Settlement vs. Resettlement

Some people responded to my last blog post with more information that I want to share with readers.

1. There are many kinds of housing projects that are being built for herders and farmers on the Tibetan Plateau. So unless someone cross-checks the numbers on the ground, it is difficult to figure out exactly how many herders have been resettled.

2. A couple of friends (Thanks again!) brought to my attention that the Reuters article discussed in my previous blog post talks about 'settlement' (ding ju) of herders, which is different from 'resettlement' (yi min) of herders. Settlement likely means simply building permanent houses at the winter pastures where villagers live -- which is not in any way as serious as "resettlement" or "ecological migration" where herders are removed to new areas as in the case of the Three Rivers Headwaters Nature Reserve.

4. Speaking of 'ecological migration,' What happens to all the yaks when the nomads are forced to resettle? It seems like many sell the animals as they are suppose to do, while others leave their yaks with relatives for keeps. I don't have any credible or interesting story about the fate of these animals. Please share any information you may have on this issue.

3. Some housing projects are simply replacing traditional mud houses with houses made of bricks. This project is more prevalent in Tibet Autonomous Region, where, in total, 860,000 farmers and herders from 170,000 families have moved into the new houses by the end of 2008. According to this Xinhua article , "another 312,000 farmers and herders from 57,800 families moved from shanty homes into new solid brick houses in Tibet [Autonomous Region] this year under a government-subsidized housing project aimed at improving living conditions."

As much as I think this is a tragedy in terms of losing traditional architecture (its cheaper, locally more suitable, environmentally more sustainable, better insulation for Tibet's cold winter, aesthetically more beautiful, etc, etc.), these brick houses are popular among Tibetans. I have seen this trend among Tibetan Buddhist farmers of Ladakh and in Spiti Valley in India. While many of these farmers tend to prefer houses made of bricks with corrugated tin roof as modern and reject their traditional mud houses as pre-modern, many local leaders are clearly concerned about implication of these changes.


[Traditional Tibetan architecture in the Western Himalayas. Photo: Tashi Tsering]
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Snuffing out the nomads?

A friend brought this Reuters article to my attention. He was baffled by the sheer number of Tibetan herders that the article says will be relocated. According to the article, there are 530,000 nomads in Western Sichuan Province, out of which 470,000 herders will be resettled in the name of environmental protection. If these numbers are true, that's the last of the nomads in Sichuan. He said this is effectively "a kind of nomad genocide.” Although I never thought of this as such, I was pleased to see that at least someone was paying attention to this issue.

As evident from my earlier postings, I have been very concerned about the many large scale ecological resettlement projects going on in Tibet. To me, this is a far more serious issue than the high profile topics such as Hillary Clinton’s China visit or the arrest of monk protestors. Precisely because the resettlement project is a low profile, politically-correct sounding policy in the context of environmental protection, I think it is one of the most far-sighted strategies of the Chinese state to deal with several serious problems on the Tibetan Plateau at the same time. As the saying goes, "Kill many birds with one stone".



China has designated many areas on the Tibetan Plateau for different environmental protection goals. Local people living in these regions are usually forced to sell their yaks and then resettled somewhere. I haven’t dug into the numbers yet, but it is clear from Xinhua and other official reports that several hundred thousand people, mostly nomads and pastoralists, are being resettled from these “protected” areas. This Science magazine article, for example, talks about government plans for the “ecological migration” of nomadic herders living around Kokonor Lake (Tso Ngon) to restore the region’s “degraded” ecology. The power of scientific and environmental discourse makes these projects sound like noble endeavors. How could anyone oppose protection of wetlands, lakes, and endangered animal species?

There are other benefits of resettling Tibetan herders. The government wants to provide access to education, health, postal system and other development schemes in every corner of the country. Promotion of economic development, especially in politically volatile regions, is an important technique for promoting state legitimacy. The Tibetan herders have been a major problem to state policy makers in this regard. Statistics reflect these people poorly on both economic and human development scales, for which the government receives a lot of criticism, but it is difficult for the government to provide them access to development due to their nomadic and subsistence lifestyle. So settling them in housing colonies is one obvious way of dealing with this problem.

The Tibetan nomadic lifestyle is the heart of the traditional Tibetan economy, which is reliant on herding of yaks, goats and sheep. The nomadic lifestyle represents the symbolic spirit of Tibet to many people. Romantic notions of Tibetan nomadic life are popular not only among Tibetans and Western sympathizers but also among Chinese people. The government could not have settled the nomads by calling their lifestyle “backward” or “primitive”, as it was done in the past. The perfect excuse to do this, thus, is within the context of environmental protection. Rallying support for environmental protection on the Tibetan Plateau is easy. Tibet is known for its “biodiversity hotspots”, pristine lakes, old growth forests, “fragile grasslands”, and for being “China’s Water Tower.” And resettling people from nature reserve parks is not a new idea but a well tested strategy. States around the world have declared many areas inhabited by troublesome indigenous peoples as nature reserves in order to control and assimilate them into the political economy.

