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Giant Pandas, , and Snow : and - Conservation Science and the State Michael Lewis and Elena Songster

Science and technology have been crucial tools in the legitimization of newly independent post-colonial states during a period of development policies, and this was equally true in India and China –seen from the start in India (as Nehru spoke of dams as the equivalent of modern temples), and in Maoist China’s attempts to juxtapose modern scientific ways of thinking with previous traditions and superstitions. was useful, from the 1960s on, as a means of state legitimization and a means of exerting control over otherwise uncontrolled landscapes. Links between conservation biology and the nationalist state were nowhere more apparent than in India’s much touted and government-run Project , formally inaugurated in 1973, and China’s equally famous and equally centralized efforts to preserve the , begun in the 1960s. The potency of charismatic as nationalist symbols has been clearly articulated in a number of different case studies from around the world. However, from its start conservation biology also provided a potential source of critique for state policies, particularly state development policies and the exploitation of state resources in the interest of global commodity flows. Even more, conservation science on such as snow leopards, and contentious landscapes such as the , questioned the national security agenda and priorities of the state in precisely the location where the state perceived itself as most vulnerable, promoting a more internationalist and transboundary vision for the region. This was a global conservation agenda, rather than a nationalist one, and it sometimes placed the goals of scientists at odds with those of the state. Thus, consideration of the history of the science and conservation of pandas, tigers, and snow leopards makes for a particularly potent for the study of the complex linkages between the history of conservation biology and the state in China and India. Neither country has made the snow a national symbol, on the model of the tiger or panda, but both are cautiously pushing for greater conservation of the species (though the biggest push is coming from scientists and NGOs, not from the government). The governments of both China and India are nervous about science along their borders – China restricts it in huge regions, including much of and , and India has a number of restrictions on research near its borders. Snow leopard science does not appear to be a tool of the state – but it is clear that in other cases (tiger and panda) conservation biology has been used by the state to guide national efforts to preserve or restore species or ecosystems. The state has a variety of reasons it might pursue such objectives: to garner international or national prestige for its enlightened policies; to deflect international or national attention from other policies; because its people demand it based on their own conservation ethic; because government leaders demand it based on their own conservation ethic; because the government perceives the preservation of nature as vital to the preservation of crucial state resources (clean water, etc.); because it is able to turn the species saved into a national(ist) symbol (a) unifying the nation and creating a national identity, or (b) as a symbol of 1

Rough draft: Please excuse errors and please do not circulate without permission governmental power and benevolence, or (c) as part of a larger effort to focus national discourse away from other state policies; because the state perceives preserved nature (or species) as a component of a profitable eco-tourism scheme; as a politically palatable mechanism for controlling landscapes and people on those landscapes. All of these benefits, at one time or another, were seen with panda and in China and India. But the risks of snow leopard conservation projects seem to over-ride these potential benefits, and it has been much less successful than earlier tiger and panda conservation and science. When science suggests that conservation requires particular policies that challenge or work against state interests, the science is discarded, discredited as western-driven, or simply ignored. This case study, then, highlights the limits of conservation science in shaping state actions and policies, particularly when pitted against perceived national security and development interests. And the key to this case study is the snow leopard’s status as a species of the borderlands– a place that arouses such anxiety on the part of the state.

Nationalist Science: Pandas and Tigers

There is a growing literature within environmental history focused upon human representations of and understandings of . Historians have written about animals as resources, animals as technologies (both as means of production of goods, and as creations of particular technologies), animals as stand-ins for how people think about other people or landscapes (in the sense that the symbol () becomes a denatured repository of meaning), animals as nationalist symbols, animals as symbols of vanishing wilderness, and animals as objects of scientific study within the context of conservation debates.1 For the purposes of this paper, we are focusing upon the three examples of what are sometimes referred to as “,” particularly appealing large animals, in other words, and the ways in which scientists, conservationists, and the governments of China and India have attempted to understand and conserve those species. This highlights the interplay between conservation science of these species and the process of state building. Within seven years of the inception of the People’s Republic of China, the Giant Panda had begun to serve as a symbol of scientific thought – a 1956 article in the People’s Daily suggested that the mysteries of panda evolution and behavior showed the necessity of scientific thinking versus “backwards” or “feudalistic” behavior. Panda science served no obvious economic application – the sudden emergence of state supported scientific research on the panda, so soon after independence and in the context of many other pressing issues, “illustrates that the Communist party recognized the giant panda as relevant to the Chinese state. This interest in the scientific study of the giant panda at the time indicated that the government expected panda science to benefit the nation.”2 Today, the panda is widely recognized as a global symbol of China – this was not always the case. Pandas only began appearing in “traditional” in the 1950s and 60s, around the same time as the European-based World Fund created their ubiquitous panda logo – a logo with nearly as long a history as any Chinese representations of 2

Rough draft: Please excuse errors and please do not circulate without permission pandas. There is a striking and near total absence of the giant panda in any artistic or historical records, in the long reach of recorded Chinese history, as compared to other creatures such as , tigers, and crickets. This strange absence meant that the panda did not carry any of the burdens of (imperialist or dynastic) history for the modern revolutionary communist state; “the giant panda achieved its position of national icon as a product of China’s Mao-Era efforts to redefine itself through revolutionary principles that guided its engagement with science, its people, and its interactions with the international community.”3 The Panda was still linked to history, however, as scientists uncovered remains of the panda that both established Chinese priority for the species (it was always here, and here first, scientists and government officials claimed, even to the extent of discrediting other potential panda found in other places), and showed the species had at one-time a wider range within China itself, even extending into and Southeast . This made it possible to claim the giant panda for all of China – not just one region. One of the tensions of many modern nationalist symbols is that of tying the “modern nation to the past, without compromising its identity as a modern country.” The panda did this brilliantly – it could simultaneously be used to make statements about the long tenure of the Chinese people on the Chinese land, while also, as a subject of modern science, serve to engage with other nations in the most modern of discourses – that of science.4

This map from WWF shows less range in Myanmar and Vietnam than many others, acting as if the historic panda stopped at the border of contemporary China.5 Initially, panda science was focused upon evolutionary studies, and captive breeding. The first successful captive birth, in Beijing in 1963, was used to demonstrate the scientific superiority of Chinese biologists. Subsequently, a reserve was established in Wanglang, created in part for the purpose of providing a site for scientific research on the giant panda. Between 1967-69, the world’s first species- specific giant panda survey was conducted in Wanglang. This survey was primarily focused upon ascertaining numbers and status, and again, allowed China to focus upon the quality of its scientific work. “To the extent that the government paid attention to panda preservation from the founding of the Wanglang reserve during

