Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
common cause between human development and wildlife conservation. As well, it remains
true that our lives as human beings are immeasurably impoverished by the loss of species
and of natural habitats.
But simply asserting that it is in mankind's interest to conserve wildlife without pursuing
the argument more deeply glosses over the crucial roles of geographic and temporal scale.
In fact, only on very broad geographic and painfully long time scales is it accurate to con-
tend that the health of wildlife populations and the development of human material wealth
find common cause. On a local scale and within a shorter time frame, it is very difficult to
support the argument that lives are made “better” (an admittedly culture-bound term) by
limiting our behavior so that natural habitat will thrive. More often, calculated on the basis
of family well-being and restricted to the scale on which families can control their destiny,
their interests and that of wildlife will conflict.
For example, for the pastoralist whose family's well-being depends on the immediate
products and/or monetary returns obtained from his livestock herd, the healthy and vigorous
condition of grasslands under his control is a prerequisite. However, the pastoralist maximizes
benefits to his family to the degree that he can sequester that vegetative biomass and direct
it toward the bodies of his domestic livestock. Wild animals that compete with his livestock
for forage, or worse yet kill them, are in no way beneficial to his economic livelihood. Simi-
larly, a woods worker depends on the sustainable production of new trees lest his own trade
disappear with the last clear cut. But he maximizes his production of wood by harvesting
(and immediately arranging for reseeding) just at the point where those trees have attained
their greatest net accumulation of wood, and he loses value if he waits until trees are older to
cut them down. Thus, to the degree that both the woods worker and forested wildlife depend
on the perpetuation of forests, their interests coincide. But in preferring a forest in which
all trees are growing at their maximum rate (and then immediately recycled into seedlings),
his optimal economic scenario spells doom for wild species requiring old, slow-growing,
or dead trees for part of their life-history.
Without doubt, mankind is inextricably linked to the biosphere and cannot destroy
it without destroying himself. But the complex civilizations that have allowed humans
such an unprecedented dominance among the earth's species have developed primarily
because of humans' success in appropriating and channeling the natural flows of energy
and nutrients toward themselves, and away from all other flora and fauna. It could arguably
be asserted that the ability of humans to exist at high population densities is inextricably
linked to their reduction of forest cover, usurpation of productive land for agricultural
use, and, in general, simplification of complex ecosystems. This may seem a bitter pill,
perhaps even wrong-headed, when viewed from the confines of a wealthy, developed
country, but is easier to see when assessing the generally negative relationship between
the persistence of native fauna and any chosen index of “modernity” within units of an
area one might examine in China.
Emblematic of this dynamic was a brief, but remarkable, interaction I witnessed in 1993
between a survey team of scientists intent on documenting and generating strategies to sustain
the remaining biodiversity in a remnant forest in western Yunnan Province, and an ethnic hill-
tribesman (who was also a part-time government official) greeting them upon their arrival.
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