The real issue is not about a clash between romantic notions of the Tibetan nomadic lifestyle and state development. It is about choices, whether the herders have a say in the policies that shape their lives. Do the herders have a choice whether to resettle or not? The issue is also about scientific management. Is it scientifically appropriate to remove herders and halt grazing on the Tibetan Plateau? Julia Klein, a scientist who specializes in climate change impact on grasslands of the Tibetan Plateau, says that the ecology of the region “is a system that has evolved with grazing; the removal of grazing from the system could have profound ecological consequences.”

Going back to the topic of “nomad genocide,” I wonder if anyone has actually done some research on the numbers. I can only hope the figures quoted in the Reuters article are inaccurate or exaggerated. I wonder how many people have really been resettled so far, and how many more are yet to be resettled? If any of you readers have any information, please share. Thanks for reading this, and spread the word!

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5.8 billion US$ to displace more Tibetans

I re-subscribed to TIN updates yesterday and this morning I saw their latest news digest in my inbox. The updates were full of grim news: more protests and arrests on the Tibetan Plateau. Yesterday I learned that one of my best friends is unable to enter Kham (Eastern Tibet) from Chengdu. He may have to return to North America and postpone his work related to hospital and school building projects in the region. Authorities have closed off (many parts of) Eastern Tibet to ensure "stability" apparently because "March 10" is around the corner.

There was a different news piece that struck me. It directly relates to the questions I raised in an earlier post. The government has allotted 5.8 billion US$ to displace even more Tibetans in the name of environmental protection. How I wish people paid more attention and probed deeper into these issues. Here's the brief update from TIN:

"Tibetan nomads, farmers may be losers in China's ecology protection plan (Xinhua) More Tibetans are set to be displaced, losing their ancestral land, homes and way of life, as China spends 20 billion yuan (UK4.1 bn; $US5.8 bn; EUR4.5) during its eleventh Five-Year Plan period (2006-2010) to build a State Ecological Safe Shelter Zone on the Tibetan Plateau, reported state-run Xinhua. "Problems such as grassland degradation, land desertification, glacier meltdown, soil erosion etc. are affecting the whole ecological environment in China" because of the deterioration of the environment on the plateau, it said. Three shelter zones will be constructed from 2008 to 2030. The report said measures will include returning grazing land to pastures, controlling rodent and pest damage, standardising construction of five regional nature reserves and rural biogas construction."

On a different note, the High Peaks Pure Earth blog has an interesting story about Angry Tibetan Netizens over continued use animal fur by Tibetans on their ceremonial dresses.

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Tibetan Language Maps of Three Rivers Headwaters region

A kind supporter of Tibetan Plateau donated some photos of Tibetan maps showing Yushu, Nangchen, Drito, Zato, Chumarleb and other areas of SNNR. The maps were published by Tibet Information Network, a reproduction of "བོད་རང་སྐྱོངས་སྲིད་འཛིན་ས་ཁུལ་གྱི་ས་བཀྲ་", a set of nine maps made by the Chinese authorities in 1981. Since Tibetan language maps are quite rare, I hope these will be of interest to many people, especially Tibetan readers.














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Update on SNNR map and related China Beat Blog article

Update: SNNR subarea #7 Zhaling-Eling Hu (མཚོ་སྐྱ་རིང་སྔོ་རིང་)་extends into Dulan County, Haixi Mongolian & Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. This news wasn't too surprising as mentioned in SNNR Map Description that SNNR subarea boundaries cross administrative borders. Map in previous blog entry has been updated. We are working on further improvements.

An excellent article related to SNNR on The China Beat blog by Ken Pomeranz . Here's an excerpt focusing on Tibet's water:

[The] state has chosen a massive three-pronged effort to move water from South to North China – by far the biggest construction project in history, if it is completed. Part of the Eastern section began operating this year, and the Central section is also underway (though the December 31Wall Street Journal reported a delay due to environmental concerns). The big story in the long run, however is the Western line [in SNNR], which will tap the enormous water resources of China’s far Southwest – Tibet alone has over 30 percent of China’s fresh water supply, most of it coming from the annual run-off of some water from Himalayan glaciers. (This is an aspect of the Tibet question one rarely hears about, but rest assured that all the engineers in China’s leadership, including Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, are very much aware of it. Tibetans, meanwhile, not only see a precious resource going elsewhere when their water is tapped: they regard many of the lakes and rivers to be dammed as sacred.) The engineering challenges in this mountainous region are enormous, but so are the potential rewards, both in water supply and in hydropower – the electricity water can generate is directly proportional to how far it falls into the turbines, and the Yangzi, for instance, completes 90 percent of its drop to the sea before it even enters China proper. The risks, as our two stories make clear, are social and political as well as environmental…