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Rough draft: Please excuse errors and please do not circulate without permission the mid-1960s through the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, the government bore the responsibility for protecting the giant panda and its .”6 Although initial work on the giant panda was conducted by Chinese scholars only, Deng Xiaoping’s “open door” policy in 1978 helped to bring foreign scientists into China, to collaborate with Chinese scientists on panda research. The idea was that China could benefit from international expertise by inviting foreign scientists to share their knowledge and technology with the people of China – “it was yet another component of China’s efforts to catch up in its post-Cultural Revolutionary scramble to succeed.”7 In 1979, the WWF, spurred by the efforts of Hong Kong based American Nancy Nash, made an agreement with the government of China to collaborate on a panda project – , by that time the most famous field biologist in the world – was pegged to lead the western scientists, in collaboration with a team of Chinese scientists. Between 1980 and 1984 this WWF project in Wolong would create a prodigious amount of data about giant panda life history and behavior, and conservation needs. Pan Wenshi, who subsequently would serve as the director of the Giant Panda and Wildlife Conservation Research Center at Peking University, was only the most renowned of the many Chinese scientists who participated in this initial international study, and parlayed their work there into highly successful, and internationally connected, careers in conservation biology. 8 By 1996, the WWF had an official presence in China – it opened its WWF- China office. The WWF promptly hired one of China’s top specialists on the giant panda, Lu Zhi, as the program officer for that species. Lu Zhi had worked with Pan Wenshi, and was one of a cadre of bright young Chinese conservation biologists. Lu Zhi was quite successful in this role, bringing scientists from Peking University, such as her colleague Wang Dajun, to conduct research in Wanglang Reserve, and establishing ecotourism initiatives for the local peoples. Lu Zhi’s conservation strategy was not just focused upon pandas – she “advocated for the basic principle that conservation efforts will only succeed when the economic wellbeing of local people is met.”9 Lu Zhi eventually left WWF-China to work in academic positions, now at Peking University. Even as panda science “internationalized” in the 1970s, this period also saw the beginning of overt uses of captive pandas as tools of Chinese diplomacy. If there was any doubt that the government of China had created pandas as a symbol of the nation, panda diplomacy put them to rest. In both the case of the US and , the government of China used highly publicized “loans” of Chinese pandas as “part of a genuine warming of relations between former political and military foes by connecting to the people through the innate charms” of these uniquely Chinese animals.10 The richest example of panda diplomacy involves , where pandas finally arrive after nearly twenty years of on-again, off-again negotiations, in a delicate dance around the relationship between Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China.11 Whether Taiwan or the US, among many other states, these panda loans involved the very highest levels of government officials – including heads of state – and made explicit the role of the panda as nationalized nature. In a striking affirmation of this, Chinese government claims all pandas, wild and captive, as their property.

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Not unlike the panda in China, tigers in India had not been a traditional symbol of the state, though they were certainly present in Indian art, culture, religion, and mythology (unlike the panda in China). The Asian , instead, had been the royal symbol of Indian monarchs from at least the 3rd century BCE, when they were adopted by the Mauryan dynasty. The symbol of the is still a column topped with three seated with their backs to each other – this symbol is still found on the rupee. And Asiatic lions, found only in the west Indian state of Gujurat throughout the twentieth century, were the subject of much science and conservation concern in their own right. However, in the 1960s, a growing group of scientists and environmentalists, both in India and abroad, began to be concerned about the fate of India’s tigers. 12 had been a cornerstone of elite Indian society – for decades, both under British rule, and after independence, members of the Indian Forestry Service were expected to “bag” a tiger early in their career. As populations began to drop, pushed both by over-hunting and habitat loss, calls for more information about the tigers grew. In 1963, while affiliated with , the young field biologist George Schaller (who fifteen years later would travel to China to study pandas) came to India and conducted a study on and tigers. While in India, Schaller worked largely alone, but he was constantly visited in his Kanha National Park field station by interested Indian scientists, foresters, and conservationists – including members of the Bombay Natural History Society such as E.P. Gee, one of the most vocal advocates for conserving the tiger. Schaller shared field techniques with everyone who came. In 1967 Schaller published The and the Tiger, perhaps his least known book, at least outside of India. Within India, it was a watershed publication – the first significant piece of wildlife research done on an Indian in the field. In more than 70 oral history interviews with scientists, foresters, and conservationists, Schaller’s book (and the chance to visit with him in the field) was almost always reported as the most important early piece of field biology research in India, and a model for all that came afterwards.13 Schaller’s book closed with a strong plea for tiger conservation – this combined with the work of Indian conservationists such as Gee, , Salim Ali, and H.M. Panwar who were also advocating attention to tiger conservation, and resulted in the 1969 IUCN annual meeting, hosted in New Delhi, focusing upon tigers. At this meeting, cosponsored by the new WWF-India chapter that had just opened in New Delhi, the Bombay Natural History Society, and the Smithsonian Institution, the delegates agreed to push for a tiger conservation scheme (subsequent years saw many different delegates claim to be the person who first proposed this). This would evolve into – the first single-species conservation program in India, and a global model. Project Tiger was formally begun in 1973. With Project Tiger, the government of India made a conscious decision to move the tiger to front and center as a symbol of India. Project Tiger was not just about conservation, but also a tool for national pride, branding, and unification. The Project Tiger planning document is quite direct in this: “Tiger reserves are situated in eight different states, in different climates, in all the four corners of the country… thus contributing towards the emotional integration of the nation.” At another point, the document states: “The 5

Rough draft: Please excuse errors and please do not circulate without permission tiger has become, in a way, a symbol of the whole wild life and nature in India today … Project Tiger is essentially an Indian venture, which nonetheless will attract worldwide interest and support.”14 Over subsequent decades, the number of tiger reserves continued to grow, and the tiger is now inextricably linked with India in the minds of people both there and abroad. Although there are tigers found in other countries, most conservation biologists agree that India is the only country with a large enough population of tigers (some 1800 individuals in 2012) to sustain the species. If the tiger is to survive as a wild animal, it must do so in India.

Map of tiger reserves in India, as of June 2013.15 Where panda research started as a China-only activity, and was increasingly internationalized after the end of the cultural revolution, the pattern in India was reversed. In the planning stages for Project Tiger, the process was intensely international, involving key support from the Smithsonian Institution in the USA, the WWF (both internationally, and in a few country offices, again particularly strongly supported in the USA), and the IUCN. Fund raising was an important part of this –

