Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
necessarily on that trajectory. This is either because the underlying vegetative produc-
tivity and resilience supports heavy grazing without undergoing directional change, be-
cause residual cultural factors act to prevent the buildup of herds past the level at which
vegetation can tolerate them, or some combination of the two. In these latter areas, the
presence of pastoralists has not necessarily been anathema to conservation of biodiver-
sity (although even here, lands are not pristine, and compromises to both livelihoods and
wildlife abundance are inevitable).
There appear to be two philosophical camps from which opinions arise on the extent
of grassland degradation in western China, the root causes of any such degradation, and
proposed solutions.
78
Most Chinese literature focuses on the poor condition of grasslands,
and if not appealing to heaven's wrath in the form of lower precipitation, blames overgraz-
ing as arising from irrational, unscientific, and ill-informed traditional pastoral systems.
Proposed solutions are almost inevitably technological, and when sociological factors
are invoked, quasi-privatization and sedentarization is usually suggested as a corrective
to the perceived lack of incentives to limit grazing intensity under traditional systems.
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In contrast, most of the Western literature focuses on the purported wisdom of tradition-
ally mobile pastoral systems, and either denies that grazing pressures are currently too
high to support sustainable livestock production and stable grassland communities, or, if
admitting to current grazing problems, blames them on the loss of that traditional wisdom
at the hands of ill-informed Han Chinese.
80
The current Chinese view of western grasslands is almost entirely a naïve adoption
of Garret Hardin's nostrum that “freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.” Both in un-
derappreciating common-property systems that characterized pre-liberation pastoralism
(and worked, directly or indirectly, to regulate livestock pressure and mitigate rangeland
damage) and in opting for a private-property-mimicking solution (allocation and fenc-
ing of individual-household pastures), Chinese policy has implicitly applied a Western
“ranching” model to pastoralists. To its credit, the Chinese policy known as the “set of
four” (
si pei tao
) seems intended to both reduce poverty among nomads and reduce high
stocking rates where per capita livestock productivity is negatively affected by poor range
conditions.
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As well, fencing and houses do not necessarily mean the complete absence
of migration or flexibility; most Chinese sedentarization efforts are focused on winter
pastures, while summer pastures often remain fluid and unfenced.
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Chinese rangeland
policy is not necessarily guilty of a fundamental conceptual error when it attempts to
apply the largely successful household responsibility system to pastoralists. In theory,
a tight linkage at the household level of responsibility and husbandry for land, on the
one hand, with capture of benefits and acceptance of losses on the other, should provide
incentives for sustainable grazing. In providing pastoralists an equitable but finite and
immutable land base, the implicit assumption of Chinese policy—that individual families
will discover their own best interest to be in limiting livestock numbers—is a reasonable
first approximation.
The rub is that, even at its best, a quasi-privatized ranch model would encounter practi-
cal difficulties in the harsh and remote conditions typical of China's western rangelands.
83
Because yearly range capacity varies greatly, sedentary pastoralists need to adopt either a
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