Call the two news stories the “double glacier shock.” On December 9, Asia Times Online reported that China was planning to go ahead with a major hydroelectric dam and water diversion scheme on the great bend of the Yarlong Tsangpo River in Tibet. The hydro project is planned to generate 40,000 megawatts – almost twice as much as Three Gorges. But the water which this dam would impound and turn northwards currently flows south into Assam to form the Brahmaputra, which in turn joins the Ganges to form the world’s largest river delta, supplying much of the water to a basin with over 300 million inhabitants. While South Asians have worried for some time that China might divert this river, the Chinese government had denied any such intentions, reportedly doing so again when Hu Jintao visited New Delhi in 2006. But when Indian Prime Minister Singh raised the issue again during his January, 2008 visit to Beijing, the tone had changed, with Wen Jiabao supposedly replying that water scarcity is a threat to the “very survival of the Chinese nation,” and providing no assurances. And so it is – not only for China, but for its neighbors. Most of Asia’s major rivers – the Yellow, the Yangzi, the Mekong, Salween, Irrawaddy, Brahmaputra, Ganges, Sutlej, and Indus – draw on the glaciers of the Himalayas, and all of these except the Ganges have their source on the Chinese side of the border. Forty-seven percent of the world’s people, from Karachi to Tianjin, draw on those rivers.
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Mapping Three Rivers Headwaters Nature Reserve (Updated)

In May 2000, China declared the establishment of its largest nature reserve on the Tibetan Plateau: the San Jiang Yuan (Three Rivers Headwaters) National Nature Reserve (SNNR). Since then, China’s plans to protect the headwaters of the Yangtze (Drichu), Yellow (Machu) and Mekong (Zachu) rivers have received a lot of media attention. This recent BBC story, for example, highlights the relocation of '100,000 nomadic Tibetans.' However, there is very little information about the specifics of the plan in all of the published sources that I have come across. There isn't a single definitive map of SNNR. So I collaborated with some colleagues, who wish to remain anonymous, and prepared a new map of SNNR area using information compiled over the last few months. I am pleased to release the map here.

[Click on the image to view/download this (updated: Feb 20, 09) copyright free map]

This map is the most accurate and informative publicly available document of its kind on SNNR to date. It throws new light to the debates about SNNR and other nature reserves on the Tibetan Plateau. We have taken every possible step to ensure its accuracy, including crosschecks between different maps, reviews by experts who work in the region, and consultations with people from this region. Information we are currently doubtful are mentioned in a detailed description that should be used alongside with the map. There are no copyrights to the map, so please feel free to use it for educational purposes. We hope to produce better maps and reports on SNNR both in English and Tibetan languages in the future.

[Counties covered under the Three Rivers Headwaters Region. Maps are copyright free.]

To me, the establishment of SNNR and other nature reserve parks in Tibet raises many questions. According to a Chinese white paper on the environment of Tibet [Autonomous Region (TAR)], the government has established 70 nature reserve parks in the region between 1980 and 2003. The white paper states that 33.4% of TAR’s total land area is covered by nature reserves and that the government will increase the number and size of nature reserves in the region. So the first set of questions, leaving aside the rhetoric of conservation, pertains to the underlying economic and strategic purpose of establishing nature reserves in Tibet. What are the political and economic goals of establishing so many parks in Tibet?

The second set of questions concerns the politics behind scientific discourses of conservation and the relevance of "protected" parks in Tibet. Protection of mountains and grasslands from the nomads and their yaks? The ideas behind nature reserve parks that are applied in Tibet are based on Western ideas and approaches. How appropriate are these in Tibet? Why do governments and scientists continue to treat indigenous perspectives as irrelevant and unsophisticated into the 21st century? After all, these nomads and pastoralists have a proven capacity in maintaining the integrity of their local ecosystem. Their livelihoods depend on it and they have been living there for thousands of years!

I have pointed out elsewhere that the current top-down management approach of exclusion is unfit for nature reserve management in Tibet and developing countries in general. As Dr. Andreas Schild, the Director General of the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development has said in a recent interview that “Mountains without mountain people will be not sustainable.” Surely enough, Tibetan nomads and pastoralists who have been uprooted from their ancestral lands and made to live in concrete houses (see photos below) are facing serious economic and social problems that many have chosen to return to their traditional lifestyle.

[San Jiang Yuan resettlement housing blocks]

My final set of questions is about China’s commitment to environmental protection in relation to its development goals. Does the creation of nature reserves with new laws and regulations lead to environmental protection? How strong are China’s environmental laws? It appears that these laws exist mostly on paper and very little in practice. 

The Government has allowed several mining companies to operate in the "protected" area, including a Canadian company in one of the SNNR wetland conservation subarea of Chumarleb (Chu dMar Leb) county. The Three Rivers Headwaters area is also the site for a major river diversion project which involves construction of least three large dams (wall height of the dams are 175 meters, 295m, and 305m!) on the headwaters of the Yangtze and Yellow rivers, connected by a series of several hundred kilometres long tunnels through a mountain range that separate the two rivers.

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A Call for Help to Stop Logging in Khyung mChu

Here is an English translation of another Tibetan language blog post related to Tibet's environment. This post is a letter providing news and calling for help to stop the deforestation, which, according to the letter, has been secretly going on for over a decade in Khyung mChu township area of Hongyuan county in North-Western Sichuan's Ngawa Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (see map below). Although posted on the blog of Tibetan writer and singer Jamyang Kyi, the letter is written by a person named Mindruk. Jamyang Kyi says she is merely posting it on her blog as per the author's request.




