As many others have pointed out, pastoralism mirrors agriculture: both are means of turning the green of the land into plenty, but where the farmer stays put, cultivates and hoards, the pastoralist "gardens" through awareness and mobility. His herd is his pantry. The timing of his migration to the next pasture, his husbandry. It's a way of life as old as our own. There's not such thing as a post-agricultural civilization, as Gary Snyder reminds us -- but are we about to see a post-pastoral planet?
Herding as a way of life is eroding under a river of pressures. Some threats are political: modern pastoral nomads often lack political power, and sometimes move back and forth across national boundaries as they follow the grazing, bringing them into conflict with multiple settled groups. The economics of herding has been transformed by agro-industry and factory cattle lots. But changes in the land and weather may offer the direst threat. Pastoral nomadism is at home in ecologically marginal lands -- dry scrub, grasslands, high mountains, far Northern forests -- and marginal lands are more vulnerable than most to climate change and over-exploitation. We're already seeing the consequences: what a generation ago were good grazing lands have in many places become semi-deserts.
What are the more than 50 million pastoral nomads worldwide to do? Is there a sustainable nomadic future?
Earlier this month, over 100 pastoral leaders from 25 countries, attended by a flock of NGO, UN and governmental officials, met in Turmi, Ethiopia to explore that question, and concluded that:
"...unless change comes, by 2015 access to education, health, clean water, economic progress and legal protection will have declined in pastoralist areas. Not only will pastoralist people and their animals suffer, but the fragile environments in which they live will have degraded and the markets which they serve will decline. This situation will affect not only herders and their children, but all those who live around and among them, and it will affect national economies and societies in their entirety."
Few think that nomads should just pack up their tents and quit. As the good people at WAMIP -- the World Alliance of Mobile Indigenous Peoples -- put it, there's a future in nomadics:
"The World Alliance of Mobile Indigenous Peoples (WAMIP) is a global alliance of nomadic peoples and communities practicing various forms of mobility as a livelihood strategy while conserving biological diversity and using natural resources in a sustainable way."
Indeed, nomad advocates emphasize that pastoralists have human rights claims to their ways of life, make valuable contributions to many developing world economies and often far better manage the ecological commons through which they move than do more settled peoples. But while these arguments strengthen pastoralists' claims to their lands, they do not neccessarily make their ways of life more likely to endure.
What's needed, it seems, is a new approach which marries political support for (and preservation of) traditional lifestyles and skills to modern tools and support systems.
One example is the work of the Swiss Tropical Institute, which has partnered with pastoral peoples in Chad to develop a program which aims to understand the ways in which human and veterinary medical needs are interrelated in migratory herdsmen, and to learn how best to deliver modern medical care to people who rarely find themselves camped next to a hospital.
Another example is the work of the Shepherd School Programme in Ghana, which brings basic education to pastoral children in a non-formal, community-based culturally appropriate way:
"Pastoral children follow the same syllabus and are graded like other Ghanaian school children. What makes SSP different is that school schedules are flexible. A community management body works to accommodate education needs with the shifting requirements of communities for help with farming and shepherding. Local facilitators mediate between teachers and families. Due to high teacher turnover in northern Ghana, local members who have some secondary education have been recruited and are serving as facilitators. Unlike elsewhere in Ghana, the local language is used at the early stages of schooling."
Finally, the tools themselves can be made nomadic, as in the instance of the networked reindeer herders we covered earlier.
We're still a long, long way from "sustainable nomadics in a box," or even a toolset which should make us confident of the survivability of pastoralism in any form. With real support for nomads' rights and a leapfrogging toolkit geared to their needs, however, we may find that the 21st Century has a place in it for the pastoral.
