Word quickly spread, and by midnight almost a quarter of the villagers were surrounding their leader’s home demanding to know why they didn’t receive the money that some of their neighbors did. The crowd continued to swell, becoming angrier and more vocal. To seek help in this village of seven hundred and fifty, without any roads, electricity, or phone service, village leader Jiang Wen hurriedly left his house and made the thirty-minute trek to the nature reserve headquarters. This episode may sound like disaster, but it actually was a positive turn of events. Jiang Wen, who might have joined the crowd just a few months earlier, was now taking a bold step and joining forces with the Cao Hai Nature Reserve in a new venture to protect one of the most important wetlands for migratory waterfowl in southern China.

China is endowed with tremendous biodiversity, having some of the richest flora and fauna in the world. In addition to the sheer number of species, China is home to many endemic and rare species such as the giant panda, black-necked crane, ginkgo, and dawn redwood. However, with the world’s third largest economy and over one-fifth of the world’s population, maintaining biological diversity is truly a herculean task. Nevertheless, an ambitious effort is under way with an extensive system of over seven hundred nature reserves established throughout the country. Although many traditional problems such as pollution and poaching are found in these reserves, one of the most pressing issues is the poverty of the local inhabitants, which forces them to disregard rules and indiscriminately encroach upon the reserves. As a result, the reserves are deteriorating.

The Cao Hai Nature Reserve lies in China’s southwestern Guizhou Province, atop the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau at two thousand one hundred and seventy meters above sea level. Cao Hai (sea of grass) is named after its abundant wetland vegetation and consists of a small lake, associated wetlands, and a watershed totaling ninety-eight square kilometers. It is an internationally important winter home for more than seventy thousand waterbirds including approximately four hundred endangered black-necked cranes (Grus nigricollis), up to a thousand Eurasian cranes (G. grus), and thousands of bar-headed geese (Anser inicus).

It is here, at Cao Hai, that I worked for the Guizhou Environmental Protection Bureau and the International Crane Foundation on a nature conservation project in 1993 and 1994. My first impression of the situation at Cao Hai was simple: a classic case of intensive use of resources leading to extensive degradation. The solution: rehabilitate the reserve by keeping people away from its key areas. However, after a few weeks on the job I realized that this strategy had already been tried repeatedly, resulting only in ailure and a deepening resentment of the reserve by local villagers. My reserve-staff colleague and friend, Huang Mingjie, explained to me that poverty was the main reason for failure. In 1993, the twelve villages located inside the reserve were some of the poorest in China, with an annual per capita income of under forty dollars. Many families were hard-pressed to grow enough food to survive the winter. Due to these conditions, the population was forced to use and abuse the resources around them, often putting people in direct competition with the birds and causing severe ecological damage.

[more]