[begin translation]

Dear Readers:

As everybody knows, protecting the environment is protecting one's own life and prolonging the future livelihood base for humanity. Therefore, we ask how can we protect the earth and how can we ensure future security and benefit existing livelihoods.

However, at the present time, in some places, pristine areas with beautiful hills and forest are being extensively destroyed and harmed for economic benefits. Major environmental pollution and destruction are taking place in the name of regional development and construction of suburbs. For example, in Zangkar [Zangs dKar] area of Kyungchu [Khyung mChu] (Hongyuan) county, tremendous destruction is being done to the land by gold mining activities. The residents of the area repeatedly complained to the government and made every effort to stop the mining. Some local monks even left the area in protest. Their efforts were able to stop the mining activities but only for a brief time.

I wanted to write about this issue for a long time, but I was unable to do so for some time due to other reasons. Zangs dKar is a beautiful region, blessed with ten natural qualities of soil, pristine natural forest with streams flowing down from the rocky mountain, with all kinds of life forms making the place their habitat. One third of the region used to be covered by forests. However, today, mining and logging activities have inflicted irrecoverable environmental damage upon the region. In this region there is a place called Thang Lung, which is rich in natural forests. Though some of the forests are under national level protection, the majority of the forests are under regional level protection. However, local authorities and offices do not have the power to independently cut down the forests.

According to the State Forest Protection Law, logging and other activities in the forests are not allowed unless one obtains necessary permits from the provincial, prefectural and city (local) level offices of the Department of Forest. The law also clearly outlines that consumption of forest resources must be lower than the natural growth rate of the forest. The State Forest Protection Law of the People's Republic of China clearly states that one must undertake verification with concerned local authorities and obtain the permit from the State authority for any kind of activities in the forests. In the last twelve years, large scale deforestation and widespread grassland degradation have taken place. Today, this area is so barren and horrific that people do not dare to catch a glimpse of the site.

According to the testimony of local people, these irrecoverable environmental damages are caused by the local and regional Forest Department offices. Every year, between Spring and Summer seasons, the local forest department undertakes extensive logging activities. They undertake these activities deep in the forest so that the public will not notice their actions. During the festive seasons when many people travel through the area, they halt the logging activities so that public will not know. Moreover, to fool the public, they have intentionally kept the forests near highway and bridges in its natural form. It is clear from their actions they are not in accordance with the law.

The local people and their representatives have repeatedly lodged complaints about the destruction of forests, and requested the authorities to stop these activities. However, authorities have never heeded these calls. This area is rich in old growth forest, it has all kinds of trees like pine, Juniper, fir and so on. Some of the old growth are believed to be over one thousand years old.

Just like scavenging vultures driven by an insatiable desire to eat flesh, they have been destroying the region's ancient forests without the slightest concern for many years. This is a very tragic scene. The place looks like a man without any clothes, standing naked to be humiliated. People believe it is because of this destruction and the resultant imbalance of the four elements that there were disasters like earthquake and landslides in the region. In order to protect Zangs dKar from this kind of continued disaster, I request my kind brothers and sisters, officials and journalists to help save the region from destruction.

Thank you.

From Mindruk, 2009/01/16.

Note: As requested by the writer of the article, I have put it as blog on this site.

[end translation]

Translated by Thinley Norbu of www.ecotibet.org
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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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Carbon emissions and the Tibetans

The prominent scientific journal, Nature, has an article about climate change and Tibet in its July 2008 issue, entitled The Third Pole. The article highlights the significance of ‘black carbon’ as a major heat-absorbing contributor of atmospheric warming: black carbon contributes about 50% of the solar heating of earth’s atmosphere and is the second largest (carbon dioxide being the first) cause of atmospheric warming over Tibet.

At first I was struck by the author's definition of black carbon as “the soot that results when people cook with bio-fuels such as wood, crop waste or dung.” Even more surprisingly, the author identifies Himalayas as a global hotspot for black-carbon emissions. When I told this to my advisor, he was skeptical considering the sparse population and low economic activity in Tibet. So I did some research. I read the two key studies that the author had cited in the paper. I found that her description of black carbon and Himalayan region’s contribution of the soot are inaccurate.

The author had only referred to one of the two categories of black-carbon sources. The original study, “Global and regional climate changes due to black carbon” by Ramanathan and Carcimichael had defined black carbon as comprising of two categories of sources: 1) in door sources such as the use of “biofuels like wood, dung and crop residue; and 2) outdoor sources such as fossil fuel combustion (dieseland coal), open biomass burning (associated with deforestation and crop residue burning), and cooking with biofuels” (R&C, p. 21).