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Rough draft: Please excuse errors and please do not circulate without permission the planned for Project Tiger required several tiger reserves, all of which needed additional funds for tiger conservation. As the planning document was prepared, however, Indian nationalism intersected with tiger conservation and resulted in a document that reserved all tiger research posts for members of the Indian Forestry Service. This was a shock not just to American and European scientists, but also to scientists within India who were not part of the government. Several factors led to this decision – not least among them the 1971 Indo- War, in which the US supported Pakistan (at least partly to help smooth the way for President Nixon’s planned-for trip to China, a key Pakistan ally, the following year). It was also a blatant power grab by the Indian Forestry Service, who was already tasked with managing national parks and saw no need for outside researchers telling them how to manage those landscapes and the animals found on them. Thus, while a substantial amount of international money still flowed to India in support of Project Tiger, a portion was siphoned off to where the Smithsonian began a tiger research program, as a poor second choice. 16 The 1970s were thus bleak years for tiger science within India. The Indian Forestry Service, with few exceptions, did not have trained scientists prepared to undertake scientific studies. It was not until the 1980s that the restrictions on non- forester tiger science was lifted, when the Indian scientist Ullas Karanth, finishing his PhD at the University of Florida, and working with George Schaller’s World Conservation Society, was allowed to begin a research program on the tigers of Nagerhole National Park. Following Karanth, in the 1990s and 2000s, other Indian scientists were allowed to work on tigers, primarily young scientists either associated with Karanth, or with the newly formed Wildlife Institute of India (a government run and sponsored training center, affiliated with the Indian Forestry Service). Tiger science has been relatively well funded, but it has also continued to be highly politicized. There was immense pressure on the foresters who managed the reserves to show an increase in tiger populations in every tiger reserve, every year. Tigers were consistently overcounted, and under-reported. This led in 2005 to a scandal, when was shown to have no tigers left. This scandal was repeated in Panna Tiger Reserve – where the scientist who delivered the bad news (Raghu Chundawat) was subsequently banned by the Indian Forestry Service from ever again entering a national park. 17 While both the tiger and panda were successfully mobilized as nationalist symbols by India and China, respectively, the link between science and this mobilization was quite different. In India, the government moved to close down international access to conducting tiger research through the 1970s and 80s, while in China, there was a gradual opening of access in the late 1970s and 1980s. Ironically, the same western scientist, George Schaller, played a key role in both countries – when he was doing his work on tigers in India in the 1960s, he would not have been allowed to work on pandas in China, and when we has doing his work on Pandas in China in the early 1980s, he would not have been allowed to work on tigers in India. But in both cases, he played a key role in training young scientists, and providing a model for international field biology in the service of conservation. Further, the state commitment to both species conservation efforts firmly aligned the state as “consumers” of scientific information about how best to preserve their 7

Rough draft: Please excuse errors and please do not circulate without permission respective , and thus, both states had an interest in supporting the training of young scientists. This was seen most directly in India in the creation of the Wildlife Institute of India in 1985, as conservationists and managers of national parks decried the lack of qualified Indian scientists to do work on various . The Wildlife Institute would go on to train dozens of wildlife biologists who are now spread throughout India, and are international leaders in their fields. And in both China and India, the single species conservation efforts directed at pandas and tigers spilled over into a greater public awareness of the need for large-scale conservation initiatives aimed both at other species, and at large and healthy for the panda and tiger. Finally, in both cases, India and China acquired world-wide acclaim for their environmental actions. While India did not have the option of practicing “tiger diplomacy” (there are currently more tigers in captivity in just the USA than there are wild tigers left in the world – in stark contrast to the very limited numbers of captive pandas outside of China), India took every opportunity to advertise Project Tiger as a successful model for global conservation. Prime Minister became a hero among environmental organizations, even winning the IUCN’s John Phillips medal post-humously in 1984. It is an interesting contrast to note that an Indian government leader was recognized for Project Tiger, while for panda conservation, it was a scientist, Pan Wenshi who won the J. Paul Getty award, given by the WWF, in 1999 – not a Chinese government official. (Ullas Karanth did also with the Getty Award in 2007 – but his status as a non-forestry researcher was originally prohibited by Project Tiger.) The preponderance of the best field biologists in China got their start with panda research. In India, while Project Tiger spurred the creation of training institutions for field biology, and created a cultural climate that validated wildlife research as a viable career for bright young Indians, the vast majority of Indian scientists have not been permitted to work on tigers.

Science at the Borderlands: Snow Leopards In , near the borders of , , Pakistan, and China, is a particular stretch of mountains sometimes referred to as the “Pamir Knot.” Here, five of the greatest mountain ranges of the world come crashing together – the Tien Shan, the Kunlun, the Karakoram, Kush, and the greatest of them all, the Himalaya. Combined, these mountain ranges stretch for more than 4,000 kilometers in a great arc surrounding the , from Mongolia, through China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tibet, India, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, and India again, before coming to ground at the Eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau in China. These are the highest mountains in the world – and one of the archetypal landscapes of the human imagination. It is the holy land of two of the world’s major religions, the mythical homeland of the yeti and Shangri-La, the real home of hundreds of mountain tribes and ethnic groups, a mountaineer’s paradise, a place of surpassing beauty. When people gaze upon these mountains, they see all these things – and for a particular group of conservationists and scientists, they also see snow leopard habitat.

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Snow Leopard habitat is indicated here in pink. Note the conveniently obscured national boundaries where India, China, Pakistan, and other countries meet.18

This is one of the best stretches of wild nature left anywhere on our planet – the “roof of the world” - with millennia of human use through the valleys and passes and grasslands, but large stretches that are simply not well suited for human habitation at any significant density. This is the kind of that didn’t just fire romantic imaginations, but also historically served states as boundaries – as edges of empires, or a kind of natural “no-man’s land.” But, of course, there were always people in those areas, living in the interstices of empires, people that were mythologized alternately as among the world’s fiercest and most independent, as tough and hardy herders and mountain climbers, or as other-worldly Buddhist sages and monks. And the passes and trails and trade routes through this region were some of the most celebrated in world history – the most famous being the silk route connecting the wealth of China and India with the rest of Eurasia. Through much of human history, bringing these regions under any kind of permanent state control was an exercise in futility, but this land was also irresistibly appealing to the surrounding empires – historically, some of the largest states in human history – which easily recognized their potential strategic importance. Starting in 2002, a group of geographers and historians have referred to a large portion of this region as “Zomia.”19 This term refers to a contiguous highlands region of Southeast, South, and Central Asia that had historically operated outside of state control, and in which various peoples shared some cultural attributes related to their environment, and their lack of settled governance. 9

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This map shows the original description of Zomia, in 2002, and its 2007 expansion. The original map was published in the Journal of Global History – this copy is from .20 It is striking to note that the “Zomia” described by van Schendel and others includes the majority of the mountain ranges and snow leopard habitat described above – excluding only the top of the arc, extending towards Mongolia. Though Zomia is more useful as a thought exercise than as an accurate cultural unit, the concept of Zomia draws attention to a region of complex Asian borderlands. In the latter half of the twentieth century, even as the frontier regions of the world increasingly were brought under direct state control, these mountain highlands continued to be politically unstable and contentious–one of the most volatile regions in the world, and arguably the area of greatest state insecurity for China, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and (to a lesser degree) the . From Nepal’s long-running Maoist conflict, the near constant conflict in Afghanistan, the messy dissolution of the Soviet Union and the resulting internal struggles in Central Asia, no state in this region can be said to rule its mountains peacefully and without controversy (even tranquil Bhutan, often idealized as a “land of happy people,” spent the latter half of the twentieth century as an Indian protectorate). India and China stand as exemplars of this, with Kashmir, Ladakh, and Arunachal Pradesh in India, and Tibet and Xinjiang in China, as regions of major state insecurity. Out of the dissolution of the India and Pakistan emerged as enemies, and nowhere was the Indo-Pakistan conflict more bloody or sustained than in the Himalayan and Hindu-Kush mountains of Kashmir, where the 10

