MOBILE HERDERS AND SUSTAINING LIFE ON OUR PLANET Dawn Chatty Emeritus Professor, University of Oxford Email:
[email protected] I recently watched Sir David Attenborough’s ‘witness statement’ on the state of our dying planet as it globally heats up through climate change partially, if not totally, resulting from man’s activity on the planet. My husband, who is not an academic, watched it with me and found it to be truly moving with a sense of finality on the climate emergency. Time was ticking away, he felt Attenborough was saying, and we were sitting passively on our sofas watching when we could be doing something about it. I, however, found myself quietly disturbed not so much by the ‘dying of the planet at our own hands’ but by Attenborough’s lack of any interest in those who make every effort to live sustainably on this planet. I was thinking of mobile herders and other ‘traditional peoples’ from whom we can learn much about protecting our precious planet. Yet mobile herders’ lives con- tinue to be disrupted throughout the globe and threatened by Western ‘modern’ development efforts. These herders are dispossessed of the lands they occupy in favour of large-scale ‘modernisation’ projects for agricultural production (e.g. palm oil plantations), commercial livestock raising (e.g. large scale cattle and sheep ranching) and fortress conservation initiatives that remove them from their traditional lands to try to create Western notions of pristine landscapes. These development efforts compromise previously sustainable livelihoods and knowl- edgeable stewardship of such territories. So, to me, not only was the planet dying through human impact on climate, but the earth’s biodiversity was also dying – flora, fauna, and human society.