Mistier Mountains
A report about conservation and eco-tourism in the lush, rich mountains of Sichuan in China.
The Min Mountains, already home to the world’s richest temperate habitat, are getting larger and richer. The shrouds of heavenly mists are spreading, the dusts are almost gone, tourism is replacing logging, and pandas are increasing for the first time in many years.
“In my travels in the mountains,” told me Yang Ming of WWF in Sichuan, “many people tell me of many former grazing grounds that have now reverted to forest. This is partly the result of tree planting and partly due to natural regeneration – the moist climate is conducive to the restoration of forests, and once the impact of human activity ceases, the forests regenerate relatively fast.”
Human meddling ceased after severe floods in China’s central plains in 1998 were blamed on deforestation in the mountains of southwest China, particularly in the provinces of Sichuan, Ganzu and Shaanxi. The government responded with a green impulse: logging was banned, “ecological construction” began in earnest, and the former loggers became conservationists. “The new role of the forestry farms,” explained Gu Xiadong, a conservation officer at the Sichuan Forestry Department, “is to nurture and maintain biodiversity, and the government is paying them to do that.”
Sichuan, a province almost as large as Spain and home to the bulk of the mountains, is spending more than a billion Euros on reforestation alone in the ten-year period ending in 2010. By September 2006, when the last review was conducted, the reforestation drive had led to an increase in forest cover from twenty-four to twenty-nine percent of the province’s territory. One policy is to plant trees on existent fields that fall on slopes greater than an angle of twenty-five degrees, and farmers are being reimbursed for ten years to give up their fields – under this program 1.16 million hectares of former agricultural land were returned to forest by September 2006. “We are encouraging the farmers to use the money to set up a business or find alternative income,” said Gu. (The last review plan presented to forestry departments in 2006 is full of revolutionary speak – reminding the “comrades” of their “glorious but arduous task” and that afforestation is something that “promotes the building of a new socialist countryside and a socialist harmonious society.”)
At the same time nature reserves are proliferating, and being linked up by so-called vegetation corridors to create a massive near-contiguous area under protection. In this manner, bit by bit, the forests and protected zones are expanding rapidly, and WWF has recognized this habitat-conservation effort – which is one of the largest in the world in its scope – by a Gift to the Earth award, one of the most prestigious international accolades for conservation. “The government has positive policies towards nature conservation, and it’s working,” told me Yang of WWF.
There is a lot to protect in the straggle of six mountain chains in the three provinces. The mountains form the transition zone between the plains and the Tibetan and Qinghai plateaus, and it’s the resultant range in elevation, as well as the monsoonal downpours, that make the habitats densely stratified and incredibly diverse. Down in the valleys the environment can be tropical or subtropical; higher up is a temperate belt, and further up, on the shoulders of the mountains, the landscape morphs into conifer alpine forests interspersed with mountain meadows and lakes. Species diversity is impressive: 12,000 species of higher plants, of which twenty-nine percent are endemic; 686 species of birds, including the largest variety of pheasants in the world; and 300 species of mammals, most important of which are animals such as wild boars, brown bears, foxes, deer, takins, clouded leopards, blue sheep, and giant pandas. Many of these species are endangered; the area features on WWF’s “one of twenty-five global priority eco-regions” – a critical importance that has attracted several international environmental NGOs – and the three provinces are coalesced in conservation by the common presence of various endemic and rare species.
The diversity reaches its zenith at the Min Mountains (Minshan in Chinese), and at the heart of the Minshan the forests are dark and enigmatic. The ground bristles with mushrooms and flowers, or thick mangles of rhododendrons and bamboo; and moss is ubiquitous, hanging from trees in festoons and sponging the ground underfoot. The Minshan, with summits topping 4,000 metres and a spread of 64,000 square kilometers, have their bulk in Sichuan (with a corner of them jutting inside Gansu), and it’s in Sichuan that conservation reaches its grandest proportions. Sichuan already has 117 nature reserves, and the plan is to increase that number to 168 – or over twenty percent of the province’s territory. The latest two reserves to be created – Longdishui (27,700 hectares) and Baozuo (116,001 hectares) – are both in the Minshan range.
“From a provincial viewpoint,” said Qiu Jian, a program officer at Sichuan Forestry Department, “the areas with rich biodiversity are already in established nature reserves, and these latest reserves – although rich in their own way – are less significant in terms of nature conservation than the older reserves. That’s also why they were only recently established.”
These new reserves mostly fit within the context of infill, or the larger corridor schemes. Baozuo, for example, connects a chain of reserves in northern Sichuan and southern Gansu. And Longdishui is part of the largest corridor being created (four corridors are currently being reconstructed). “The area of this corridor,” elaborated Gu Xiadong, “suffered from the construction of a highway that cuts through the habitat, and also from the destruction wrought by local people. There are ten villages scattered along the road, and in the past these people cut down the trees and turned the forest into fields. Now we are slowly rebuilding the natural forest: Longdishui Nature Reserve was established to protect the existing forest, and outside the reserve we are reforesting agricultural land on slopes. We have also banned hunting entirely, funded the production of biogas for household stoves (so that people don’t have to cut trees for cooking and heating), and am now helping the local people find alternative income in tourism.”
