"Are the police allowed to fish?"

A Tibetan blogger by the name "Ling Se Jur Tha" (གླིང་སྲས་བྱུར་མཐའ) reports fishing in the Zoege (Ch: Ruo’ergai) grasslands at the source of Machu (Yellow) River. The blog was posted on July 26, 2009. The blogger is reporting this incident because on the one hand the government claims protection of the Zoege Wetland as a nature reserve, while its own policemen, on the ground, are breaking the same law "with pride".

When independent media is absent, such citizen journalism deserves our close attention. If you read Tibetan, read the comments by readers on the original post . One of them suggests noting the vehicle number and reporting to higher authorities. Tibetans bloggers engaging in citizen journalism was first publicly identified by High Peaks Pure Earth.


A quick note on the importance of wetlands: Wetlands perform key roles in a river's hydrological cycle. During wet seasons when there is risk of flooding and high erosive activity due to increased flow in rivers, wetlands help reduce these risks by absorbing water like a sponge. The excess water is slowly released during dry season. Wetlands also filter sediments, chemicals and nutrients in groundwater.

I don't know what kind and quantity of fish are in the Zoege Wetlands but this area is known to bird lovers as a prime site for viewing migratory birds such as Black-necked Crane and Mongolian Plover.

Here is the translated post (in italics) with pictures.

Are the police allowed to fish?



This policeman is fishing in the vast Zoege grassland region (read the Tibetan language post for precise description of the location). I asked the policeman, "Can the police fish in the river?" He replied, "Of course," with pride.



Here he is, fishing. The laws and regulations of China are a joke.




This is his [police] car.

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"Medicinal Herbs"

I was browsing through Tibetan language blogs, and I came across this brief post by sKar Mig (སྐར་མིག་གི་ཟིན་བྲིས་) expressing concern about the ecological implications of excessive digging of medicinal herbs on the Tibetan Plateau. Over the years, the number of Tibetan families depending on the harvest of herbs, mainlyYartsa Gunbu (དབྱར་རྩ་དགུན་འབུ་ / also known as caterpillar fungus or Cordyceps sinensis), has been growing throughout the TIbetan Plateau, mainly in the south and the east. Daniel Winkler's website has lots of useful information and pictures related to mushrooms of the Tibetan Plateau. I met Daniel Winkler last year at UBC, where he did a presentation on "The Mushrooming Fungi Market on the Tibetan Plateau". I asked him about the ecological sustainability of Yartsa Gumbu, and he did not seem too worried about it because data available to him show that so far both the harvest and growth of cordiceps around the plateau have been favorable.

While there seems to be no systematic study that looks at the question of the ecological sustainability of livelihood based on yartsa gunbu, informed people like Professor Emily Yeh are concerned about the long term social and economic risks associated with excessive reliance on the yartsa gunbu trade. Today a significant proportion of the Tibetan population depend on collection and sale of cordyceps. What if this livelihood becomes impossible for whatever reason (legal bans/ecological/etc/)?

Here are the Image of the original Tibetan blog post and its English translation:



This year again people are digging the ground everywhere on the Tibetan Plateau . Since numerous Tibetans, Chinese as well as Muslims (harvesters) have been digging out the earth to gain medical herbs for decades. If this continues, severe damage in the ecosystem of the region will occur. It is urgent that the Government and the informed people do something to avert such a situation.

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Grasslands of Bathang County unsafe for livestock due to mining

Bathang county (Tibetan: འབའ་ཐང་; Chinese: 巴塘县) gets its name from Tibetan, meaning the vast grassland where one can hear sheep everywhere. "Ba" refers to the sound made by sheep, and "Thang" means plains or grasslands (as in "Tsa-Thang"). However, Washington Post has published a story today that says that the grasslands are not safe for the sheep anymore due to gold and copper mining in the region. Here are two quotes from the article:

Their sheep die when they drink tainted water flowing from the mine, or lick crushed ore left on the hillside, villagers say. Now there are reports that the mine will open another cave this year in the upper grassland above Dorje's home. "We are trying to think of every possible way to stop this. If we have to, we will carry stones and wood sticks to block the entrance as soon as [the miners] begin to dig again," he said.

"Last year, eight of my yaks died. They just fell down, foaming at the mouth," said Gompo Dondrup, a nomad and farmer in Bathang county in western Sichuan province, whose family has lost more than 60 percent of its herd. "At first we didn't know why. Later, the veterinarians told us it was because of the mine. We protested, but the mine continues to operate. They said they gave compensation to the government, but the government never gave us any."

Read the full Washington Post article here .
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Village headman's home attacked

Following is translation of a Tibetan language blog entry about "An incident near Kokonor Lake (News)" that was posted on January 22, 2009. Lake Kokonor is called མཚོ་སྔོན་ (Tso Ngon) in Tibetan. Tso Ngon means Blue Lake. The Chinese also has the same name in their language, which is Qinghai for Blue Lake. Lake Kokonor is the largest lake on the Tibetan Plateau (and in China). Reports indicate that the lake is shrinking due to climate warming, desertification and human encroachment.

[Photo courtesy of Wikipedia]

"An incident near Kokonor Lake (news)"
by Samten la



In recent years, an increasing number of fishermen around Amdo's Lake Kokonor have been catching a lot of fish and occupying pastures around the lake which belong to the region's nomads. So recently, the headman of Mogra village told the fishermen that they cannot fish here anymore and must immediately go away from the region. That night around seven to eight men, carrying different weapons with their faces covered in black cloth, came to the headman's house. Luckily the headman was not home that night. But the masked men severely assaulted the whole family and damaged their motorcycle and car and ran away. Next day on hearing the news, more than a thousand local people gathered and called for the fishing activity to stop immediately and asked them to go back. When a fight was about to break, the police came and arrested the suspects who came to kill the headman and the local nomads went home.

