The decline of nomadic life
Living the life of a nomad, especially the travelling, grey-haired type, has great appeal these days. However, Tim Cope, National Geographic Adventurer of the Year, went on a three-and-a-half-year odyssey, travelling across the Eurasian Steppe countries, to experience first hand the nomadic life and immerse himself deeply in their culture.
His aim was to ‘appeal to the better side of people, whoever they were, and live the kind of dream that most forget when they grow up’.
From the ancient Mongol capital of Karakorum, Tim travelled on horseback across the former territories of Genghis Khan, through Kazakhstan, Russia, Crimea and the Ukraine, ending up at the Danube River in Hungary.
Mr Cope began the trip in 2005, and has maintained his connections to Mongolia through regular visits. But within this time, he’s noticed big changes that now threaten the livelihood and lifestyle of the traditional pastoral nomad.
While nomadic populations used to number in the tens of millions across Africa, Australia, India and the countries of the Eurasian Steppe, today Mongolia remains the only steppe nation with a dominant nomadic way of life and culture.
Mr Cope says that between 30 and 40 per cent of Mongolia’s population continues to live this way. They still enjoy life without fences and know where the boundaries of their traditional grazing lands exist. But it’s the incursion of big mining that could have a lasting impact on the nomadic existence.
Over thousands of years, Mongolian nomads have developed a sophisticated migratory pattern according to the specific local ecology. As one Mongolian pastoralist explained:
‘In winter, we live in Moiynkum Desert where the soil is sandy and soft, there is little snow and it is warmer than elsewhere. Then just before the ticks come to life in the spring we pack up and leave. If we stay too late, the animals suffer from ticks, and the grass won’t have time to recover for the next winter. In summer we go up high where the wind keeps the mosquitoes at bay, but timing when to return south is crucial so as to avoid getting trapped by blizzards, too early and the winter pastures would not sustain the herds until spring.’
With temperatures that can reach as low as -65 degrees Celsius in winter and +50 degrees during summer, this type of knowledge is crucial to survival. However, in neighbouring Kazakhstan, where Mr Cope spent about 14 months during his trip, the intimate connection with the land has already been almost lost.
In his book On the Trail of Genghis Khan, Mr Cope gives a comprehensive history of the region and the pressures its unique culture has faced. For instance, one hundred years ago, more than 90 per cent of the Kazakh population lived the nomadic life, and the largest towns held no more than 3,000 people. Their lives were dependent upon their animals and it was a poor man who had no animals, horses, camels or goats.
Today, only five per cent of Kazakhs are thought to carry on a nomadic or semi-nomadic way of life.
The upheaval for nomads in Kazakhstan began in the early years of the 20th century. Mr Cope writes: ‘In 1916, about 150,000 Kazakhs, nomadic herders, were killed during a doomed rebellion against their Russian rulers, following their expropriation of livestock and an order for men between the ages of 18 and 43 to be conscripted into the imperial army’. Subsequently, the Bolshevik Revolution and Soviet industrialisation of the 1930s saw the introduction of policies which had a disastrous effect on nomadic culture, the Kazakh landscape, and way of life.
From 1928, the secretariat for the Kazakh republic declared that livestock was the equivalent of land for nomads, and ordered animals confiscated. Officially the confiscated goods and animals were to become the property of state-owned collectives, but the real intent was for Kazakhstan to supply meat to the cities of the Soviet Union. In effect this meant that every train station across Kazakhstan became mass holding and slaughter yards, and without veterinary control, epidemics of tuberculosis and brucellosis broke out.
By 1932, between 80 and 90 per cent of Kazakh sheep and cattle had been removed, triggering a disastrous famine which saw up to 2.2 million Kazakh nomads starved to death, almost one-third of the entire population at the time. A further 653,000 fled to China.
According to Mr Cope, Kazakhstan is still trying to mend itself from the scars inflicted during that time.
The subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s saw the closure of state-run farms and industry, but today Kazakhs again find themselves facing different, but no less serious threats.
‘Big oil has come to Kazakhstan and the Caspian Sea, which is having the added effect of marginalising the nomad economy, and markedly changing the cultural values once held by traditional herders,' Mr Cope told Late Night Live.
'Today land leases are becoming the norm. Pastoral leases are being bought up by businessmen from the towns and cities who take control of large tracts of land, moving the nomads off and employing cheap, outside herding labour.’
‘So whether they live under Soviet Stalinist occupation, or under a democratic, market based economy, in a post-Soviet era, the quality of life is definitely not an improvement for these people’.
Now, Mr Cope has concerns that Mongolians could face the same fate as their Kazakh cousins.
While Mongolia’s constitution currently prevents the privatisation or lease of pastureland, it does allow for mining and crop growing. Mr Cope warns that should the constitution ever be altered, the nomadic way of life that exists today would rapidly decline.
If this were to happen, one of the truly remarkable qualities about the people of the steppe nations, one which sets them apart from most other peoples, might very well be lost. The people of the steppe have always been nomadic and self-ruling, and unlike most nations which have marginalised ethnic groups, this issue has never existed here.
Traditionally the land was shared, everybody was equal and the family was at the heart of society. But today that’s changing. The incursion of mining into Mongolia has begun to marginalise the nomadic economy, and the location of these mines have had disastrous effects on its animals and people.
Mr Cope explains that while today Mongolia is experiencing a population boom, the effect of this growth is putting the fragile environment of the steppe under stress. An additional strain on the land is its overuse for goat herding to feed the booming cashmere market.
Over the years he’s been visiting Mongolia, Mr Cope has also noticed changes within the local culture, and an increase in imported items and fabrics that are taking the place of locally hand-made crafts.
But the Mongolians’ most precious resource, its children, like children the world over, are aspiring to live in the cities, and they’re starting to attach far less value to the nomadic customs of their families.
Photo and Audio Link: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/4982986
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