Rough draft: Please excuse errors and please do not circulate without permission borders are still contested. India annexed the independent Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim in 1975, and since 1949 has been responsible for Bhutan’s foreign policy and defense. Simultaneously, with the success of the communist revolution, the People’s Republic of China began expanding the reach of its state into the mountains - moving the PLA into Tibet by 1950, fully annexing the territory in 1959, and then fighting a brief war with India to gain control of some high Himalayan passes and the territory of Aksai Chin in 1962 (China also gained control of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, but unilaterally withdrew). Against continued Indian protests, China holds Aksai Chin to this day, land that was necessary for the construction of the Xinjiang-Tibet highway. Both sides of the border are now heavily militarized. As Jawaharlal Nehru explained to a journalist, some three years before he had suffered India’s defeat by China, “the basic reason for the Sino-Indian dispute was that they were both ‘new nations,’ in that both were newly independent and under dynamic nationalistic leaderships, and in a sense were ‘meeting’ at their frontiers for the first time in history,” without buffers: “they were meeting as modern nations at their borders.”21 The last sixty years have seen the two most populous nations in the world, sharing a long and unresolved border and uneasy diplomatic relations, trying their best to modernize and bring their billions of people into a better life while steering clear of Western domination and suppressing revolts and discontent in mountain regions (Kashmir, Tibet, and Xinjiang). The collapse of first Afghanistan, then the Soviet Union, and the dangerous instability of Pakistan have only raised the stakes and the uncertainty in the northernmost reaches of the Himalayas and the associated mountain ranges of Central Asia. The growth of India and China as world economic and political powers has paralleled the growth of the global conservation movement, and the science of conservation biology with which it is so closely associated. Many conservationists became concerned about the preservation of the Himalayas (its landscape, , mountains, and even traditional Buddhist culture) as the playground of trekkers, ecotourists, and mountaineers, and as an idealized landscape for westerners of all sorts. By the late 1970s, many of these conservationists began to focus their concern on the visually striking snow leopard, a symbol for the wild Himalayas and other mountain highlands of central Asia. This western zeitgeist is exemplified by Peter Mathiesson’s 1978 National Book Award winning travelogue, Snow Leopard, in which the author wrote about his travels with biologist George Schaller to the border between Nepal and China. The book is as much a meditation on , the mountains, and the human search for meaning, spurred by an exotic landscape and exotic culture, as it is about the snow leopard (which Mathiesson never saw).22 As western interest in this region peaked, the Chinese and Indian governments, and Indian and Chinese scientists, began to expand scientific research and conservation programs that had begun with species such as giant pandas and tigers into the study of snow leopards.

The first published scientific study of snow leopards that was more than just a recounting of their presence or absence in a landscape was written by a mountaineer and schoolteacher, Dang, from India. In 1967 he published “The Snow Leopard and its Prey” in Cheetal, the journal of the Wildlife Preservation 11

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Society of India.23 Dang was part of a group of wildlife enthusiasts based at the Doon School (a preparatory school in Dehra Dun, at the foothills of the Himalayas, also the city where the Wildlife Preservation Society was located) that had begun the “Himalayan Wildlife Research Project” in 1964. They listed as technical advisors a mixture of Indian Forestry Officers, old guard Indian conservationists such as E.P. Gee, and Indian and US biologists, chief among them the ubiquitous George Schaller, who apparently met with them while he was doing his tiger research in 1963. This informal research program continued for more than forty years. Looking back in 2003, Dang remembered the enthusiasm of those early years, tempered by a sense that they were observing an ecosystem in crisis. 1964 was less than two years removed from China’s takeover of Aksai Chin in Ladakh, and only five years removed from the Chinese occupation of Tibet and the flight of the Dalia Lama and thousands of other Tibetan refugees. There was a palpable sense that Himalayan geopolitics was bad for wildlife: “The Tibetan occupation by China, and the subsequent roads all along the North of the Himalaya, with feeders to our borders, brought armed conflict and wayward soldiers to impoverished, hopeful mountain villagers… to the excessive hunting pressure immediately after the war years and the fifties was added the road-building, para-military policing, and the troop concentrations and activity along the newly alive borders.”24 Scientists working along the Line of Control between India and China in the 1990s (India has thus far refused to ratify the border as legitimate, still insisting that China return Aksai Chin) reported that the border region is still littered with bunkers, fortifications, and even landmines. Following his tiger research, Schaller wanted to work on Himalayan wildlife, but was prohibited from doing so in India by a government that was increasingly leery of foreign scientists, especially in sensitive border regions. As Dang recalled, “the difficulty of including foreign nationals in Indian expeditions into the hyper- sensitive border regions of the Himalaya discouraged foreign foundations, and the IUCN/WWF was discouraged from helping the Himalayan Wildlife Research Project work because of the then Indian and Western differences in attitudes at the political level.”25 In India, all snow leopard habitat was in sensitive border regions. Denied permission to work in India, Schaller went in 1969 to Pakistan, to the Chitral Valley. Here Schaller was studying wild sheep and goat species in the mountains, but while he was there, he lucked into a week-long observation of a snow leopard and cub. He was hooked – both on the Himalayas, and on snow leopards. Upon his return from the 1969-1970 field work, Schaller wrote a popular article for about the Snow Leopard. The photographs published with the article were the first ever published of a snow leopard in the wild.26 The title, referring to the snow leopard as a “phantom” set the pattern for later representations of snow leopards in the west – they would be phantoms, ghosts, vanishing shadows, mysterious sentinels, or, in plain English, simply hard to find. In 1973-74, when Schaller and Mathiesson went to the high mountains of Nepal for months to observe blue sheep and (hopefully) snow leopards, they found only signs of the predators until Schaller saw a quick glimpse of one while trekking home. Snow Leopards are horrible subjects for research if you want to test basic tenants of ecological science, or to research animal behavior in the wild. They are 12