[end]
Translated by Yungdung Nyima of www.ecotibet.org
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"Climate Change as a Human Rights Issue for Subsistence-Based Societies"

Is it fair if the climate costs of development of industrialized economies such as US and China are borne by subsistence-based societies like those of Tibetans and the Inuits? Should the victims of climate change be compensated by its perpetrators? What if Tibetan nomads and pastoralists are being blamed and forcefully relocated for grassland degradation that is caused by global warming? Read an article by Professor Julia Klein of Colorado State University addressing some of these issues.




Climate Change as a Human Rights Issue for Subsistence-Based Societies
By Julia Klein
Source: ource: Trin-Gyi-Pho-Nya [སྤྲིན་གྱི་ཕོ་ཉ་], Tibet Justice Center, Vol. 2, No. 6, January 2005.

In December 2004, a meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change took place in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in anticipation of the upcoming entry into force of the Kyoto Protocol. At the same time, the Inuit -- 155,000 seal-hunting peoples scattered around the Arctic -- announced they were preparing a petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights stating that the United States, by contributing substantially to global warming, is threatening their existence. The Inuit people's lives and culture depend upon the Arctic ice. Scientists have concluded that climate change caused predominantly by human influences is causing that ice to melt and causing other impacts to the Inuit way of life. In their petition, the Inuit assert that because the United States is responsible for 25% or more of the greenhouse gas emissions that are contributing to climate change, the United States has an international obligation to prevent these human rights violations. The Inter-American Commission will forward the petition to the United States, which is the respondent, hold a series of hearings on the matter and determine whether this constitutes a violation of human rights.


[Photo by Raul Gutierrez]

Just as the Inuit rely on the arctic ice for their subsistence, Tibetan pastoralists depend on the alpine rangelands of the Tibetan Plateau for their survival. The pastoralists rely on the rangeland vegetation to convert the sun's energy into products - via domestic herbivores - that form the basis of their culture and subsistence. These products include food, clothing, housing, fuel, stored wealth, and transportation. The Tibetans also directly rely on vegetation for goods such as medicinal plants and other products.

Scientists, range managers and development personnell working on the Tibetan Plateau have primarily ignored issues of climate warming effects on the Tibetan rangelands. Rather, they have focused on the Tibetan rangelands with respect to grazing issues. The Tibetan rangeland debate is often couched in terms of whether the Tibetans are "rational" or "irrational" land managers, whether animal densities are increasing or decreasing on the Tibetan Plateau, the merits and drawbacks of fencing and sedentarization, and the effects of small mammal grazing on the rangelands. While most of these issues are very important, they should be studied in the context of a changing underlying climatic condition. These topics also highlight the propensity for scientists, range managers and development personnell working on the Tibetan Plateau to observe rangeland degradation, observe grazing animals (or fences or small mammals), and make a causal connection between the two based on observation rather than a valid scientific analysis of cause and effect.

While very little research has been conducted on how climate warming may affect ecosystem goods and services on the Tibetan Plateau, work has recently been published in the scientific literature (Klein et al. 2004) that shows climate warming could cause as much as a 36% decline in plant species diversity on the northeastern region of the Tibetan Plateau. This includes declines in medicinal plant species and palatable forage species richness. This work also indicates warming could reduce overall vegetative productivity and increase shrub encroachment in this region of the Tibetan Plateau (Klein 2003).

There is a consensus among the scientific community that much of the present climate warming on Earth is due to human activities (IPCC 2001). According to the New York Times, the United States was the only country at the climate meetings in Buenos Aires which continues to question the climate change science. There is also evidence that climate warming is occurring on the Tibetan Plateau (Thompson et al. 2000). China, which ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 1992, is the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases, but per capita emissions of global warming pollutants in China are just 15 percent of U.S. levels. China accepted no mandatory greenhouse gas emissions target under the Protocol -- only developed countries are subject to binding emission targets in the Kyoto Protocol's first emission control period, 2008 to 2012.

Climate warming is an unusual environmental problem because the primary actors driving the changes can be far removed from the most vulnerable recipients of the climate change effects. This large spatial disconnect between drivers and recipients is due to the nature of greenhouse gases, which mix relatively rapidly in the atmosphere across the globe. The Inuit people can assert their rights in the international arena because there has been careful documentation of climate change in the arctic, because the ecological and social impacts of climate change on the Inuit people have been rigorously studied for over a decade, and because supporters of the Inuit people recognize the links between politics, human rights and climate change. The Tibetan pastoralists, who are potentially highly vulnerable to climate change impacts, will also need to rely on rigorous science and an interested community to assert their rights to a resource base that is being affected by anthropogenic climate changes and to bring this issue to the attention of the international community.

References cited:
1. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2001. Climate change 2001: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (ed. Houghton, J.T., Griggs, D.J., Noguer, M., van der Linden, P.J., Dai, X., Maskell, K., & Johnson, C.A.). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
2. Klein, J.A., J. Harte & X.Q. Zhao. 2004. Experimental warming causes large and rapid species loss, dampened by simulated grazing, on the Tibetan Plateau. Ecology Letters 7(12) 1170-1179.
3. Klein, Julia A. 2003. Climate warming and pastoral land use change: implications for carbon cycling, biodiversity and rangeland quality on the Northeastern Tibetan Plateau, PhD Thesis, University of California, Berkeley.
4. Thompson L.G., Yao T., Mosley-Thompson E., Davis M.E., Henderson K.A. & Lin P.-N. (2000) A high-resolution millennial record of the South Asian monsoon from Himalayan ice cores. Science, 289, 1916-1919.

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