So there are more than just bio-fuels that make up black-carbon. Still, how could the Himalayas, a sparsely populated area, be one of the global hotspots for black-carbon emissions? The region, even in the Southern face of the Himalayas in India, is not that densely populated, nor is it economically developed. Shimla, the capital city of the state of the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, may be one of the greatest contributors of black-carbon in the Indian Himalayas, but even Shimla cannot be that severe. As it turns out in Ramanathan and Carcimichael's study, the Himalayas is at the borderline between high and low black-carbon emitting regions. The Indo-Gangetic plains and the plains of “mainland China” are two of the major hotspots, not the Himalayas. The Tibetan plateau is clearly one of the lowest contributors of black-carbon, as shown in two simulated images of annual mean optical depth of black-carbon aerosols in the region (p. 225).

With these doubts clarified, I found two new (to me) noteworthy points:

1. Although CO2 and black carbon are the main contributors to atmospheric warming, water vapour actually has a even stronger greenhouse effect if measured per molecule. Water vapour is apparently not a big concern because it normally reaches no higher than 1–2 kilometres below the stratosphere, the layer of atmosphere which contains the most ozone. Research mentioned in the article says that climate warming (evaporation) and wind blowing over the plateau can transfer water vapour and pollutants (black carbon) into the stratosphere. If this is true, one can speculate that things could get pretty complicated and worrisome for the glaciers and snows on the the planet's Third Pole.

2. The article also touches on debates on the implications of the plateau's warming for the Monsoon. The obvious argument is that the increased (land) surface temperature would augment monsoon (higher temperature over land means more intense monsoon winds from the sea). However, some studies indicate that the plateau has had a weakening effect on the monsoon (see Fig. 4, R&C, p. 224). This is perhaps due to changes in land use patterns and aerosols that absorb solar radiation. So, it seems there is need for further studies before we can draw conclusions on this debate.

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Commercialization of Tibetan medicine in China

Below are two brief articles that were published in Trin-Gyi-Pho-Nya [སྤྲིན་གྱི་ཕོ་ཉ་]. The first article by Tashi Tsering expresses concerns for the social, environmental and the long-term sustainability implications of the Tibetan medical system due to its commercialization. In response, Tsultrim Gyaltsen provides some thoughtful suggestions on dealing with the situation, including payment of royalty fees for using plants from the Tibetan environment and the necessity of regulation being in the hands of people who possess the knowledge system.

Designing Modernization To Promote Traditional Tibetan Medicine
By Tashi Tsering
Source: Trin-Gyi-Pho-Nya [སྤྲིན་གྱི་ཕོ་ཉ་], Tibet Justice Center, Vol. 2, No. 6, January 2005.

Tibetan medicine has become a lucrative business yielding million-dollar profits to large pharmaceutical companies in China. Various new policies have been instituted to standardize the production and distribution of Tibetan medicinal products, mainly for commercial and bureaucratic reasons. These new policies are proving to be a debilitating legal framework for the persevering practitioners of the unique Buddhist healing tradition.

According to a study, there are 75 pharmaceutical companies dealing with Tibetan medicine in various corners of the Tibetan Plateau, out of which 30 are run by Tibetans. While the spiritual guidelines of making medicine according to the Buddhist medical texts – Gyushi – are increasingly compromised with the onslaught of industrial production of Tibetan medicine, an interesting issue that comes to point is regarding the efficacy of the healing powers of these medicine. “Amchi (Tibetan doctor) makes medicine to heal the patient but the pharmaceutical companies make medicine to reap profits,” explained a concerned Tibetan doctor from Amdo (now incorporated in Qinghai Province).

New government regulations require all Tibetan doctors to go through a cumbersome registration process. When approved, they are allowed to sell medicine, but only to their private patients. Rinchen-Tsotru-Dashel, a pill that normally costs 20 yuan, is now being sold for 50 yuan by pharmaceutical companies.

“Soon, we will be barred from producing these medicines as Chinese companies are gaining patents over different Tibetan medicines,” said the doctor. To the Tibetan people, the long-term issues involve the survival of this centuries-old healing tradition, as well as the access members of the community have to the tradition. Surely the ultimate subversion of the Tibetan medical tradition would be if the Tibetan people themselves were forced to purchase medicine invented by their own culture and made from their own land, at a higher cost, and from a Chinese company because of a contrived patent system set-up to benefit large industries to the exclusion of local practitioners.

Commercialization of Tibetan medicine also has environmental consequences. Most of Tibetan medicine’s plant ingredients are rare herbs that are endemic to Tibet’s high mountains. Currently, there are no mechanisms in place to check indiscriminate harvesting of these species. The commercialization of Tibetan medicine has dramatically increased demands for these ingredients, resulting in the widespread, unsustainable removal of certain plant species. Utpal Ngonpo (Blue poppy, meconopsis sp.), marketed as a cure for Hepatitis B by Chinese companies, is one such rare plant species that the Tibetan doctor fears might not survive if the current rate of harvesting continues.

The challenge for policy makers in China is not just the integration Tibetan medicine into the mainstream economy and modes of production, but also the preservation and promotion of a unique tradition of medical knowledge and expertise. While greater access to, and availability of, Tibetan medicine is a worthwhile goal, it will mean very little if the tradition which produced it is swallowed up and destroyed in the process.
===================================

Response from Tsultrim Tsering Gyaltsen
Source: Trin-Gyi-Pho-Nya [སྤྲིན་གྱི་ཕོ་ཉ་], Tibet Justice Center, Vol. 3, No. 1, March 2005.

