Outlining Nomad's Land.

This blog is where I will be posting thoughts and photos and findings from my Watson year. It will contain long ramblings about my findings, and short snapshots and anecdotes. This first post will be a lengthy, and perhaps a bit dry, example of the former, but if you want to know what the project is all about, keep reading.

The idea behind my project, "Nomad's Land -- Development, Conservation and Nomads" is to spend a year talking to nomadic pastoralists who are caught between the forces of development and conservation.

----------

That economic development is hard to reconcile with environmental protection is well-established. The global economic system faces many challenges, among the most complex of which is addressing widespread poverty without jeopardizing the environment and our natural resources. Disparities in living standards between different parts of the world are rising, and increasing economic opportunities in poorer countries is an important means of reversing that trend.

However, economic development and industrialization have historically been very resource intensive, and have had detrimental effects on the environment through e.g. pollution and the depletion of natural resources. This problem is exacerbated in many poor countries, where governments struggling to provide basic needs for their populations are unable to shoulder the cost of environmental protection, and sometimes purposefully weaken environmental protection policies to attract investment.

Domestic and international environmental organizations therefore work to establish conservation zones to shield ecosystems and animals from the effects of development. Meanwhile, the lands that are often sought for development or conservation purposes are rarely uninhabited. Indeed, nomadic pastoralists increasingly find themselves caught between the two powerful forces of development and conservation, both of which pressure them to leave the land that their families have wandered for generations.

During two months of field research in Mongolia last summer, I set out to study the challenges facing conservation efforts. I reached very few conclusions, but discovered countless unanticipated questions that I reflected upon after my return home. The most intriguing of these relates to nomads and the effect that conservation has on their livelihoods. I had always thought of protected areas – legally established areas restricting human access dedicated to the protection and maintenance of biological diversity – as being unambiguously good phenomena, one of the best methods invented for preserving valuable species and ecosystems.

My goal then was to study the effect that mining and other economic interests have on this kind of conservation, but I came to realize that protected areas in fact have profound effects of their own. They reflect very particular assumptions about how ecosystems are best managed, and pastoralist lifestyles usually have little place within that set of assumptions: pastoralists’ land-use practices are seen as incompatible with conservation objectives and the herders themselves are seen as disturbances. Moreover, exploration for natural resources is being undertaken in ever more remote places, and recent discoveries on traditional grazing lands have attracted mining companies to the area.

Consequently, nomads who have prospered for thousands of years in hostile environments are struggling to cope with outsiders’ new and conflicting interests in that same land. Migration routes have been cut off by national borders, mining claims, and park boundaries, and migrants have been forced to move away from ancestral lands and to settle down. Most disturbingly, nomadic peoples have had little voice in decision-making processes.

This pattern holds true for nomads in all corners of the world, including the reindeer herding Sami in northern Scandinavia, the pastoralist Kuhi in Iran, the Fulani in West Africa, and the Kolla in Latin America. Despite the wide distribution of the problem, the issue has received remarkably little attention from scholars. Indeed, the 2004 World Parks Congress was the first of its kind to actually include indigenous mobile peoples, many of whom came to challenge the prevailing approach to conservation.

Many people working with conservation are trapped in their own perceptions of the world and their own views of how policies should be shaped, unwilling to listen to anyone who might challenge their most entrenched convictions. Unfortunately, this group often includes nomads, so their voice is not part of the conservation discussion. Don't get me wrong, I am a very green person (some would even go so far as to call me a dirty hippie), and I believe that preserving the environment for future generations is one of my generation's great challenges.

But perhaps we need to re-think how to best achieve this. This is why I want to listen to nomads. I want to listen, to record and to document; to be challenged, to be thrown off, to be surprised; to analyze, to break down and to understand.

By sharing my findings, I hope to help nomadic people overcome physical and cultural distances from national governments by obtaining a political voice and influence over their countries' development and conservation efforts.

This is one of the first steps of the sharing part. I hope you will enjoy reading about this at least a tiny fraction of the amount I will enjoy telling you about it.