all support-beams and
tresses but no actual building. Because there is, for all intents and purposes, no legal
hunting in China, a body of trained wildlife staff such as exists in the United States,
Canada, or Europe is lacking entirely, there simply being no reason for its existence.
Beyond dealing with permits and assisting with the very occasional survey, wildlife
staff at the provincial level do almost none of the work we associate with wildlife
management in North America.
In China, all government units work largely under the framework of the 1988 Wildlife
Protection Law. This law sets down very strict prohibitions on killing wildlife. In doing so,
it explicitly alienates people from wildlife, and implicitly establishes the geographic scale
on which costs and benefits of having wildlife are to be weighed as the entire People's
Republic. China's top-down and hierarchical political system ensures that lower-level
staff have little flexibility to deviate from the strictures in the 1988 law.
In addition to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES,
which it joined in 1980), China is also a signatory to most of the major wildlife-related
international treaties and conventions, such as the Ramsar convention (on protecting
wetlands) and the International Convention on Biological Diversity. Through its mem-
bership in the UN and the World Bank, China also participates in various loan and grant
programs administered through the Global Environmental Facility (GEF), some of which
may have benefits for wildlife habitat.
In this system, nature reserves take on the primary, and in some cases, the sole burden
of providing habitat for species that cannot thrive in human-dominated landscapes. A
system in which strictly protected areas are relied upon for wildlife habitat makes sense in
eastern China, but it does not make sense in western China. What China presently lacks,
indeed what it has never had, is a functioning system to regulate use of wild species by
common people, and to mediate and modulate the changes to habitats that occur with
persistent yet low-density human occupation. There has been rampant exploitation, and
Search WWH ::




Custom Search