Rough draft: Please excuse errors and please do not circulate without permission simply too elusive. Snow Leopard researchers regularly go entire field seasons without ever spotting the animal that they are studying. Basic life history data from the wild is still being compiled. Even in 2013, nobody has any idea of the number of snow leopards left in a single one of its range countries – let alone in the world as a whole. Estimates vary wildly and widely – from 3,000 to 7,000. If you are a biology graduate student, and you are interested in any of the basic questions of the life sciences, you will not chose to study snow leopards in the wild. If you are interested in felid evolution, you might study the skeletons or cellular samples of captive snow leopards. But it is a career dead-end to choose to study snow leopards in the wild, if your goal is to do basic or experimental science. Yet, people chose to study snow leopards. Why? For most scientists it seems to boil down to two basic reasons: a desire to preserve the Himalayan ecosystem in some degree of ecological completeness, and a corresponding sense that the snow leopard is important to that project either as a keystone species, or a flagship symbol; or a desire to preserve the uniquely beautiful snow leopard, specifically, from extinction. Thus – a conservation agenda, but these scientists choose to pursue it through science, with the conviction that conservation decisions should be based not on ideology or tradition, but on observable data derived from the natural world. This fits snow leopard science squarely into the realm of conservation biology – biological studies in the service not of larger questions about ecology or organismal biology, but with the goal of conserving species and landscapes. And within this realm, snow leopard science is quite viable, for here the basic questions are not theoretical or experimental so much as questions of technique (of estimating population, of surveillance, of management), of natural history data collection (testing no hypothesis so much as simply describing life history), and of interdisciplinary management across the boundaries of biology, policy, economics, philosophy, history, and anthropology.27 Through the rest of the 1970s, a few field biologists (often working on other species, usually ungulates) attempted to photograph or otherwise observe snow leopards in the midst of their work. In most cases they were unsuccessful. As the snow leopard was so difficult to observe, conservationists made the logical assumption that it was scarce. Thus, it was included in the endangered species list of the USA and of India (both in 1973), and in the global CITES convention (1975). This was more of a precautionary ruling, as literally no one really knew how many snow leopards existed. By the 1980s, both Project Tiger and giant panda conservation programs were humming, to global popular acclaim. Across the globe a number of other species-specific conservation programs were taking off – from condors in California, to in Belize, and India alone was experiencing an explosion of species “Projects”: Project Crocodile, Project , Project Rhino. Field biologists were organizing themselves into the new “Society for Conservation Biology,” founded in 1986, the same year that E.O. Wilson coined the term “biodiversity.” Conservationists were increasingly savvy about the possibilities of using charismatic animals as flagship species – popular symbols for an ecosystem – or as umbrella species (if you save the wide-ranging , you save everything

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Rough draft: Please excuse errors and please do not circulate without permission that lives in its habitat). 28 It was in this context that scientific and conservation interest in snow leopards took off. In 1981, the Swiss-based Rolex Foundation awarded US based South African biologist Rodney Jackson a Rolex grant to work in Nepal that would eventually lead to the first radio collaring project on snow leopards. Jackson and his partner Darla Hillard (who wrote a popular book about the project, and worked with him on a National Geographic article) returned to Nepal through 1984, and have continued to be leading snow leopard conservationists ever since. Also in 1981, Seattle resident Helen Freeman (who worked at the Seattle , and fell in love with snow leopards there) started a new NGO – the Snow Leopard Trust (later the International Snow Leopard Trust, or ISLT). This NGO, still based in Seattle, has played an outsized role in snow leopard conservation – it is nearly impossible to overstate its reach and importance. Other scientists working in India, including David Mallon (working on the ecology of Ladakh, from the University of Manchester) and Michael Green (working on a PhD on musk deer) wrote short articles about the presence of snow leopards in their study areas in the early 1980s, for the International Pedigree Book for snow leopards – a zoo based publication, originally designed to insure genetically appropriate captive breeding.29 Most significant for this essay, however, were two unrelated but synchronous developments in China and India. First was a snow leopard and survey by George Schaller and a group of Chinese colleagues, from 1984 to 1987 (seven months inclusive from this range of years was spent in the field, in Qinghai and ). Schaller, always attracted to the mountains, went straight from giant pandas to snow leopards, and many of his panda colleagues in China also broadened their field interests to include both pandas and snow leopards. Schaller and his colleagues Liao Yanfa and Tan Bangjie knew that their surveys were incomplete; Liao and Tan wrote of Xinjiang that its snow leopard population must be high, given its habitat, but they had not surveyed that region. And in regard to the Tibet Autonomous Region, they wrote that “most parts of these Tibetan mountains are still unexploited and uninvestigated … Hence the status of the snow leopard is not clear in Tibet.”30 These regions were unexplored not for lack of interest, but because “Quite a large part of plateau and mountain district, especially the southwestern part of Qinghai, the southwestern and southeastern parts of Xinjiang, and the remote north-western parts of Tibet, are not yet opened to faunal investigation.”31 This early survey would be followed up by subsequent work by Schaller and an assortment of Chinese colleagues in the 1990s, when he returned to the Tibetan plateau after a brief interregnum in with jaguars. The fauna of the Tibetan plateau has continued to be Schaller’s primary interest ever since. These surveys of Schaller’s served to bring the snow leopard into focus as a major species of concern within China, though it never rose to anything approaching the level of governmental or popular concern of the giant panda. In India, a 1983 review by the government led to a “National Wildlife Action Plan,” which reviewed the progress on protecting endangered species, ten years after the Wildlife (Preservation) Act of 1973. 32 In this review, the department of environment noted that for many endangered species, even rudimentary life history or population data was not known, and recommended that the government seek 14

Rough draft: Please excuse errors and please do not circulate without permission outside expertise in coming up with suitable management plans for key endangered species. In this climate, the government of India agreed to allow the brand new Wildlife Institute of India to collaborate with the US and Wildlife Service and the International Snow Leopard Trust in a Indo-US Snow Leopard Project, in the field in 1985-86, and tasked with assessing the status of snow leopards in Northwestern India with an eye to making policy recommendations. Under this plan, the US scientist Joseph worked with the director of the Wildlife Institute of India, H.S. Panwar, a former director of Project Tiger. Panwar was an administrator more than a scientist, so a team of field scientists were recruited to work with Fox in the field. One of these scientists was a young man fresh from his Masters degree in botany, Raghu Chundawat, whose life was transformed by his first field experience in the high Himalayas. The state government of Jammu and Kashmir, particularly, embraced the newfound interest in Snow Leopards. There were no tiger reserves in Jammu and Kashmir, and the state department of wildlife saw this as a conservation initiative more suited for their alpine landscape. Since 1982, the International Snow Leopard Trust had organized annual symposiums on the Snow Leopard – those had been held in Helsinki, Zurich, Seattle, and Krefeld, West Germany (all associated with ). In 1986, for the first time, the ISLT was able to hold the symposium “in a country with native populations of snow leopard and the emphasis was on high altitude habitat and conservation of the species in the wild” rather than in zoos. The Government of India cosponsored the 5th International Snow Leopard Symposium, hosted by the state of Jammu and Kashmir in its capital city of Srinigar. The papers presented at this symposium (and subsequently published) included work on India, China, Nepal (Rodney Jackson), Mongolia, and the Soviet Union. At the conclusion of the symposium, the government of India announced, to great fanfare, “the initiation of a new research and management program for the snow leopard and its high altitude ecosystem.”33 In 1988, the Government of India and the Ministry of Environment and Forests published a “Snow Leopard Conservation Scheme.” Written by M.K. Ranjitsinh, a member of the Indian Administrative Service and one of the founders of Project Tiger, the Snow Leopard Conservation Scheme was closely based on the tiger model – the snow leopard would be conserved a series of protected areas scattered through the landscape.34 Quite simply, the plan never made it off paper. Within months of its release, Kashmir’s separatist movement moved to a radical stage, and none of the other state governments were interested in adding snow leopard reserves to their portfolio. This attempt at a Project Snow Leopard was an interesting experiment – it was conservation of a charismatic animal, but without any associated nationalist elements, without strong central government support, and without many foresters or scientists on the ground clamoring for the program. Perhaps the most important result of this increased attention to the snow leopard, even if unsuccessful, was the work of the young biologist, Raghu Chundawat, who decided to pursue a PhD studying snow leopards and their prey. While he was not allowed to enroll at a US university of have a US collaborator for his project, he stayed in touch with Joe Fox and Dave Ferguson (the head of US Fish and Wildlife Service efforts in ), and by 1992 India had produced the world’s first PhD on snow leopard science. 35 15

