INTRODUCTION - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 17

most of us live in human-centered societies, connected to wildlife only via indirect and
circuitous routes, it is usually difficult to see what effects our actions have on wildlife.
And, as just one of over 6 billion human beings (most of whom live far from wildlife),
one individual can hardly make a difference. Instead, we generally find that we must
institutionalize conservation, for example by establishing limits on how many animals
we kill and on how much habitat we convert, which can be enforced by social institutions
such as governments. I will argue that both Chinese history and the examples of modern
societies elsewhere suggest that a more promising path is to increase, rather than decrease,
human interactions with and appreciation of wildness. The Devil's bargain that I contend
the Chinese have not appreciated is that we can accept restrictions on our own vaunted
task of civilizing the wild if we are able to benefit directly from having the wild. The
triumph of civilization over wilderness is not yet complete, but we must limit ourselves
over the long term in order to allow wildness a place in our future. Such a fundamental
limitation of what would appear to be progress will only be possible if some tangible
benefits accrue to society from prioritizing biological niches other than human.
The rub, of course, comes in institutionalizing incentives for players at all levels of the
system to prioritize long-term benefits over short-term profits. It is worth pondering whether
this is possible in Chinese culture, with its weak tradition of power coming from the bot-
tom, spread reasonably evenly over individuals assumed to be equal in prerogatives and
responsibilities. Yet such does not seem totally unrealistic, particularly if management units
are focused on local rural areas sufficiently small that they retain an internal sense of con-
nectedness, and particularly if management policy attempts to harmonize with the tradition
of viewing wildlife primarily in terms of its material value.
I am an advocate of change. Scholars of the Chinese legal system William Alford and
Yuanyuan Shen have written that “it is imperative to develop an approach toward environ-
mental protection that takes account of Chinese circumstances without accommodating
them so completely as to surrender all possibilities of fostering transformation.” Simply
replace the words “environmental protection” with “wildlife conservation” and one has
a nice encapsulation of my perspective on change and tradition as it relates to wildlife.
This challenge, it seems to me, is the real one facing China's vulnerable wildlife.