Research on Landscape and Conservation- Yiyi Wei, BFA Glass, 2019

“When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”

Aldo Leopold 

A Sand County Almanac 

On July 1st, the first day of my internship, I met with my WCS supervisor Liang in Dali, Yunnan, (an adjacent province to Tibet) where my first part of internship took place. Liang established a plan in the first month, aiming for an immersive understanding of conservation and its systems. In these first 10 days, I was assigned to dive in to books/articles and a presentation, in order to get an overview of wildlife conservation’s broad spectrum. For me, this part of research is constructed on an awareness of ‘Landscape’— its broadness, diversity, inclusiveness and the problems that it’s encountering.

Geographically, Chang Tang is an area covers not only northern part of Tibet, but also western Qinghai Province, and the southern part of Xinjiang. At North, it goes as far as Kunlun mountain range and Kekexili; at East it includes Sanjiangyuan (literally means the source of three rivers, which are Yangtze, Yellow and Mekong.) Water flowing out from this region of Tibetan Plateau goes through China and countries of Southeast Asia, from Myanmar to Vietnam. 

Larger than 270,000 square miles, Chang Tang’s land is like a vessel, encompassing mountains that expand to neighbor countries, glaciers supporting human and wildlife as well as regulating temperature of the area, animals that are migrating or dispersing, and human being, who has been living in some locations for generation after generation. 

Tibetan’s lives are deeply interlocked with the wildlife and the environment up at the high lands.

Permafrost [rocks and soil that contains ice] determines distribution and quality of pasture, which determines the well being of herbivores like domestic yak and sheep, wild yak, chiru [Tibetan antelope], pika, Marco Polo sheep and more. These animals then affect carnivores such as wolf, Tibetan brown bear, fox, snow leopards and tigers. Glaciers, lakes, mountains and valleys create important habitats for migration and breeding. 

Speaking broadly, pressing problems come from two major perspectives— climate change and human activity. Warmer temperature from climate change, a phenomenon that is responsible globally,  creates negative feedback loops on the environment that supports life, affecting both domestic herds as well as wild animals. Melting glacier increases glacier avalanche that destroys animal habitats, meanwhile causing water level to rise up in lakes, flooding pastures and roads. Retreating glacier also leads to water shortages in villages that are dependent on it as water source. Increasingly warmer winter decreases vegetation’s growing season as well, contributing to pasture/meadow’s degradation. 

Human activity on the other hand, such as hunting, mining, increasing population, as well as  constructions like roads, fences and settlements are obstructions among wildlife habitats and migration routes. Developments that help improving the local living standards are crucial, nonetheless sometimes these developments can negatively affect human just as much as wildlife. Decrease in wild herbivores due to human activities mentioned above, results in carnivores preying on domestic herds, which leads to revenge-driven huntings toward carnivores. And this phenomenon is only one of the many. 

Therefore, I think maybe to conserve a species, is to preserve the soil that it’s stepping onto—the same soil that we are also standing on; to vitalize the food that it’s seeking for, and to understand the people whom it’s living with—the people who plays a crucial role in conservation with their behavior and awareness.

Human is an element of an interlocked, interconnected, interactive system that consists of many other elements. While we are affecting non-human entities, the consequences also reflect back to us. The first step to understanding conservation is to discern interconnected elements of the land— from ground to sky, from the disappearing animal to local government politics, from ecology to anthropology.