stops getting fat.”^42 Qing state policies that encouraged Mongol -
sedentarization,fixing boundaries, promoting intensive agriculture, and
creating relief dependencies, all worked to reduce pastoral mobility and
sustainability.
In sum, by the nineteenth century, the dynasty could not host both
imperial pastoralism and imperial arablism in its Inner Mongolian bor-
derland. In 1908 Prince Güngsangnorbu, the prominent late Qing Khar-
achin reformer, expressed this dilemma in straightforward terms still
pertinent to today’s IMAR:
For over the past hundred years wilderness clearance for cultivation has steadily
expanded and the old customs have steadily changed. Consequently, two sorts of
practices have developed over time. One is the resolute protection of herding
areas, which fears that as soon as land for cultivation is cleared, the inevitable
result will be the abandonment of the old [ways] in pursuit of new [ones], with
many inconveniences. The other is there should be prolonged clearance for
cultivation to effect habituation to agriculture and disdain for further herding
activities.^43
In a fundamental sense, disharmony arose because imperial arablism’s
primary long-term form of adaptation, to both success and failure,
was spatial expansion related tohuman population increase. This is
not to say that herding did not require equally large or even larger
spaces. Arablism, however, was better at concentrating resources more
rapidly and intensively. One reason is because the production of meat
andmilkrequiredmoreinterconnections, especially with animals,
sustained over a longer time periodthan grain production required.
To a large degree this is simply a distinction between consumption at
different levels of the food chain, but one with critical environmental
effects.
It is likely that much of the recent environmental degradation
has actually arisen not from pastoral practices in isolation, but in
dynamic relation to the expansionofcultivationoverthelastfifty years
or so. Officials have generally attributedthis condition to overstocking
and overgrazing that has been estimated as high as 35. 6 percent
of IMAR grasslands. During this period, some of the most fertile land
has been transferred from pastoralists to cultivators. In turn, larger
concentrations of livestock, whose overall population is now roughly
that of the 1920 s, have been moved to substandard range land under
conditions of decreased mobility. Many of these same dynamics
connecting arablization to steppe desertification are also prominent
in the later decades of the nineteenth century. State encouragement
240 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
