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Notes
(^1) In support of his argument, Wilson (2002) provides a
remarkable array of financing schemes undertaken by
the world’s wealthiest NGOs to establish large protect-
ed areas in countries harboring the most biologically
diverse environments.
(^2) For the history of wilderness preservation and conser-
vation in the United States see Nash (1982). For a
broader critique of Western constructions of humans
and nature, see Merchant (1996). Critiques of “the
Yellowstone concept” of protected area management,
along with perspectives on community-based conserva-
tion include McNeely and Miller (1984), McNeely
(1985), Western, Wright, and Strum (1994), and
Stevens (1997).
(^3) The discipline of political economy focuses on “aggre-
gates of individuals, on how power relations distribute
resources between such aggregates and on how these
distributions of resources maintain relations of domina-
tion and subordination” (Mohun 1994; 478).
(^4) Political ecology arose from the adjustment of cultural
ecology to political economic concerns in the 1980s.
From the 1930s to the 1980s, cultural ecology engaged
anthropologists and geographers in the application of
ecological theory to the resource management and
social practices of relatively isolated indigenous and
peasant societies in order to show that they were
“adaptive systems just like any other biological popula-
tion, and culture was posited as an ecologically func-
tional attribute of the evolutionary demands of the
environment” (Peet and Watts 1996; 5). Studies in
political ecology often maintain a carefully bounded
geographic framework, but are inherently concerned
with a larger network of spatial and temporal process-
es and relations. As Peet and Watts (1996; 5) explain,
“Market integration, commercialisation, and the dislo-
cation of customary forms of resource management -
rather than adaptation and homeostasis - became the
lodestones of a critical alternative to the older cultural
5 or human ecology.”
This is hardly surprising if we consider Richard Perry’s
(1965) estimate that at least 1 million Asians had been
killed in the last 400 years, an average of 2,500 per
year. Also, this figure would be much higher, but 395
records did not specify the numbers of casualties.
(^6) The connection between poor government, societal
disorder (luan), and tiger depredation has lasted to the
present, and some villagers in Meihuashan today say
that the rise of the Chinese Communist Party brought
order, and as a result tigers “went away” (zoule).
(^7) Probably a “fu” or written charm with magical proper-
ties.
(^8) For those who are skeptical about this rhetorical ques-
tion, see Coggins (2003) and Hammond (1991).
(^9) Exemption from local legal jurisdiction.
(^10) Caldwell (1924) uses this term because the Chinese
word for civet - “lingmao,” can be translated “spirit
cat.” The name lingmaois also commonly used in the
Southeast Uplands to denote a number of small and
medium-sized mammals like foxes, civets, leopard cats,
and mongooses.
(^11) For a comprehensive treatment of human-nature rela-
tions from the Great Leap Forward through the Cultural
Revolution, see Shapiro (2001).
(^12) Lu and Sheng 1986. Despite increased international
control of trade in wildlife and wildlife products follow-
ing the formation of CITES in 1981, a CITES report
showed that by 1989 China had exported 89,656 cat
skins, about 66% of the world total (reported) of
136,825. Though this report does not indicate species,
it shows that wild cat populations were relentlessly
slaughtered through the 1980s.