Regarding your last editorial, "Designing Modernization To Promote Traditional Tibetan Medicine," there are some issues that should be given consideration for all parties involved at the practice or production level in "traditional" Tibetan medicine.

The plants and substances used in Tibetan medicine are also part of the fabric of life particular to Tibet and therefore a part of the heritage of the Tibetan people. The fact is that companies selling Tibetan medicines are not only profiting from the knowledge of Tibetan medicine but are also using the actual plants integral to the wholeness of the land. In consequence, I suggest the following two conditions.

1) There should be strict limits established regarding the sustainable harvest of these plants and that all companies, in some fair way, should share in that supply and those restrictions.
2) Non-Tibetan owned companies should pay a royalty fee for using plants from the Tibetan environment. When companies substitute foreign plants for native Tibetan plants then the resultant production should not be called Tibetan medicine.

Such measures could insure benefit for future generations in three ways.

1) The integrity of the environment would be assured by mitigating potential environmental damage from overuse.
2) They would create an economic basis for the enforcement of those regulations.
3) There would be an ongoing source of funds to support further research and training in all aspects of the tradition of Tibetan medicine.

Furthermore regarding the production of medicines the traditional texts often specify many conditions under which the ingredients for the medicines were to be collected, handled, and prepared. The texts may state, for example, that certain plants are to be collected only in certain months because their medicinal properties are then active, or that some medicines were only collected from north facing slopes, or in a certain season, or at night, or during a certain phase of the moon. These are some of the many subtleties that, in combination, make Tibetan medicine effective. It does not suffice for a manufacturer to have a list of ingredients that can be haphazardly combined to hopefully produce a positive result.

If what is called a "Tibetan medicine" is in the sole judgment of physicians, fully qualified in the Tibetan medical tradition, to be found to be of diminished quality, efficacy, or that it has a negative consequence for the environment as a result of its production, that product and its producer should be made to conform to traditional practice or the production should be discontinued.

Furthermore if the Tibetan medical system is to be regulated it should be done from the bottom up, not the top down. It must be put under the supervision of those who are intimately familiar with the traditional training and all of the prerequisites for the qualification of doctors and the production of the medicines. In such case, there should be assembled a congress of knowledgeable and qualified Tibetan doctors to establish the requirements for the formulation of the compounds used and the practice of the traditional medicine.

Regulation should come only from within the ranks of those who have an intimate understanding of the tradition and not by governmental officials or profit driven companies who know little or nothing of its nuances. The members of that congress should provide certification for a qualifying product that the product has been produced in accord with tradition and is an "authentic Tibetan medicine." This is the only way to insure the continued efficacy of the medicines and to prevent the bastardization of the Tibetan medical tradition for profit.

With this approach the twin goals of establishing standards of practice and production would be accomplished along with the guarantee of the preservation of all of the many nuances of understanding that are critical to the authentic continuation of the tradition.

A final point is that all names traditionally used for medicines should be part of the public domain. They should be available for use to anyone who produces medicines in accord with the above standards. They must not belong to any single company who could disenfranchise other legitimate producers of traditional medicines simply by controlling the rights to the names.
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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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Development and investment in politically volatile regions

There are no stringent international laws to regulate foreign investment in politically volatile regions like Tibet. Canada, for example, is a world leader in the mining industry and is actively seeking to profit from Tibet's gold and copper even though the ownership of Tibet's resources is a disputed issue. Tibet could benefit from foreign investment but it is difficult to ensure a fair and sustainable development under current political conditions. The Central Tibetan Administration of the Dalai Lama has laid out a guideline for foreign investment. In the following article, Carole Samdup of Montreal based Rights and Democracy opines that the Tibetan guidelines would have been more appropriate with a human rights based approach for development.

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A Human Rights Framework for Development in Tibet
By Carole Samdup
Source: Trin-Gyi-Pho-Nya [སྤྲིན་གྱི་ཕོ་ཉ་], Tibet Justice Center, Vol. 2, Issue 3, May 2004.

When the Tibetan government-in-exile (TGIE) released its new Guidelines for International Development Projects and Sustainable Development in Tibet last month, it emphasized a "needs-based approach" for planning and implementation of development initiatives on the high plateau. In adopting this needs approach, the TGIE has failed to take into account the current momentum within development circles for a rights-based framework for development planning, implementation and evaluation strategies.

In describing its rationale for a needs-approach, the TGIE said:

"It is time for a new approach based directly on human needs because the human needs approach is direct, observable, locally-based and not reliant on mammoth investment, grandiose visions or ideological convictions."

A needs-based approach to development in Tibet abandons the Tibetan people to the whims and discretionary policies of politicians within the various levels of government in China as well as those of Western bureaucrats and the aid agencies they control. Moreover, a needs approach does nothing to address the negative impact that sometimes results from the activities of international agencies or transnational corporations. The Tibetan people are provided neither dignity nor legal recourse should their human rights be violated as a result of inappropriate or harmful “development” practices of any type.

