grows in russet waves on crags above the scoured plain, but down below,
as far as the eye can see, spread the works of man.
Beyond the train window, this anthroscape continues southward until
one is about an hour outside Beijing proper. Here the factories start and
one passes into a Turneresque “miasm in brown”—part pollution and part
dust from the encroaching Gobi Desert. China is the putative birthplace
of the tiger and, prior to the advent of communism, Manchuria—the vast
area north and east of Beijing—was a source of prime tiger habitat.
Today, with the exception of a few transients along the Russian border, it
is as barren of tigers as the Gobi. Judging from the highways being built
there now, tigers won’t be back any time soon. A Confucian road sign
proclaims the new status quo: “Car Accidents Are More Ravenous than
Tigers.” But not as ravenous as pollution: in November 2005, a
devastating benzene spill in Jilin City, 120 miles south of Harbin, killed
virtually everything downstream in the Songhua River. The Songhua is a
major tributary of the Amur, and the effects of this catastrophe are still
being felt as far away as the Sea of Japan. This is but one of many such
accidents, and their impacts reach far beyond the country’s borders.
It is safe to say that had Czar Alexander II not annexed Outer
Manchuria a century and a half ago, no wild tigers would remain there
today and Primorye would be as unrecognizable as the neighboring
provinces in China. Were Yuri Yankovsky, Vladimir Arseniev, or Roy
Chapman Andrews to return to Manchuria now, they would be completely
disoriented. And so would a tiger. Primorye and its borderlands now
represent the last hope for tiger-dom in Northeast Asia. Completely cut
off from any other subspecies, the Amur tiger’s nearest wild neighbors
are in Cambodia, two thousand miles away.
Looked at from this perspective, Russia’s conservation efforts have
been a resounding success. The presence and current viability of tigers in
the Russian Far East may have begun as an accident of history, but it has
been maintained by human intention, often at considerable personal risk.
And now it may require more: in October 2009, the international Siberian
Tiger Monitoring Program reported a precipitous drop in tiger sightings
in its sample areas. The decrease—approximately 40 percent below the
ron
(Ron)
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