MONGOLIAN CONSERVATION EFFORTS

[Guest guest]

http://www.newwest.net/index.php/topic/article/3941/C73/L38  

Grassland Conservation

From Mongolia to the Front Range

By Richard Martin, 10-19-05

 

 

 

Can you get the Broncos on TV?

 

The Front Range is around 6000 miles from Ulaanbaatar, but there are some

distinct similarities between the capital of Mongolia and our own region. For

one thing, Colorado east of Boulder is, like eastern Mongolia, home to some of

the world’s last intact grasslands, a critical ecosystem for dozens of

endangered species. And so this week a team of Mongolian conservationists is

winding up an extended tour of Colorado in an exchange hosted by The Nature

Conservancy.

 

I met the Mongolians yesterday before a presentation they gave at the Boulder HQ

of the Conservancy. The leader, N. Sarantuya, is a formidable woman both

physically and intellectually: the holder of a Ph.D. in biology, she was the of Strategic Planning and Management for the Mongolian Ministry of

Nature and Environment before establishing the Environmental Initiative Center,

a non-governmental conservation organization in Ulaanbaatar. She gave the small

audience a quick lesson in the global importance of grasslands and in the

similarities between Colorado and Mongolia.

 

Both places have extensive grasslands rising to the foothills of a vast mountain

range: the Rockies in Colorado and the Altai Range, which bisect much of Central

Asia, in Mongolia. The latitudes are nearly identical, and both areas are home

to the sort of charismatic megafauna that end up on posters and T-shirts (not to

mention trophy rooms): Mongolia has some of the last remaining populations of

such mythical beasts as the snow leopard, the Gobi bear, and the majestic Argali

sheep, which has fostered a burgeoning big-game hunting industry in the country.

Denver is the sister city of Ulaanbaatar (Boulder’s sister city is another

Central Asian capital, Dushanbe, Tajikistan), and both Colorado and Mongolia are

home to livestock herding, horse-centric populations whose ways of life are

slowly being overtaken by modernity: cowboys in this country and nomadic herders

in Central Asia.

 

Since Mongolia became a democracy in 1990 the government has made preserving the

country’s wild lands (which make up 90 percent of the territory), and the

culture of its nomadic people, a priority. The former prime minister approached

The Nature Conservancy several years ago with an ambitious goal: to formally

protect 30 percent of Mongolia’s total territory as national parks or wilderness

areas.

 

Since then the Nature Conservancy has sent several teams of conservationists to

Mongolia to help build its nascent environmental movement – and to learn from

the Mongolians, who have inhabited the high prairie of Central Asia for two

millennia. This week’s exchange was a step forward in building cooperation

between two regions that despite long distance and cultural differences, share a

spectacular, and threatened, landscape.

 

By Richard Martin, 10-19-05 | add comment | email this story | read more like

this