A rights framework for development is holistic in nature and promotes the realization of all human rights – civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights. It emphasizes the interdependence between democratic governance and social progress. Far from focusing on "grandiose visions" or "ideological convictions," a rights framework places the human person at the centre of the development process and provides an internationally-recognized legal framework for meaningful individual and collective participation. This quality is particularly relevant for the Tibetan people living under Chinese rule.

The trend towards rights-based frameworks for development stems primarily from concerns about the erosion of national autonomy in the face of globalisation and, in particular, of economic liberalization and integration. It is related to the inability of national governments to create or protect national legislation designed to ensure equitable distribution of wealth and non-discriminatory provision of services within their borders. A rights-based framework also responds to the particular problems faced by a people living under the political control of another group with conflicting interests or priorities for development programming.

In the case of Tibet a rights-approach would, theoretically at least, empower the Tibetan people to claim such things as the continuous improvement of living standards, non-discrimination in the provision of healthcare or education, and active participation in decision-making with regards to the use of natural resources. It would influence programming by Western agencies to prioritize activities that serve those objectives.

A rights framework for development provides a number of other distinct advantages. Primarily, it uplifts the human person to a position of dignity in that he/she claims specific inalienable rights or entitlements from government rather than accepting random benefits provided on a discretionary basis for undetermined lengths of time and under variable conditions. Moreover, the non-discrimination requirement that governs all human rights mitigates social exclusion by requiring that special emphasis is placed on the delivery of development benefits to vulnerable sectors of society, such as rural people.

Oxfam International has articulated the value-added of a rights framework for development in a recent paper entitled, International Frameworks, Policies Priorities and Implications: A Guide for NGOs:

"A rights approach assumes that there is an acknowledged duty-bearer with a responsibility to respect, protect and fulfil the rights of a legitimate claimant or rights holder. The welfare concept of beneficiary is incompatible with a rights-based approach. Further, the language of unfulfilled or denied rights, must replace the language of needs, an idea of entreaty or charity that is also incompatible with a rights-based approach".

In fact, a needs-approach may be effective in democratic states with active civil societies and freedom of expression, association and opinion. In that situation, government is generally responsive to community participation and accountable to public scrutiny of the implementation process. In Tibet, this is not the case. Development priorities are determined in Beijing, often with political objectives, and foreign development assistance is required to adopt the overarching design of that development strategy. Even if some needs are met along the way at the project level, there is no over-arching framework that addresses the structural causes of under-development.

While the substantive content of the TGIE guidelines is comprehensive and relevant, it is the framework in which it is written that fails to empower the Tibetan people to adequately lead their own development process. What is required is a fresh look at the meaning and goal of development in its broadest sense. A rights framework for the TGIE's development recommendations would build Tibetan autonomy by providing the Tibetan people with a measure of ownership over their development process.

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Letter to the Editor
From the Environment and Development Desk of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile
Trin-Gyi-Pho-Nya, Vol. 2, No. 4, July 2004

This is in response to Carole Samdup's comments (Op-ed: A Human Rights Framework for Development in Tibet) on the Guidelines for Development in Tibet in the last issue of TRIN-GYI-PHO-NYA, May 06, 2004, Vol. 2, No. 3. Her comments are highly appreciated. However we feel that our stress on needs-based development as an alternative to China's present development strategy in Tibet under the Rationale section of the Guidelines has been misunderstood.

A careful study of the Guidelines in its entirety would show that we are deeply concerned about the rights of the Tibetan people to participate in the development process right from the planning stage. When we say "a new approach based directly on human needs....", we are not necessarily advocating the conventional needs-based strategy. We are talking about a strategy that addresses the basic needs of the Tibetan people through their own active participation.

In the Guidelines, the last of four underlying principles, Participatory and Needs-based Development, should make our stand clear:

"Usurpation and co-option of public powers by groups or individuals becomes self-development of vested interests rather than addressing the interests of the people. To ensure that development projects are sensitive and accountable to the needs of the people, empowerment of the grassroots level populace through genuine participation is essential. Participatory development would naturally safeguard the needs of local people...

So, when designing projects, it is crucial that the development agencies find skillful and innovative ways to assess the needs and involve the local populace, and at the same time avoid the clear danger of putting them at risk due to the ire of local authorities. Institutionalisation of procedures and democratic governance at the grassroots level are essential steps toward self-governance..."

The Guidelines have advocated neither a needs-based nor a rights-based approach per se. Instead, we have taken a pragmatic and flexible approach to development based primarily on the needs of Tibetans. To be precise, under the section Crosscutting Guidelines, it says:

"...The Tibetan worldview and modern synthesis of appropriate development practices encourages a respectful, thoughtful approach to development that embraces many factors rather than a narrow, technical compliance with shallow and literal considerations..."