Another corridor further south, called Tudiling, is designed to restore the historical link between two clusters of pristine landscapes. It’s a project funded by WWF and CEPF (Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund) using workers employed by the forestry farm. “The main problem in Tudiling is that when the forestry farms were logging companies they cut down natural forest and planted, in its place, non-native pines,” said Gu. “We call these forests ‘green deserts’ or ‘no value forests’ – because they have no value for biodiversity.” These non-indigenous pines were planted at a density of 2,000 per hectare (in natural forest the pines occur at 190 per hectare); and such density, plus the tannins that leach from the leaves, has served to snuff out any other species of flora that would otherwise take hold.
“From the perspective of pandas,” said Yang of WWF, “this project is crucial as there is a small community of 30 pandas living south of Tudiling, and this group is susceptible to demise due to lack of genetic exchange and diversity.”
A strip of land 8,967 hectares in size is due for surgery – this involves felling the present trees and replanting mixed natural forest – and earlier this year a trial conversion of twenty hectares was carried out. “The test seems to be working,” told me Yang. “Now the scientists are due to assess the results of this test area before the conversion takes place across the entire corridor area. But it’s a high-risk project; it’s uncertain if it will work as a wildlife corridor as it historically did because of various factors such as the effects of climate change, the disturbance by local people, and government policy, which can always change in the future.”
Yang may take encouragement from the experience of Shaanxi where nature in corridors is flourishing. Shaanxi has 16 nature reserves in the Qinling Mountains alone, some of them established in recent years, and another three are awaiting the governor’s official designation. Five corridors, with a combined area of 65,369 hectares, have been created in the past few years to link Qinling’s reserves. One of these corridors replaces a former road; the road used to dissect pristine habitats, and when it was up for an upgrade the government decided to dig a tunnel through the mountain. That presented an opportunity for Shaanxi Forestry Department and WWF: the old road was broken up and trees and bamboo planted in its place, and a nature reserve was declared to place the area under protection.
“The corridor will be extremely helpful in reconnecting the two largest Qinling giant panda sub-populations,” said Jinna Zhao of WWF Shaanxi branch. “In the spring of 2007 we found everything bursting with life. Ninety-eight percent of the bamboo has survived the cold winter and dry season, and the first visitors were pheasants trying out the new forest and inviting other animals to follow suit. We saw droppings of the takin, and hopefully the pandas will be reunited soon.”
Meanwhile, there are indications that the logging ban has had the side-effect of an increase in poaching. "Poaching is chronic problem,” told me Jiang Shiwei, vice director of Wanglang Nature Reserve, one of the least-touched landscapes on earth. “The local people are poor and deprived, and they poach for takin and black bear. Others intrude into the reserve to collect mushrooms, vegetables, and medicinal herbs. The most destructive activity is the collection of medicinal herbs; this is a bigger problem than poaching as there is a large demand for medicinal herbs, and tourists who visit the area encourage the trade by buying medicinal herbs.”
There are 4.6 million inhabitants in the Minshan alone, most of them cultural minorities of Tibetan stock, and some of them have grown poorer after the logging ban put an end to their trade, hence the escalation in poaching. The reserves have responded by stepping up their monitoring and patrolling – at Wanglang, for example, the wardens have started patrolling 24 new anti-poaching routes that crisscross the 323 square kilometre reserve – but the effect of the anti-poaching clampdowns is uneven. Halting intrusions in remote and inhospitable mountainous terrain is a vexatious and endless task, even if the reserves had more money and manpower, and the hope now is that the growing tourist industry will provide an alternative stream of income to the local inhabitants.
In this way the development of tourism has become part of the larger holistic conservation plan – some twenty nature reserves are now open to tourists in Sichuan – and the conservation officials are trying to ensure that tourism doesn’t end up becoming an unwittingly destructive force. “We want to put conservation first, and not ruin nature reserves by mass tourism,” said Qiu Jian of the Sichuan Forestry Department. “Some reserves already have mass tourism and we have to accept that reality. But now, if a reserve wants to open up for tourists, we place various restrictions – we limit the number of visitors after doing a carrying-capacity assessment, we open only a part of the reserve for visitors, and within that part visitors have to keep within designated trails.”