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The 1980s, then, saw a dramatic increase in international attention to snow leopards, the creation of US based scientific expertise and NGOs, and the attempt to spread some of that expertise to Chinese and Indian collaborators. These initial efforts bore steady fruit throughout the 1990s and 2000s, as an increasing number of scientists (from the US and India, and to a lesser extent China) developed expertise in snow leopard science – and more broadly, in high altitude ecology. American Richard Harris competed his dissertation at the University of Montana on wild grazers in Qinghai, China, in 1994. Rodney Jackson completed his dissertation on snow leopards in Nepal (University of London) in 1996, and was working as the science and conservation director of the ISLT. In 2000, Tom McCarthy, recruited by Schaller to conduct satellite tracking studies on snow leopards in Mongolia, completed his PhD at the University of Massachusetts – he took over from Jackson as science and conservation director of ISLT as Jackson branched off to form his own NGO, the Snow Leopard Conservancy. Within India, Raghu Chundawat ended up on the faculty at the Wildlife Institute of India, where he, along with other faculty, encouraged students such as Yash Veer Bhatnagar (PhD on Himalayan Ibex in 1997) and Charudutt Mishra (PhD on high altitude ecology in 2001, from Wageningen University, the Netherlands). Both men would subsequently work for the International Snow Leopard Trust, which established its country office in India in 1998, led by Bhatnagar until he joined the faculty at WII, and then led by Mishra (who would subsequently follow McCarthy as the Science and Conservation director of ISLT in 2008, when McCarthy moved to the new wild cat based NGO, – allowing first Chundawat, and then Bhatnagar, to take turns as the head of the ISLT India program). It is difficult to overstate the importance of the ISLT providing an institutional home and support for scientists who had been working largely outside of government positions. As the ISLT began to sponsor country offices (including India, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Pakistan, and, not until 2004, China) the NGO also became involved in a number of experiments at the local level, working in local communities. These ranged from insurance programs, vaccination programs for livestock, building corrals, Snow Leopard Enterprises (where village women make handicrafts that ISLT markets and sells, bringing the proceeds back to the local communities), grazing-free zones, and so forth. For all the vibrancy at the academic and non-governmental level, however, for government conservation policy and initiatives, these years were largely wasted. In 2000, the ISLT decided to host a Snow Leopard Survival Summit in Seattle, with the support of the US Fish and Wildlife Service. This Summit was originally scheduled for the fall of 2001, but 9/11 necessitated a shift to the spring of 2002. The attendees for this Summit were a who’s-who of snow leopard conservation, with representatives from every country with a population of snow leopards, and every important scientist either in attendance or (as with Schaller) commenting and advising from afar. At this summit, there were two primary emphases: establishing a snow leopard network for the rapid sharing of information (which was immediately done), and working hard with range country governments to establish a legal framework for snow leopard protection. In some cases, as with China, this meant establishing a country program. In other cases, as with India, it meant turning the attention of the country program in place to not focus just upon disparate local 16

Rough draft: Please excuse errors and please do not circulate without permission efforts (such as the Kibber grazing reserve), but instead create a systemic legal framework to protect snow leopards. In India, this bore fruit by 2008 when the Government of India officially began Project Snow Leopard, the culmination of a five year effort by Mishra and Bhatnagar. After meeting with foresters from each snow leopard range state (five states, in India), there was a national workshop in Ladakh to set goals for Snow Leopard Conservation. After this workshop, Bhatnagar and Mishra were assigned by the government of India to serve on the drafting committee to write up a Project Snow Leopard. The document that this committee produced was radical within the context of state-sponsored conservation schemes. Other than its “Project” name, it bore almost no relationship to Project Tiger. Rather than being a conservation scheme predicated on the exclusion of human uses from sacrosanct nature reserves, Project Snow Leopard was a landscape level conservation plan. The central insight of this document is that conservation cannot occur only in protected areas within the high Himalayas. Snow leopards require such a large that a nature reserve would have to be massive, and local peoples rely upon grazing domestic stock in those same wide expanses. The ecosystem, in biological terms, is unproductive for both the snow leopards and the people, and they need relatively more space. Thus, to save snow leopards, the key is not a “business-as-usual” national park model, but rather working with human communities and park administrators to make landscapes that have a wide array of habitats, and meet the needs of wildlife and people, both. This requires saving not just snow leopards, but also saving Himalayan human societies as well by helping them achieve livelihood security without degrading their environment. This model became governmental policy in India in 2008, but it remains to be seen if it will succeed at the level of implementation.36 2008 was important not just because of Project Snow Leopard in India, but also because that marked a shift in snow leopard research in China. In that year, the tenth international snow leopard conference was hosted in Beijing by the Chinese Institute of Zoology. 100 people attended it, with representatives from 10 countries (21 of the 100 were members of the ISLT – and the keynote address was given by George Schaller). At this conference, the delegates “unanimously adopted three major resolutions focused on developing conservation action plans for each country, naming coordinators or focal points to facilitate the work, and developing specific plans to facilitate trans-boundary conservation projects.” At that meeting, Charudutt Mishra was the newly appointed science and conservation director of the ISLT, and he was tasked with strengthening the country programs, particularly in China, where a collaboration in Xinjiang was coming to a close. Schaller introduced Mishra to a Chinese colleague that he knew from her work on giant pandas – Lu Zhi. Lu Zhi was now a faculty member at Peking University, and the leader of a conservation NGO, Shan Shui. Schaller suggested that Shan Shui and Lu Zhi would be the perfect collaborators for ISLT in China. Mishra agreed, and he has been travelling to China each year since, working with Lu Zhi as she and her graduate students do work on snow leopards in Qinghai. Both Indian and Chinese actors have often critiqued the global conservation agenda as a proxy for a neo-imperialist west. But as these examples show, snow 17

