CHINA’S WILD WEST - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 37

1980s, organized and extensive rangeland surveys were conducted by the provinces,
with standardization and guidance from the Ministry of Agriculture in Beijing. 54 These
investigations no doubt varied considerably in their quality and thoroughness, but at least
benefited from consistent methods and definitions. Each survey developed livestock car-
rying capacities (from which allocations to families from the former communes were
determined); if inaccurate, these capacities were at least based on field data that could
later be checked and adjusted. Some surveys even documented growing conditions with
geographically fixed photographs, allowing future trends to be seen as well as measured
quantitatively. They thus constituted an invaluable starting point from which trends in
range condition, as affected by livestock numbers, herding strategies, economic incen-
tives, land tenure arrangements, and—as always—yearly weather anomalies, could have
been measured.
The great tragedy was that no system was ever set up or funded to continue such range-
land monitoring on a continual basis, notwithstanding general exhortations in the 1985
Grassland Law to do exactly that. Instead, the grassland surveys of the early 1980s were
treated as though they were capable of determining inherent and unalterable characteristics
of each surveyed area. The one-time nature of the surveys betrayed an unstated but per-
vasive belief that science could determine fixed properties of these complex and variable
systems, to which the social and organizational systems need merely adjust themselves
to produce a sustainable pastoral economy. It was thus impossible, for example, to alter
livestock carrying capacities—whether implemented or not—if subsequent monitoring
revealed the initial estimates to be erroneous. 55 Instead, assumptions and projections that
would constitute a baseline for years to come were developed based on only one or two
seasons' data. 56 The years of sampling were plucked from all the variations inherent in
such arid ecosystems not because they were known to be representative or random, but
simply because they coincided with the administrative mandate for conducting the surveys
and allocating the livestock.
That is not to say that no inventories of grassland condition have been conducted since
the early 1980s. Indeed, there have been studies, each providing a snapshot of information
gathered at the time. But such individual, time-specific studies can only describe what is
found; they fail to provide any longitudinal data with which to compare the magnitude
of changes over time, much less to relate those changes unambiguously to biophysical
and anthropogenic causes. Without monitoring trends over time, interpreting conditions
as being caused by grazing pressure is always liable to being confounded by bio-climatic
differences among sites and weather-related differences among years.
Four Case Studies of Grassland Condition
Given the scarcity of reliable data with which to make generalizations, a brief look at the
grassland/livestock dynamic at four of my study sites in pastoral western China is valu-
able, even if I, too, lack rigorous, quantitative data with which to make well-grounded
conclusions. Each of these four study areas falls on a different point along the precipita-
tion continuum that dominates western China (but all have similar elevations, which is