When people mention mass tourism in nature reserves they are talking about Jiuzhaigou Nature Reserve, a victim of its success. Jiuzhaigou, which is 650 square kilometres large, has alpine slopes, granite peaks, thunderous waterfalls, and impeccable lakes – a piece of landscape that features on UNESCO’s famous two lists: a World Heritage Site as well as a World Biosphere Reserve. Two million people visited the reserve in 2006, and in the peak season the number of daily visitors reaches almost 18,000 – which is the cap the administration has placed on the maximum number of daily visitors. An entire small town consisting of more than 90 hotels and other outfits has sprouted up outside the reserve to serve the tourists.
The reserve officials are doing an excellent job at mitigating the impact of such a deluge of visitors. A fleet of 300 buses that ferry people inside the reserve run on biofuels; these buses shuttle throughout the reserve, and visitors can hop on and off at will and go walking – there are about 60km of elevated board trails. Smoking is strictly prohibited inside the reserve; there are wardens and CCTV cameras everywhere (the control room is a honeycomb of TV screens). People can only eat at one designated central place, and toilets are high-tech and mobile. No tourist accommodation is allowed inside the reserve, although some of the inhabitants flout the rules by offering lodgers rooms in their houses (there are about 1,000 native Tibetan inhabitants in a scattering of villages; the government gives them ₤700 each annually, a good salary for the region, to sit idly; some of them are also employed in the reserve as wardens.)
“Now we are trying to spread the load of the visitors by encouraging more people to visit in the quiet winter months,” told me Ma Yigang, the director of marketing at Jiuzhaigou. “Additionally, we want to encourage visitors to stay longer and walk more.”
This thinking is the anti-thesis of the present pattern: most people visit for one day, riding in buses from one scenic spot to the next, where they get off the bus and jostle rowdily to take some pictures. Now the officials are planning to open another part of the Jiuzhaigou and reserve it exclusively for eco-tourism – meaning, trekkers. This new area, Zharu Valley, has a small Tibetan village that remains quaint and affable – the inhabitants kept inviting me home for tea during my visit – and the idea is that the discerning visitors will see the village and then go for a whole-day trek along an old trail that peters out in a series of remote lakes.
“We have asked WWF to design the program in Zharu,” elaborated Ma, “and we’re hoping to introduce the first batch of tourists in the area soon. It will be a tour organized by WWF.”
“At Jiuzhaigou the park officials have realized that mass tourism has had a negative impact on the quality of landscape and scenery,” told me Yang of WWF. “This is why they want to do things differently in Zharu.”
Other reserves are also shunning mass tourism. An eco-tourism project launched in Wanglang Nature Reserve in 2001 is something of a prototype. A small hotel was built inside the reserve – at an area already disturbed by the warden’s quarters – and the idea is that guests would trek from the hotel into the wilderness, first along a narrow jeep track and then along elevated board paths branching out in scenic spots. “We have a limit of 150 tourists daily,” told me Jiang Shiwei, vice director of Wanglang. “We also take out all rubbish, wastewater, and sewage.”
The setup is professional enough, and there are board signs everywhere to draw attention to features of interest and exhort visitors. But I saw people talking loudly next to the sign that says ‘Please be quiet, the birds are singing for you’. And I didn’t see anyone walking much; the hotel was virtually empty, and most visitors were day-trippers who drive along the jeep track to scenic spots, get out to take some pictures, and leave. Some tour operators have now started taking groups inside the reserve in buses, disgorging tourists that go for a short stroll, take some pictures, and have a picnic and leave. “I have even seen people in reserves playing cards or mahjong,” said Yang of WWF. “We still need to educate the Chinese on how to appreciate nature.”
“Developing eco-tourism in China is hard,” muttered Jiang, Wanglang’s vice director. “Our plan, in the future, is to actually stop cars from driving into the reserve – cars would have to park outside, and then we would take the visitors into the reserve in our buses. At the same time we need to develop the reserve better for international guests, or people who visit for nature, so they stay in the hotel and go walking – we need better marketing to attract this kind of guests. But this is still our dream; we have many things to do. The big question for us is management, and how to manage tourism, and in the future we need better management.”
The faltering eco-tourism plan hasn’t gone unnoticed, and the central Sichuan Forestry Department has turned against the idea of lodging inside reserves. “Currently we don’t encourage lodging houses inside nature reserves,” told me Qiu Jian. “Now we encourage the development of small inns outside the reserves, and we want these inns to be run by local people so that the benefits of tourism can be shared by the local people. In some cases we help the local people build guesthouses in their traditional building style, and help them arrange business and promotion, as well as manage the waste produced in an eco-friendly manner.”
Eco-tourism has become a buzzword, at least among the conservation officials; at the county level, where the Forestry Department has no writ to enforce rules outside nature reserves, local officials are less versed and concerned about eco-tourism models of development. “As tourism expands and the region develops,” said Yang, “we are trying to steer development towards a sustainable footing. The good news is that much of the mountains are in nature reserves now, and the impact of humans in nature reserves is limited. But we still have a lot of work to do to educate people and change the pattern of development.”
(C) Victor Paul Borg 
|
