Mongol Herders Have A Point
It is for these reasons and more that after decades of being ignored and pushed about, the views of Mongol herders are beginning to be heard in Inner Mongolia. A cultural revival is taking shape on the grasslands as Mongols lay claim to their history and herding traditions, and advocate for age-old herd and grass management practices that have long been neglected. Their view: the dry steppes of Inner Mongolia support a nomadic livestock agriculture. Keeping people and their animals in one place is a formula for disaster and dust.

A great deal of the Mongol revival is due to Chen Jiqun. Person by person, place by place, Chen is introducing Mongol theories of grassland management to the world, and courting new influence for promising solutions to desertification. One of the main ways that Chen introduces Han Chinese and foreigners alike to traditional Mongol herder culture is through supporting the establishment of eco-tours in the region, a sort of Mongolian experiment in social and economic entrepreneurism.

Chen insists that the eco-tourist sites he works for are run by and for the nomad herders themselves. He helped establish Nomad Family in April 2007, working with a herder named Tugesibayal to set up the site. Chen arranged for two more herders to help staff Nomad Family, which is five yurts along the side of the road surrounded by sand and grass, and a sixth standing behind. .

The eco-tourism site provides a clear window on traditional Mongolian culture and rangeland practices. Along with Tugesibayal's daughter and two other female workers, Nomad Family enables visitors to live in yurts, eat traditional Mongol dishes made on-site, and experience a modern Mongol lite version of nomadic life.

Chen is also working with other herders in the area so that tourists can visit grasslands that still look as they always have, as well as areas that have become deserts in the past few years.

Nomad Family: Reclaiming Mongol Identity and Ecotourism
On his most recent visit to Nomad Family, Chen reacquainted himself with a veteran herder named Batar, who lives at Nomad Family and knows Chen well.

They talked about the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution of the 20th century, which marked the first two attempts to "settle" nomadic herders, first as part of the collectivization movement that swept all Chinese citizens into communes as large as 110,000 families. "My parents and grandparents had lived by the traditional ways, spending the summer in one place and then, when the grass got low, moving very far away to where the grass was healthy," Batar said in an interview. "They were proud of our history and traditions. But then, during the Cultural Revolution, we could not talk about our history." By settling down in urban areas Mongols "have forgotten [their] culture and the importance of the grasslands."

A young herder, Temtsel, who came from a neighboring county to help the Nomad Family get started, joined the conversation. His specialty is to educate Han Chinese and foreigners about traditional pastoral life on the grasslands. "Protecting the grasslands is important, because without the grasslands we can't live," he said.

Chinese scientists, they said, have experimented with various methods of fixing dunes, planting hybrid shrub and grass varieties, and aerial seeding of the grasslands. Scientists now admit what Temtsel and other Mongols knew all along. The scientific experiment was a costly failure, a product of trying to find a technological solution to a much more complex environmental and socioeconomic process.
There are economic costs as well. Earlier this year, the World Bank conservatively estimated that the cost of China's environmental degradation is 3.5 percent to 8 percent of the gross domestic product annually. The cost of desertification caused by water scarcity alone, said the bank, is roughly $31 billion a year.

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