Rough draft: Please excuse errors and please do not circulate without permission leopard conservation biologists have not just been westerners – the first significant article on snow leopards was by an Indian mountaineer, and Indian scientists play leadership roles in the International Snow Leopard Trust. When the ISLT works in China, it does so through an Indian and a Chinese scientist – Mishra and Lu Zhi. Thus, while American scientists such as George Schaller, Rodney Jackson, Joseph Fox, and Tom McCarthy have clearly been leaders in snow leopard science, it is too simple by far to assume that snow leopard conservation biology is strictly a western creation, or dominated by western priorities. Indian scientists like Charudutt Mishra or Yash Veer Bhatnagar idealized the Himalayas every bit as much as any western scientist, and their science has been even more important in how we now understand snow leopards and their uncertain future preservation. But this returns us to the state – and both the Indian and Chinese states cannot help but to see snow leopard science in the context of global geopolitics. On 15 April, 2013, Chinese soldiers walked ten kilometers beyond the line of control, into the Indian state of Ladakh. The Chinese soldiers pitched tents, and protested the construction of new Indian military facilities looking down upon crucial Chinese supply lines. For several days in India, the newspapers were full of bellicose rhetoric about the “Chinese incursion.” Though the border is an unresolved issue, the Indian and Chinese governments carefully avoided escalating the conflict, and after some days, the Chinese returned to their side of the Line of Control, and India dismantled its forward station. The press did not announce whether or not any of the soldiers spotted snow leopards during their chilly stand-off. The government of India announced to the press that there should be no concerns; that this sort of thing happened from time to time and there were mechanisms for handling these conflicts. But from the lens of snow leopard science, it highlights the difficulty faced by scientists attempting to study or conserve these animals – in a region that is still fraught with so many military tensions, the chances of a scientist having free access for study, let alone a jointly managed conservation zone for high altitude species, is slim indeed. Snow leopard researchers in China avoid many of these problems by working hundreds of miles from the border, in Qinghai. China has the most snow leopard habitat in the world, and probably the highest population of snow leopards in the world. But the bulk of this good habitat is not open for research. Indian scientists have no options like Qinghai – all Indian snow leopard habitat is near the border. Scientists working near the border regularly have to get special permissions from the military – sometimes the Indian army insists on sending soldiers with the scientists. Along the Pakistan border in Kashmir, militants have questioned graduate students in the field. In 2009, an Indian graduate student was doing research on snow leopard populations in the Spiti Valley, a high-altitude trans- himalayan region bordering Tibet. As part of this research, there were a series of camera traps along game trails, triggered to take photographs of passing animals. A short time later, a group of soldiers in the Indo-Tibetan Border Police were doing a training exercise in the Spiti region, and the soldiers discovered the carefully hidden cameras, photographing their movements as they passed along the narrow trails in the high passes. The soldiers carefully collected the cameras, certain that they had been set by spies attempting to ascertain Indian troop movements along the border. 18

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The cameras were taken to the Central Intelligence Department, and an investigation commenced. Fortunately, the graduate student had permission to set out the camera traps, and in a relatively short while the potential international incident was resolved – but the lost scientific data was not so easily recovered. It is not lost on the military that many wildlife science techniques used to monitor animals are based on technologies that were originally developed for the military, such as satellite tracking.37 Stories such as these are omnipresent when field biologists in India gather around a cup of chai. They speak of permissions denied, of delays, of government suspicions about their work. In a small chai shop in Sikkim, in 2013, there was a WWF poster on the wall. This poster focused upon the key endangered species of the high trans-himalayan cold desert, the snow leopard chief among them. The poster spoke of the threats to these animals – the usual suspects were there: poaching, habitat loss due to lumber or agriculture, competition with domestic livestock. But then it included one other – landmines along the border. This poster, in a nutshell, encapsulated the uneasy status of conservation along troubled political borders. But at last one scientist believes that things are getting better – as he said, “I am less concerned about the border [now] because we are dealing with a generation which has come of age with these media programs, National Geographic and Discovery and so on. And it is nice because even in the remotest corner on the border, they are able to know what we are doing.”38

In Search of a Conclusion…. When considering the status of snow leopard conservation and science, it is clear that scientists find snow leopards to be intriguing objects of study. Environmentalists and the public are entranced by its beauty and mystery – many call the snow leopard the most beautiful of wild cats. Its habitat, its landscape, is simply unsurpassed in the world. But it is a species that belongs to no one state; its conservation does not depend on just one country, but on a landscape shared by several. The country that has perhaps gone furthest in melding state power, science, international money, local policies and snow leopard conservation is Mongolia. While Mongolia’s border with China can be contentious (Rodney Jackson reports being jailed when he accidentally crossed it while tracking snow leopards), it is not even in the same category of instability as the borders shared by India, China, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. For India and China, national security has consistently trumped concerns about snow leopards – scientists are allowed access only at the convenience of the state. And likewise, any conservation policies to protect snow leopards have been required to fit into geopolitical considerations. The most dramatic example of how a snow leopard might be inconvenienced by a border is along the Line of Control between Pakistan and India in Kashmir, where a massive fence was built by India in the late 1990s, to keep out clandestine Pakistani insurgents. While motivated Pakistanis can still pass through, wildlife cannot. Snow leopards have long benefitted from their sheer inaccessibility. The high mountains have only recently been fully brought within the orbit of centralized states. Many snow leopard scientists still feel that the snow leopard is ultimately far safer than its more earthbound cousins – cats that rely upon forests or other 19

Rough draft: Please excuse errors and please do not circulate without permission economically valuable land as habitat. But other scientists cannot escape their nagging concern that they simply do not know how many snow leopards are left, and what if it’s less than everyone thinks? And as India and China continue to develop their Himalayan frontiers, the remaining snow leopards are increasingly placed in contact with people, often to their detriment. This all suggests that not all animals are created equally, and that conservation biology is not monolithic in its relationship to state power. Pandas and tigers are privileged in conservation, because of the ease with which these species can be coopted by the state as nationalist symbols. Over the last sixty years, conservation biologists have an uneasy relationship with state power. In many cases scientists have been happy to use authoritarian states to preserve nature in a top- down fashion, as with the work of Panthera leader preserving tigers with the help of the military generals in Myanmar. But these same biologists have been quite unhappy when states place restrictions upon their research or their access to the field. Snow leopard science is trending in quite a different direction than tigers or pandas, however. Because of the lack of nationalist rhetoric surrounding snow leopard conservation, and the lack of state investment in its continued existence, scientists working on high altitude ecology have been leading their peers within conservation biology in rethinking conservation strategies. In the absence of a strong state commitment to conservation of the snow leopard, scientists have had to consider ways to make conservation work on a local scale. Thus, snow leopard scientists tend to be far less top-down than, for instance, scientists working in India on tigers. Snow leopard scientists also tend to be much more improvisational, and more willing to consider local differences in conservation strategies and outcomes. It is no accident that Charudutt Mishra and Lu Zhi work well together – both have clearly stated that they understand that conservation must occur in a matrix of human population and uses of the land. If conservation is to succeed, it must succeed both for human communities and non-human nature. And the role of the state, then, is to create a legal framework that allows for fluid, local, and improvisational solutions. Borders have always been renowned for the fluidity of their human cultures. They are sites for the mixing of peoples, of foods, of goods. They are sites of exchange, and out of this mixing often comes new ideas and new cultural forms and norms. It should not be surprising that conservation science at the borders would look quite different than conservation biology for species at the center, and that this border science might in fact be more usable in a world increasingly populous and increasingly connected and intermingled, whether economically, culturally, or politically. Perhaps historians of the twenty-first century will write of a very different sort of conservation biology emerging out of the twentieth century, of animals no longer just as symbols of the unitary state, but animals conserved and cherished as symbols of the transnational ties that bind us. And if so, why not the snow leopard as the first example? But this seems quite distant in the future, in a world where states still struggle to control this fluidity and where nationalism often trumps hybridity in media and politics.