The Guidelines are an attempt to facilitate and promote better development practices under the present, complicated situation. They emphasize that the needs of the Tibetan people should be articulated by the Tibetans themselves and not by the State or other outside actors.
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Tibetan perspectives on the significance of mountains and lakes

[Photo: Tashi Tsering]

By Tenzin Choezin, Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center, New York
Translated by Tenzin Bhuchung, UC Berkeley Rotary Peace Scholar
Original source: Trin-Gyi-Pho-Nya [སྤྲིན་གྱི་ཕོ་ཉ་], Tibet Justice Center, Vol. 1, Issue 3, January 2004.

Tibetans’ traditions and their way of life are intimately linked to the landscape: its spectacular high mountains and pristine lakes. The significance of landscape finds meaning and expression both in pre-Buddhist Bon tradition as well as in Tibetan Buddhist culture.

According to the indigenous Bon tradition, Tibetans believe that mountains, lakes, ponds, springs and river sources are dwelling places of the protector gods of Tibet and most of these sites are named, often in a modified version, after the name of a particular deity believed to be dwelling there. Furthermore, all mountains and lakes have at least one amazing legend surrounding them. The sky-touching mountains are believed to be stairways to heaven (ལྷ་ཡུལ་/Lha-yul) and the crystal clear lakes as gateways to the underworld realm of the Nagas (ཀླུ་ཡུལ་/Lu-yul).

From a Tibetan Buddhist interpretation, mountains like the Jomolangma (ཇོ་མོ་གླང་མ་/Everest), Ghung-gyal, Amnye Machen and many other high mountains of Tibet are regarded as abodes of the gods and the twelve female guardian deities that were believed to be present at the formation of the Tibetan landscape and civilization. Mountains such as Ghang Rinpoche (གངས་རིན་པོ་ཆེ་/Mount Kailash), Mount Tsari Tsagong (ཙ་རི་) and Mount Khawa Karpo (ཁ་བ་དཀར་པོ་) are regarded as heavenly dwelling places of various trans-worldly deities.

Even lakes such as Mapham Yutso (མ་ཕམ་གཡུ་མཚོ་/Lake Manasarovar), Namtso Chukmo (གནམ་མཚོ་ཕྱུག་མོ་), Yamdrok Yutso (ཡར་འབྲོག་གཡུ་མཚོ་/Turquoise Lake), Trishor Gyalmo (མཚོ་སྔོན་ཁྲི་ཤོར་རྒྱལ་མོ་/Kokonor Lake) and others are widely revered as abodes various female deities such as Dorji Phagmo (རྡོ་རྗེ་ཕག་མོ་/Vajra Yogini). There are also lakes that Tibetans believe reveal prophetic visions in them such as Lhamo Lhatso (ལྷ་མོ་བླ་མཚོ་), Thod-lung Tsehu (སྟོད་ལུང་མཚོའུ་), O’lkha Tsehu (འོལ་ཀ་མཚོའུ་), and Tsari Yutso (ཙ་རི་གཡུ་མཚོ་). These lakes are revered as miraculous sources of protection and are believed to have helped in identifying the next incarnation of Lamas (བླ་མ་/spiritual teachers) including the current Dalai Lama.



Three lakes in eastern Tibet—Kyaring (སྐྱ་རིང་), Ngoring (སྔོ་རིང་) and Doring (དོ་རིང་) —are surrounded by high mountain ranges with one mountain rising distinctively higher. Tibetans regard this area as the dwelling place (བླ་གནས་) of King Ling Gesar (གླིང་གེ་སར་རྒྱལ་པོ་), and have named the highest mountain after the legendary King. It is a common practice for local Tibetans to offer prayers in these sacred sites. There are also numerous natural fountains and hot springs that Tibetans believe are blessed by the Medicine. Tibetans believe that when they drink or bathe in them, many chronic diseases can be cured. Then there are lakes such as Nagphak Tso and O’tso that serve as winter migration places for rare and endangered species of birds like the black-necked crane (ཁྲུང་ཁྲུང་སྐེ་ནག་).

In particular, Ghang Rinpoche (གངས་རིན་པོ་ཆེ་/Mount Kailash) and the River Ganga (ཆུ་མོ་གངྒ་) are sacred places of worship not only for Tibetans but also for many in India and Nepal. Many of Tibet’s high Lamas (Dharma teachers) have built monasteries and meditation houses near these sacred sites, while others have spent their lives there in solitary contemplation. Thus these places are considered doubly blessed. Animals dwelling in these sacred places are regarded as divine manifestations. Respect for the lives of these animals is such that not even a small plant is cut, let alone the animals killed. Instead, Tibetans customarily pile white pebbles into a heap in such places to symbolize the enhancement of their pure motivations. Instead of fishing, Tibetans throw precious objects into the lakes as offerings to the deities believed to be residing in them.

Even today, the Tibetan people deeply believe in the world of gods (ལྷ་)and demons (འདྲེ་). In all their worldly activities, they evoke gods and spirits for their accomplishment. Such traditional practices and belief systems associated with local ecosystems are an inseparable part of Tibetan culture and way of life.
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