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1 For example, see the writings of Harriet Ritvo, Edward Russell, Donna Haraway, Peter Alagona, Etienne Benson, Jane Caruthers, Mahesh Rangarajan, Mark Barrow, Al Crosby, Andrew Isenberg, Paul Greenough, Elena Songster, or Michael Lewis, among many others. 2 Elena Songster, Panda Nation: Nature, Science, and Nationalism in the People's Republic of China, manuscript under review, chapter 1, p. 24. 3 Songster, ch. 1, p. 4. 4 Songster, ch. 1, pp 18-27. 5 “Where Panda Lives: Habitat,” Website of WWF-Global, http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/endangered_species/giant_panda/panda/where_panda_lives_ha bitat/, accessed June 18, 2013. 6 Songster, ch. 8, p. 1 7 Songster, ch. 8, p. 6. 8 [need more on the international project, how it changed the direction and texture of Chinese panda science, and did it change way in which Panda operated as nationalist symbol when international scientists were collaborating with Chinese scientists?] 9 Songster, ch. 8, p. 2. 10 Songster, ch. 7, pp. 27-28. 11 Songster, ch. 7, pp. 25-27. 12 On lions and India, see Mahesh Rangarajan., “From Princely Symbol to Conservation Icon: A Political History of the Lion in India,” in The Unfinished Agenda: Nation Building in South Asia, ed. M. Hasan and N. Nakazato (New Delhi, 2001), 399-442. 13 George Schaller, The Deer and the Tiger. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). For more on the reception of this book, and Schaller’s research, see Michael Lewis, Inventing Global Ecology: Tracking the Biodiversity Ideal in India, 1945-1997. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004). 14 Project Tiger: A Planning Proposal for Preservation of Tiger (Panthera tigris Linn.) in India. Ed. Task Force Indian Board for Wild Life (Delhi, 1972), 8, 5. For more on the establishment of Project Tiger, see “Globalizing Nature: National Parks, Tiger Reserves, and Biosphere Reserves in Independent India,” in Civilizing Nature: National Parks in Global Historical Perspective, eds. Bernhard Gissibl, Sabine Hohler, and Patrick Kupper. (New York City: Bergham Books, 2012): 224-239. 15 “Map of Project Tiger Reserves,” The Official Website of National Tiger Conservation Authority, Government of India. http://projecttiger.nic.in/map.htm, accessed June 18, 2013. 16 See Michael Lewis, “Indian Science for Indian Tigers,” Journal of the History of Biology 38 no. 2 (Summer 2005): 185-207. 17 See Lewis, Inventing Global Ecology, and Joining the Dots: The Report of the Tiger Task Force, (Delhi: Government of India, 2005). 18 Map from the International Snow Leopard Trust, “Habitat” page, http://www.snowleopard.org/learn/cat-facts/habitat, accessed June 18, 2013. 19 For an overview, see for example Jean Michaud. “Editorial – Zomia and beyond.” Journal of Global History 5 (2010): pp. 187–214. The term was first coined by Willem van Schendel, and has been popularized by James Scott, in The Art of Not Being Governed. (New Haven: Yale University press, 2009). 20 Frank Jacobs, “The Undiscovered Country, New York Times on-line edition, February 14, 2012, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/the-undiscovered-country/, accessed March 3, 2013. 21 Jawaharlal Nehru to Edgar Snow, as quoted by Ramachandra Guha, India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy. (London: Macmillan, 2007), 336. 22 Peter Mathiesson, Snow Leopard. (New York City: Viking Books, 1978). 23 Dang, Hari, “The Snow Leopard and its Prey,” Cheetal: The Journal of the Wildlife Preservation Society of India, Dehra Dun 10 (October 1967): 72-84. 24 Hari Dang, “Notes on Himalayan Wildlife,” in Himalayan Environment: Issues and Concerns in Conservation and Development, ed., Hari Dang. (Delhi: S.K Gorg, 2003), 37. 25 Dang, “Notes on Himalayan …,” 46. 26 George B., Schaller. "Imperiled Phantom of Asian Peaks." National Geographic 140, no. 5 (November 1971): 702. 21

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27 In an extensive survey of the published scientific literature on snow leopards, research is often geared towards the most basic of questions: are there snow leopards in a given area, and if so, how many? Some versions of this survey literature focus on different techniques for surveying snow leopards, including: versions of direct observation; camera traps; scat and sign collection; DNA analysis of scat and hair to identify individuals; habitat analysis via satellite data and GIS; attempts to use prey numbers and densities to determine possible predator densities. Beyond counting, a second large body of literature is focused upon life history data: how long do they live, patterns, cub rearing, home range size and patterns of migration, food habits, and so on. Some of this research is done by direct observation, some (particularly home range analysis) is done via radio collaring and after the 1990s, satellite tracking, and some is done with captive populations in zoos. A third body of literature is focused upon prey species studies. This work includes prey population studies to determine presence and numbers; analysis of snow leopard scat to see what they actually eat; analysis of prey species grazing and correlation with available grazing plants; impact of snow leopard number increases or decreases on prey species dynamics; and analysis of the relationship between wild prey and domestic livestock – including the grazing capacity of meadows. This leads to a fourth research focus on human-snow leopard conflict studies. This research has attempted to ascertain how much livestock is going on; how much of it is done by snow leopards; and experiments with solutions (from livestock insurance, to livestock corrals, to ecotourism, to professional herders and for wide-ranging livestock, to cottage industries for impacted villages). A fifth strand of published literature is focused upon taxonomic/evolutionary studies, questioning how snow leopards fit into other Panthera sp. – when and how did it diverge evolutionarily? 28 See Lewis, Inventing Global Ecology. 29 Green, M.J.B. “Status, Distribution, and Conservation of the Snow Leopard in North India,” International Pedigree Book of Snow Leopards 3 (1982): 6-10; Mallon, D., “The Snow Leopard in Ladakh,” International Pedigree Book of Snow Leopards 4 (1984): 23-37. 30 Liao Yanfa and Tan Banagjie, “A Preliminary Study on the Geographical Distribution of Snow Leopards in China,” in Helen Freeman, India Dept of Environment, Forests, and Wildlife, International Snow Leopard Trust, et al, “Proceedings of the Fifth International Snow Leopard Symposium,” (India: International Snow Leopard Trust, 1988), 60. 31 Liao and Tan, “Preliminary Study …”, 52. 32 Department of the Environment, National wildlife Action Plan. (New Delhi: Government of India, 1983). 33 Helen Freeman, “Introduction,” in Freeman, et al, “Fifth International Snow Leopard Symposium,” ix-x. 34 Ministry of Environment and Forests, Snow Leopard Conservation Scheme. (New Delhi: Government of India, 1988). 35 Raghu Chundawat, “Ecological Studies on the Snow Leopard and its prey species in Hemis National Park, Ladakh,” University of , Jaipur, 1992. 36 Interview with Yash Veer Bhatnagar, March 18, 2013, , India, transcript on file with Michael Lewis. Also, Ministry of Environment and Forests, Project Snow Leopard. (New Delhi: Government of India, 2008). 37 Bhatnagar Interview, March 18, 2013. 38 Bhatnagar interview, March 18, 2013.

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